Augusta Walker
ALLEGORY: A LIGHT CONCEIT
Suppose a man walking home from work across a field
were to come upon a group of angels sitting around in a circle talking
about some project for which the earth had been requisitioned. After
peering through the bushes for a while to see what he could find
out, trying not to be caught, and after recovering a little from what–
ever state the spectacle had thrown him into, he would probably go
home and wonder what to do next.
Obviously he could not go on doing whatever he had been doing
before. He would be like a man who had spent his life in a factory,
working at some tiny! job on a piece of machinery, the purpose of
which he had not the faintest idea about, and who then suddenly
found out what it was for. Whether this use were good or bad, im–
portant or trivial, it would probably be a shock to him. He would see
a kind of aberration in his whole life; it would all look slightly de–
flected from the direction he might have lived it in if he had been
turning his screwdriver with that knowledge in mind.
The question would be whether or not to tell other people about
the purpose of the machine or the council of angels. The enlightened
one could scarcely help noticing the irrelevance of most things that
people did, and as he went around watching, he would begin to feel
that these irrelevancies were becoming his responsibility. One reason
why he had not rushed out to tell everybody in the first place was
that he knew nobody would believe him. Besides, he could think of
no way to tell it. All of our words are closely attached to material
things, even words for abstractions. The word "angel" is a name
that we apply to a hypothetical being translated into earthly existence.
But not to tell would be to negate this curious gift, this dubious
blessing bestowed upon him. And worse still than stoppering himself
