I’m looking for a beautiful Pythia to be my oracle. I’m a wizard priest with youthful good looks and wisdom beyond my years.
I promise to treat you with tender loving care; like a bromeliad in a solarium– attached to opulent castle that we call home.
You see me from a garden sward. Tender white lilies at your feet, I’m on a balcony lit by the rising moon. You can’t turn away from my song, my countenance is sweet and commanding.
You sit aside a marble mausoleum contemplating the immaterial spirit. I arrive with a tune, a march, an irresistible dirge.
All of your suitors fall away like fodder from a hayrick. Our connexion is a tidal force.
Do you believe in the supernatural? Are we confusing cause and effect? Is there a simple explanation for our meeting?
It’s love.
It’s science.
It’s art.
It’s magic.
I’m Margrave.
You’re Lillian.
Do not be afraid.
My magic won’t hurt a bit.
Let’s be lovers. Meet me at the marble mausoleum at midnight. During the full moon, I’ll inscribe a Fairy’s Ring on the ground, we’ll sit inside the circle and say a prayer.
We needn’t be in conflict.
Get rid of Allen Fenwick
Make way for the morning star.
You don’t know how right you are.
Dear Lillian, It was me that brought you through the thicket and heath. I waited on the shore with my ship. It was my intention to sail you away from here, far from the madding crowd— to the Ionian Isles where we can focus our connexion and power.
Allen Fenwick stole my magic wand. He can’t be trusted. Don’t go with him. My powers are much more formidable than his. I can appear anywhere as a spectre. I can whisper to the wind. I can commune with the vital parts of nature. I know the secret to the elixir of life. I want to share it with YOU!
I love YOU!
STRANGE STORY by Edward Bulwer Lytton Book Review
My highlights and annotations:
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.79%
Highlight: And it is only when “in fairy fiction drest” that Romance gives admission to “truths severe.”
Notes: Fairy romance.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.79%
Highlight: without some gleams of the supernatural, Man is not man nor Nature, nature.
Notes: This is a dream.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.83%
Highlight: It is much in this life to be quite sure that we are in the right, whatever that conviction may cost us.
Notes: I am in the right. Steep conviction price.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.85%
Highlight: asperity
Notes: Harshness of tone or manner.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.87%
Highlight: he had the imprudence to proclaim himself not only an enthusiastic advocate of mesmerism as a curative process, but an ardent believer of the reality of somnambular clairvoyance as an invaluable gift of certain privileged organizations.
Notes: Career advancement.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.87%
Highlight: Puysegur
Notes: Ask circe
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.88%
Highlight: Cracked poets may be all the better for being cracked, — cracked doctors are dangerous.
Notes: Covid scam doctors are cracked killers.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.9%
Highlight: You employed against your brother in art venomous drugs and a poisoned probe.
Notes: Poisoned probes. Covid injections.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.9%
Highlight: Fellow-creatures afflicted by maladies your pharmacopoeia had failed to reach came to me for relief, and they found it. ‘The effect of imagination,’ you say. What matters, if I directed the imagination to cure?
Notes: Psychosomatic. Mind over matter.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.91%
Highlight: quackery draws profit from the wonder of ignorance.
Notes: Covid scam.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.91%
Highlight: do not honest men every day incur the penalty of ridicule if, from a defect of good sense, they make themselves ridiculous?
Notes: Face mask morons.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.92%
Highlight: the bitterness of a servile dependence.
Notes: Debt slave.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.93%
Highlight: affable smile of supreme indifference.
Notes: Good look.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.94%
Highlight: No views of matrimony could be less romantic, more soberly sensible, than those which I conceived.
Notes: Hehe
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.95%
Highlight: The form was so slight, the face so young, that at the first glance I murmured to myself, “What a lovely child!” But as my eye lingered it recognized in the upturned thoughtful brow, in the sweet, serious aspect, in the rounded outlines of that slender shape, the inexpressible dignity of virgin woman.
Notes: Introducing the heroine.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.97%
Highlight: arabesque.
Notes: Ballet posture.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.99%
Highlight: All women would be men if they could.
Notes: Fact check.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.02%
Highlight: recondite
Notes: Little known. Abtruse.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.05%
Highlight: by that mixture of affability and indifference with which some high-born beauty allows the genius, but checks the presumption, of a charming and penniless poet.
Notes: Allow genius. Check presumptions. Poet. And high born beauty.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.07%
Highlight: Was it possible that the mere sight of a human face, never beheld before, could disturb the whole tenor of my life,
Notes: Yes.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.07%
Highlight: The instinct of my profession seized me at once. I could never behold suffering without forgetting all else in the desire to relieve it.
Notes: Vaccinate till dead. Doctors orders.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.09%
Highlight: In this world of fools intellect should ally itself with intellect.
Notes: Let’s be together.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.09%
Highlight: I passed by the circling glade and the monastic well, — sward, trees, and ruins all suffused in the limpid moonlight.
Notes: I’ll meet you there.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.11%
Highlight: Woe to the households in which the trusted Healer feels not on his conscience the solemn obligations of his glorious art!
Notes: MD doctors are covid murderers.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.11%
Highlight: Reverently as in a temple, I stood in the virgin’s chamber.
Notes: You are an angel.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.13%
Highlight: The things which do not disturb her temper may, perhaps, deject her spirits.
Notes: Insight.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.13%
Highlight: Yes, she is fond of reading, but more fond of musing. She will sit by herself for hours without book or work, and seem as abstracted as if in a dream. She was so even in her earliest childhood.
Notes: Too cute.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.14%
Highlight: That luteharp must be surely hers, and the scarf, with a girl’s favourite colours, — pure white and pale blue, — and the bird-cage, and the childish ivory work-case, with implements too pretty for use, — all spoke of her.
Notes: I can’t stop thinking of you.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.15%
Highlight: Thrones and bread man wins from the aid of others; fame and woman’s heart he can only gain through himself.
Notes: Trying my best.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.15%
Highlight: The whole human race seemed to be worthier of love, and I longed to diffuse amongst all some rays of the glorious hope that had dawned upon my heart.
Notes: After meeting you.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.17%
Highlight: Bichat, in his famous book upon Life and Death,
Notes: Ask circe.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.17%
Highlight: I had seen many more patients die from being mistreated for consumption than from consumption itself.
Notes: Doctor M Đ Scam.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.2%
Highlight: Solitary — solitary! Should I be so evermore?
Notes: Good question.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.2%
Highlight: Better be unhappy with one we love, than be happy with one we love not.
Notes: Fact check.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.21%
Highlight: ask yourself what kind of a wife you would have sought to win; had not this sudden fancy for a charming face rushed over your better reason, and obliterated all previous plans and resolutions.
Notes: Sudden fancy.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.22%
Highlight: She never seems at home on earth; and I do not think she will ever be contented with a prosaic earthly lot.
Notes: I’ll meet you in fairy land.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.26%
Highlight: He is a poor doctor who is not a stern despot.”
Notes: Covid death injection for everyone. MD SNAKE.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.27%
Highlight: Nature will do more for her than all our drugs can do.
Notes: Face mask slave whores.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.27%
Highlight: How serious, then, is the danger to a young girl, at the age in which imagination is most active, most intense, if you force upon her a belief that she is in danger of a mortal disease!
Notes: Covid scam and most disease in modern time. Psychosomatic mental persuation. Mind over matter.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.28%
Highlight: all jealousy, all sadness vanished, and I felt the glory which blends with the growing belief that we are loved.
Notes: She loves me!
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.29%
Highlight: In that diviner epoch of man’s mysterious passion, when ideas of perfection and purity, vague and fugitive before, start forth and concentre themselves round one virgin shape, — that rises out from the sea of creation, welcomed by the Hours and adorned by the Graces, — how the thought that this archetype of sweetness and beauty singles himself from the millions, singles himself for her choice, ennobles and lifts up his being!
Notes: Ladies and gentlemen. Edward Bulwer Lytton. Great work.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.39%
Highlight: The scales of our science have no weights fine enough for the gossamer threads of a maiden’s pure fancies.
Notes: I fancy you.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.41%
Highlight: I could never have applied to her the homely but significant name of helpmate. I reproach myself while I write for noticing such defect — if defect it were — in what may be called the practical routine of our positive, trivial, human existence.
Notes: Trivial human helpmate missing.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.43%
Highlight: pabulum
Notes: Bland or insipid intellectual matter.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.44%
Highlight: Strange, that at the very time my love for Lilian might have taught me that there are mysteries in the core of the feelings which my analysis of ideas could not solve, I should so stubbornly have opposed as unreal all that could be referred to the spiritual!
Notes: Love is spiritual.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.45%
Highlight: See the poet reclined under forest boughs, conning odes to his mistress; follow him out into the world; no mistress ever lived for him there!(2) See the hard man of science, so austere in his passionless problems; follow him now where the brain rests from its toil, where the heart finds its Sabbath — what child is so tender, so yielding, and soft?
Notes: Conduct and systems dissimilar in real life.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.45%
Highlight: Muller’s “Elements of Physiology,” vol. ii. . Translated by Dr. Baley.
Notes: Circe
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.45%
Highlight: Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets:” COWLEY.
Notes: Circe
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.47%
Highlight: prolix.
Notes: Using or containing too many words.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.5%
Highlight: what may be revered as truths in Asia are usually despised as dreams in Europe.
Notes: Oriental magic.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.52%
Highlight: described him again, — haughty, quarrelsome, reckless, handsome, aspiring, brave. Does that kind of creature interest you, my dears?” (appealing to the ladies).
Notes: Hello ladies!
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.52%
Highlight: to be shot at is a trifle, to be laughed at is serious.
Notes: They’re all going to laugh at me.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.56%
Highlight: The creature I had just seen gave me the notion of youth in the golden age of the poets, — the youth of the careless Arcadian, before nymph or shepherdess had vexed his heart with a sigh.
Notes: Perfect health.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.6%
Highlight: Van Helmont
Notes: Circe.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.63%
Highlight: roots of the white lily,
Notes: Pain killer.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.65%
Highlight: Does any animal, except man, love its fellow she-animal as man loves woman?
Notes: Good question.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.65%
Highlight: The secret of preserving so much of boyish freshness in the wear and tear of man-like passions and man-like thoughts.
Notes: Boyish freshness in original being.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.66%
Highlight: No healthful child likes alcohol; no animal, except man, prefers wine to water.
Notes: Ascetic.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.69%
Highlight: Tarantella, that famous Neapolitan air which is founded on the legendary belief that the bite of the tarantula excites an irresistible desire to dance.
Notes: Circe.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.71%
Highlight: Pythoness
Notes: Woman able to foresee the future.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.71%
Highlight: For the eye of the true Pythoness matter has no obstruction, space no confines, time no measurement.
Notes: How to find Pythoness?
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.72%
Highlight: I have read or heard that the priests of Delphi were accustomed to travel chiefly into Thrace or Thessaly, in search of the virgins who might fitly administer their oracles,
Notes: Virgins of Thrace.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.73%
Highlight: “I do not fear, except so far as he who loves truly, loves humbly, and fears not that another may be preferred, but that another may be worthier of preference than himself.
Notes: Love is sacrifice.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.79%
Highlight: mystics, — Iamblichus and Plotinus; Swedenborg and Behmen; Sandivogius, Van Helmont, Paracelsus, Cardan.
Notes: List of mystics.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.79%
Highlight: caryatides;
Notes: Circe
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.81%
Highlight: with as vacant a stare as that of a peasant whom one has addressed in Hebrew.
Notes: Hehe
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.81%
Highlight: farrago
Notes: A confused mixture.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.82%
Highlight: What weary old man is thus venting his spleen against the ambition which has failed, and the love which has forsaken him?’
Notes: Good question. Is it me?
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.82%
Highlight: Misanthropy
Notes: Dislike of humankind.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.82%
Highlight: what would you give for one which would enable you to defy and to deride a rival where you place your affections, which could lock to yourself, and imperiously control, the will of the being whom you desire to fascinate, by an influence paramount, transcendent?
Notes: Great question. I would give everything for you.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.84%
Highlight: Secrets!” I murmured; “none now are worth knowing. I am loved! I am loved!
Notes: She loves me!
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.9%
Highlight: magnetism perverted to evil may solve half the riddles of sorcery.
Notes: Mirror mirror on the wall.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.94%
Highlight: a consciousness of some lofty intelligence immeasurably beyond that which human memory gathers from earthly knowledge.
Notes: Your presence.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.95%
Highlight: Can that starry spark speak the presence of the soul? Does the silver light shine within creatures to which no life immortal has been promised by Divine Revelation?
Notes: You are the spark.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.96%
Highlight: And I saw that the mind was storming the soul, in some terrible rebellious war, — all of thought, of passion, of desire,
Notes: Mind over matter.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.98%
Highlight: that the juggler may learn much from the dervish, but the dervish can learn nothing from the juggler.
Notes: The trance reigns supreme.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.99%
Highlight: you will advise with me how, for the sake of humanity, we should act together against the incarnate lie, the anomalous prodigy which glides through the crowd in the image of joyous beauty.
Notes: For humanity!
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.99%
Highlight: Not the young boy-god Iacchus, amidst his nymphs, could, in Grecian frieze or picture, have seemed more the type of the sportive, hilarious vitality of sensuous nature.
Notes: Envy. Jealousy. Lust
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.01%
Highlight: There is magic of two kinds, — the dark and evil, appertaining to witchcraft or necromancy; the pure and beneficent, which is but philosophy, applied to certain mysteries in Nature remote from the beaten tracks of science, but which deepened the wisdom of ancient sages, and can yet unriddle the myths of departed races.
Notes: Magic.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.12%
Highlight: Yesterday is as to-morrow in the Forever.
Notes: Time is meaningless.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.12%
Highlight: Let me recall it — softly, — softly! Let me recall that evening spent with her! — that evening, the last before darkness rose between us like a solid wall.
Notes: I remember the last we spoke.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.14%
Highlight: Can the mere sound of that man’s voice, the mere glimpse of that man’s face, have—”
Notes: electric magnetic effect of a great wizard.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.16%
Highlight: the desire for some quick bodily exercise which is so natural an effect of irritable perturbation of mind,
Notes: Sit ups push ups crunches pull ups and curls. Because i can never be w you.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.2%
Highlight: Some of them were astrological observations and predictions; some were upon the nature of the Cabbala; some upon the invocation of spirits and the magic of the dark ages.
Notes: The lost books.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.22%
Highlight: sublime discontent of earth, which is the peculiar attribute of soul.
Notes: This place is hell.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.22%
Highlight: that the true art
of healing is to assist nature to throw off the disease; to summon, as
it were, the whole system to eject the enemy that has fastened on a
part. And thus his processes, though occasionally varying in the
means employed, all combined in this, — namely, the re-invigourating
and recruiting of the principle of life.
Notes: Art of healing homeopathy.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.27%
Highlight: The intellect, armed and winged by the passions, has besieged and oppressed the soul; but the soul has never ceased to repine and to repent.
Notes: I’m sorry. For everything.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Highlight
Chapter progress: 74.37%
Highlight: Scin-Laeca, — the shining corpse.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.39%
Highlight: I fear for the pure and innocent being who is under the spell of your deadly fascination. This is your power over me. You command me through my love for another.
Notes: Love is sacrifice.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.46%
Highlight: Had he then the arts that could thus influence the minds of others to serve his fell purposes, and achieve securely his own evil ends through agencies that could not be traced home to himself?
Notes: Yes.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.46%
Highlight: what had I done to be singled out from the herd of men for trials and visitations from the Shadowland of ghosts and sorcerers?
Notes: you love the wrong woman.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.5%
Highlight: He alone had no doleful words, wore no long face; he alone was invariably cheerful. ‘Everything,’ he said, ‘would come right in a day or two.’”
Notes: I love you. Do not fear.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.5%
Highlight: He could not make love, he could not say in the serious tone of a man in earnest, ‘I love you.
Notes: He is a frivolous egoist.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.52%
Highlight: he said that he was sure Lilian possessed a faculty that he called by some hard name, not clairvoyance, but a faculty, which he said, when I asked him to explain, was akin to prevision,
Notes: Be my oracle. Please!
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.52%
Highlight: namely, that in him there was a something present, or a something wanting, which forbade love and excited fear.
Notes: He’s a snake.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.55%
Highlight: Was Margrave really the most innocent and serviceable of human beings, kindly affectionate, employing a wonderful acuteness for benignant ends?
Notes: Or is he the devil?
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.59%
Highlight: we must abide by the old maxim, not to accept as cause to effect those agencies which belong to the Marvellous, when causes less improbable for the effect can be rationally conjectured. In this case are there not such causes?
Notes: Occam’s razor non sequitur.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.6%
Highlight: He speaks not only of drugs that renew youth, but of charms that secure love.
Notes: Drugstore cowboy.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.61%
Highlight: Who does not know the power of music? and of all music, there is none so potential as that of the human voice.
Notes: Sing for me.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.63%
Highlight: Intense self-concentration is, in itself, a mighty magician. The magicians of the East inculcate the necessity of fast, solitude, and meditation for the due development of their imaginary powers.
Notes: Fast, solitude, meditation.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.64%
Highlight: Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.
Notes: Goethe. Probably a secret society manifestation.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.69%
Highlight: here is the hallucination by which Nature is left Godless, because Man is left soulless.
Notes: Materialism
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.69%
Highlight: Take my advice, pray! And in this counsel I do not overstep my province. I speak not as a preacher, but as a physician.
Notes: Power of prayer.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.7%
Highlight: as her eyes only gaze on the stars and yours only bend to the earth.
Notes: Seeing you through the clouds.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.7%
Highlight: Nature does not impel the leviathan or the lion, the eagle or the moth, to pray; she impels only man. Why? Because man only has soul, and Soul seeks to commune with the Everlasting, as a fountain struggles up to its source.
Notes: Soul to soul. You are the fountain of life.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.73%
Highlight: Sir Philip Derval,
Notes: Allepo mystic.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.74%
Highlight: if without soul, man would have no conscience, never be troubled by repentance, and the vague dread of a future world,
Notes: Vaccine degenerates are soulless face mask slaves.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.77%
Highlight: It is true,” said I,— “a grim truth. Nature, on the surface so loving and so gentle, is full of terror in her deeps when our thought descends into their abyss!
Notes: I see a fruit fly caught in Charlotte’s web. I see a snake eating a squirrel!
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.78%
Highlight: Rich men like you,” said Strahan, peevishly, “can engage others, and are better employed in rewarding good artists than in making bad drawings themselves.
Notes: Hehe
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.79%
Highlight: You observe two triangles interlaced and inserted in a circle? — the pentacle,
Notes: Magick pentacle sigil.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.8%
Highlight: stone at Corfu, celebrated as an antidote to the venom of the serpent’s bite,
Notes: Bluestone. Ventura of Corfu family relic. Ask Circe.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.8%
Highlight: the pentacle itself has an intelligible meaning; it belongs to the only universal language, the language of symbol, in which all races that think — around, and above, and below us — can establish communion of thought.
Notes: Pentacle magick explained.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Highlight
Chapter progress: 74.8%
Highlight: Sir Emerson Tennent, in his popular and excellent work on Ceylon, gives an account of “snake stones”
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.84%
Highlight: This, at least, is an hallucination or a dream!”
Notes: Or is it!?
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.93%
Highlight: The yacht belonged to Mr. Margrave; he had purchased it by commission in London.
Notes: Meet me at my yacht.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.97%
Highlight: Is it by some occult magnetic property in this wand that you have exercised so demoniac an influence over a creature so pure as Lilian Ashleigh?
Notes: Magic wand.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.97%
Highlight: I sought in her the aid of a gift which would cease did she cease to be pure.
Notes: The gift.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.99%
Highlight: Do not weep; I shall live for you, — for your sake.” And she bent forward, drawing my hand from my streaming eyes, and kissed me with a child’s guileless kiss
Notes: I live for you.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 74.99%
Highlight: Her love for me was restored, as if its thread had never been broken.
Notes: She loves me!
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.0%
Highlight: How speak to her — or, indeed, to any one — about an occult fascination and a magic wand?
Notes: Do not speak about magic wand.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.06%
Highlight: I should have known better what dupes the wisest men can be to the witcheries of a fair face and eighteen!
Notes: Duped by eighteen year old.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.1%
Highlight: latent fluid as that which Reichenbach calls the “odic,” and which, according to him, “rushes through and pervades universal Nature
Notes: Circe
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.11%
Highlight: Ah! how unutterably tender and reverential Love becomes when it assumes the duties of the guardian, and hallows its own heart into a sanctuary of refuge for the beloved!
Notes: I can protect you.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
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Chapter progress: 75.13%
Highlight: For it is truly said by a wise critic of old, that “the attribute of Art is to suggest infinitely more than it expresses;”
Notes: I suggest we meet..
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.13%
Highlight: as a moonlit wave struck by a passing oar impels wave upon wave along one track of light.
Notes: Greatest simile ever?
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.14%
Highlight: What if there be spirits around and about, invisible to the common eye, but whom we can submit to our control; and what if this rod be charged with some occult fluid, that runs through all creation, and can be so disciplined as to establish communication wherever life and thought can reach to beings that live and think?
Notes: Good question.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.17%
Highlight: no enchantments for me but thine! Thine are the spells by which creation is beautified, and, in that beauty, hallowed.
Notes: You are a beautiful enchantment.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Highlight
Chapter progress: 75.21%
Highlight: painter Blake, himself a visionary, illustrated the Poems of the “Night Thoughts” and “The Grave,” —
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.23%
Highlight: The world itself is but an appearance; who can blame it if appearances guide its laws?
Notes: Keeping up appearances.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.27%
Highlight: In you still all my hopes fold their wings; where you are, there still I myself have my dreamland!
Notes: I love you.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.31%
Highlight: Has the Evil One never tempted you?
Notes: yes.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.33%
Highlight: illusions in a brain otherwise healthy suggest problems in our human organization which the colleges that record them rather guess at than solve.
Notes: Problems in human organization remain unsolved.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.34%
Highlight: The World for you, Nature for me. Farewell!”
Notes: Everybody wants to rule the world.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.35%
Highlight: It opened at the Second Book of Esdras, which our Church places amongst the Apocrypha, and is generally considered by scholars to have been written in the first or second century of the Christian era,
Notes: Removed from current canonical bible. Esdras.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.36%
Highlight: For like as the ground is given unto the wood, and the sea to his
floods, even so they that dwell upon the earth may understand nothing
but that which is upon the earth; and He that dwelleth above the
heavens may only understand the things that are above the height of
the heavens.”
Notes: Stay in your lane.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.37%
Highlight: Where is my track of light through the measureless future? Would that I could believe as I did when a child! Woe is me, that all the reasonings I take from my knowledge should lead me away from the comfort which the peasant who mourns finds in faith! Why should riddles so dark have been thrust upon me, — me, no fond child of fancy; me, sober pupil of schools the severest?
Notes: Severe school of sobriety.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.41%
Highlight: Love teaches that there is something of nobler value than mere mind? Yet surely it cannot be the mere body? What is it, if not that continuance of being which your philosophy declines to acknowledge, — namely, soul?
Notes: Soul mate connexion.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.44%
Highlight: And this fact is emphatically insisted upon by the mystics of our own middle ages, who state that a man must be born a magician; in other words, that the gift is constitutional, though developed by practice and art.
Notes: I’ll put a spell on you!
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.45%
Highlight: Van Helmont, of all the mediaeval mystics, is, in spite of his many extravagant whims, the one whose intellect is the most suggestive to the disciplined reasoners of our day.
Notes: Circe
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.45%
Highlight: In Scandinavia, before the introduction of Christianity, all tradition records the wonderful powers of the Vala, or witch, who was then held in reverence and honour.
Notes: I love you, Vala. Do you love me? Yes or No
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.47%
Highlight: phantasmal impressions produced on my senses,
Notes: The experience.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.47%
Highlight: For instance, it is in my experience that the common hazel-wood will strongly affect some nervous temperaments,
Notes: Hazel wood divining rod.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Highlight
Chapter progress: 75.48%
Highlight: Rhabdomancy, or divination and enchantment by wands.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.49%
Highlight: The Delphic Pythoness had her iron tripod,
Notes: Virgin of Thrace
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.49%
Highlight: I, son of Adam, am on earth, not in Paradise! Oh, that my Eve were at home on my hearth, and not in the skies with the seraphs!
Notes: You are an angel in the far away sky.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.5%
Highlight: The world, I grant, would get on very ill if women were not more or less actively useful and quietly good,
Notes: Lol
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.5%
Highlight: there would be far fewer good men of sense if there were no erring dreamer of genius!
Notes: Dreamer of genius.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.51%
Highlight: So the man who is much too enlightened to believe in a peasant’s religion, is always sure to set up some insane superstition of his own. Open biographical volumes wherever you please, and the man who has no faith in religion is a man who has faith in a nightmare.
Notes: Faith in nightmare.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.53%
Highlight: See for these unguents the work of M. Maury, before quoted, “La Magic et l’Astrologie,
Notes: Laurel berries
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.56%
Highlight: Could Ophir itself buy back to my Lilian’s smile one ray of the light which gave ‘glory to the grass and splendour to the flower’?”
Notes: I love you.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.59%
Highlight: My friend,” replied the old man, “believe me that the happiest art of intellect, however lofty, is that which enables it to be cheerfully at home with the Real!
Notes: I’m trying my best but these people are all low commoners.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.59%
Highlight: Even for the blessing of life, which she shared with all creation, she felt as if singled out by the undeserved favour of the Creator, and thus was filled with religion, because she was filled with love.
Notes: I love you.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.64%
Highlight: the bird and the beast know before you and I do when the mountain will rock and the ground groan, and their instinct leads them to shelter; but it does not lead them to prayer.
Notes: Animals have no prayer life. But can foretell earthquakes better than humans.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.64%
Highlight: Nature gives to no species instincts or impulses which are not of service to it.
Notes: Fact check.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.69%
Highlight: We are now in the midst of the critical struggle between life and reason; if she preserve the one, my conviction is that she will regain the other.
Notes: Why did you go w Allen Fenwick?
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.74%
Highlight: What sage would not have exchanged his wearisome knowledge for my lusty revels with Nature?
Notes: Lusty revels.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.76%
Highlight: he was the mystical fascinator; still, if the legends of magic had truth for their basis, he was the born magician, — as genius, in what calling soever, is born with the gift to enchant and subdue us.
Notes: i am the mystic! Go with me!
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.78%
Highlight: The science of to-day is the ignorance of to-morrow!
Notes: Covid vaccine face mask cult.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 75.94%
Highlight: But I was a child, — wayward as the child who pines for what earth cannot give, and covets the moon for a toy.
Notes: I’m still a child. Peter Pan.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 76.06%
Highlight: He who once quaffs that elixir, obtains in his very veins the bright fluid by which he transmits the force of his will to agencies dormant in nature, to giants unseen in the space.
Notes: Quaff the frothy tips from a carpenter’s cup.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 76.07%
Highlight: Dervish or magician, alchemist or phantom, what care you and I? And if they fail us, what then? They cannot fail us more than the colleges do!”
Notes: University endowment collapse.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 76.16%
Highlight: In its prevalent colour it had, indeed, the dazzle and flash of the ruby; but out from the mass of the molten red, broke coruscations of all prismal hues, shooting, shifting, in a play that made the wavelets them selves seem living things, sensible of their joy.
Notes: Elixir of life.
Chapter 25: A STRANGE STORY
Annotation
Chapter progress: 76.21%
Highlight: The waves in man’s brain are like those of the sea, rushing on, rushing over the wrecks of the vessels that rode on their surface, to sink, after storm, in their deeps.
Notes: Waves of emotion ocean.
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