# 2026-01-07 - Day And Night Stories by Algernon Blackwood
IMG Illustration by Sundaram Rajam
I enjoyed this collection of short stories by Algernon Blackwood.
All of the stories qualify as Weird Tales. Some were profound while
others were merely sentimental. I have read some of his other
writing [1] [2] [3].
My favorites from Day and Night Stories were Initiation and
A Victim of Higher Space. Initiation is hauntingly beautiful and
appeals to my own love of nature. A Viction of Higher Space is a fun
romp into the occult detective genre [4]. It reminds me of
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's writing in the best way.
What follows are spoilers, er um, excerpts from the book.
# Initiation
I seemed to walk on air, and there was a smell about those trees that
made me suddenly--well, that took my mind clean out of its accustomed
rut. It was just too lovely and wonderful for me to describe it. I
had got well into the forest and lost my way a bit. The smell of an
old-world garden wasn't in it. It smelt to me as if some one had just
that minute turned out the earth all fresh and new. There was moss
and tannin, a hint of burning, something between smoke and incense,
say, and a fine clean odour of pitch-pine bark when the sun gets on
it after rain--and a flavour of the sea thrown in for luck.
The sensation was new--a kind of lifting, exciting sensation that
made my heart swell out with exhilaration. There was happiness in it.
A cloud that _weighed_ seemed to roll off my mind, same as that
light-hearted mood when the office door is locked and I'm off on a
two months' holiday--with gaiety and irresponsibility at the back of
it. It was invigorating. I felt youth sweep over me.
I kept myself busy thinking the whole thing over again. What caught
me all of a heap was that million-dollar sense of beauty, youth, and
happiness. Never in my born days had I felt anything to touch it. And
it hadn't cost a cent!
Something melted in me. For it was Spring, and the whole world was
singing like a dream. Beauty was creeping over me. I don't know. I
began to feel all big and tender and open to a thousand wonderful
sensations. The thought of streets and houses seemed like death...
Something in me--it was like the click of a shutter--announced that
the "change" was suddenly complete. I was another man; or rather a
deeper part of me took command.
He stood beside me in his grey flannel suit, with his brilliant eyes
and his great shock of hair, looking more like a column of light than
a human being.
I saw bright pools of sunshine here and there upon the forest floor.
Great shafts of light dropped in slantingly between the trunks. There
was movement everywhere, though I never could see what moved. A
delicious, scented air stirred through the lower branches. Running
water sang not very far away. Figures I did not actually see; yet
there were limbs and flowing draperies and flying hair from time to
time, ever just beyond the pools of sunlight...The atmosphere of
dream came round me, but a dream of something just hovering outside
the world I knew--a dream wrought in gold and silver, with shining
eyes, with graceful beckoning hands, and with voices that rang like
bells of music.... And the pools of light grew larger, merging one
into another, until a delicate soft light shone equably throughout
the entire forest. Into this zone of light we passed together.
I looked at Arthur moving beside me like a shaft of light.
"Was it worth while?"
Was "what" worth while? Why, my present life of commonplace and
grubbing toil, of course; my city existence, with its meagre,
unremunerative ambitions. Ah, it was this new Beauty calling me, this
shining dream that lay beyond the two pictures I have mentioned...
And next the desire came to hear my voice--my own familiar,
high-pitched voice with the twang and accent the New World climate
brings, so-called American:
"Exchange Place, Noo York City. I'm in that business, buying and
selling of exchange between the banks of two civilised countries, one
of them stoopid and old-fashioned, the other leading all
creation...!"
It was an effort; but I made it firmly. It sounded odd, remote,
unreal.
"Sunlit woods and a wind among the branches", followed close and
sweet upon my words. But who, in the name of Wall Street, said it?
"England's buying gold," I tried again. "We've had a private wire.
Cut in quick. First National is selling!"
Great-faced Hephæstus, how ridiculous! ... It was barbaric...
centuries ago. Again there came another voice that caught up my own
and turned it into common syntax. Some heady beauty of the Earth rose
about me like a cloud.
"Hark! Night comes, with the dusk upon her eyelids. She brings those
dreams that every dew-drop holds at dawn.
"Your life's insured in _this_," he said quietly, waving his arms to
indicate the Earth. "Your love of Nature and your sympathy with it
make you safe." He gazed at me. There was a marvellous expression in
his eyes. I understood why poets talked of stars and flowers in a
human face.
I think I know what it was too. I say this soberly, with reverence
... all wool and no fading. There was a bit of God in me, God's power
that drives the Earth and pours through Nature...
And the fear I'd felt was nothing but the little tickling point of
losing my ordinary two-cent self, the dread of letting go, the
shrinking before the plunge--what a fellow feels when he's falling in
love, and hesitates, and tries to think it out and hold back, and is
afraid to let the enormous tide flow in and drown him.
But somehow these stunts of the psychologists and philosophers didn't
cut any ice with me just then, because I'd _experienced_ what they
merely _explained_. And explanation was just a bargain sale. The best
things can't be explained at all. There's no real value in a bargain
sale.
# A Desert Episode
They realised the immensity of a moment: the dizzy stretch of time
that led up to the casual pinning of a veil; to the tightening of a
stirrup strap; to the little speech with a companion; the roar of the
vanished centuries that have ground mountains into sand and spread
them over the floor of Africa; above all, to the little truth that
they themselves existed amid the whirl of stupendous systems all
delicately balanced as a spider's web--that they were _alive_.
For a moment this vast scale of reality revealed itself, then hid
swiftly again behind the débris of the obvious.
Eternity is not realised to-day; [people] have no time to know they
are alive for ever; they are too busy...
# A Victim of Higher Space
Such intelligent sympathy meeting him half-way was a new experience
to him, and it touched his heart at once.
I had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any connection in
the world to look after me. I grew up, therefore, utterly without
education. This much was to my advantage; I learned none of that
deceitful rubbish taught in schools, and so had nothing to unlearn
when I awakened to my true love--mathematics, higher mathematics and
higher geometry.
"... I reached sometimes a point of view whence all the great puzzle
of the world became plain to me, and I understood what they call in
the Yoga books 'The Great Heresy of Separateness'; why all great
teachers have urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour as
himself; how men are all really _one_; and why the utter loss of self
is necessary to salvation and the discovery of the true life of the
soul."
At night, of course, the spirit is active elsewhere, and we have no
memory of where and how, simply because the brain stays behind and
receives no record. But I found that, while remaining conscious, I
also retained memory. I had attained to the state of continuous
consciousness, for at night I regularly, with the first approaches of
drowsiness, entered _nolens volens_ the four-dimensional world.
Apparently sleep is unnecessary in the higher--the
four-dimensional--body.
To see inside everything and everybody is a form of insight
peculiarly distressing. To be so confused in geography as to find
myself one moment at the North Pole, and the next at Clapham
Junction--or possibly at both places simultaneously--is absurdly
terrifying.
author: Blackwood, Algernon, 1869-1951
TEXT detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Algernon_Blackwood
HTML source: ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/4/5/9/6/45964/
tags: ebook,fantasy,outdoor
title: Day and Night Stories
# Footnotes
DIR [1] The Man Whom The Trees Loved
DIR [2] The Centaur
DIR [3] Pan's Garden
TEXT [4] Occult detective fiction (wikipedia)
# Tags
DIR ebook
DIR fantasy
DIR outdoor