ALLEGORY: A LIGHT CONCEIT
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up, would be to tell and not be believed. Then he would soon be a
mad prophet on the street corners, than which nothing embarrasses
us or excites our ridicule more. He would be raging wild-eyed and
shaggy-haired up and down the world, hating the human race for
its stupidity.
If
he does not make his peace in some way by finding
some compromise between what he has to tell and what he succeeds
in telling, he will likely end his days tragically in madness and chains,
or execution, or suicide.
But if nature has seen fit to bestow a vision upon him, maybe
it will be consistent enough (an assumption of perhaps unwarranted
faith) to bestow on
him
also the sense to work out partial solutions
to his problem. There is really after all not much choice in the terms
for presenting angels to people because the only possible ones are the
terms of people themselves. No form has more meaning to us than
our own because we have seen no higher one, bad though it often
is. So he
has
only! to think of creatures like us but bigger and
stronger, and if the council of angels struck him as very beautiful,
and overpowered him with a sense of the honor it conferred upon
the earth by being there and upon
him
as its spectator, he would
describe them with all the beauty possible to imagine in human form:
idealized bodies in glittering dress, and a few borrowed conveniences
such as wings.
He would have to tell what he knew about the ulterior designs
for which the earth was requisitioned through what he saw of their
repercussions on the lives of people; and since this is only the tiniest
segment of their repercussions in space, he could invent some little
fiction in place of the real interstellar drama which would in some
way account for its effects. He would do this, not to hide anything
or to make a mystery of it, as he would undoubtedly be accused of
doing, but because in the first place, he could not have got a com–
plete picture of the whole thing himself, and in the second place,
even if he had, he must reduce it in size and simplify it in concept
in proportion to the rest of his story and the scope of his hearers.
He could give his superhuman beings names and present them in
personal squabbles over love affairs or in competition for power–
things that people know about. He could make them inhabit the
highest mountain on earth, since this location is out of the sight
but still within the concept of a general audience. They: could drag
