“The faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking, three months ago; … and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift, and to profit by its possession.” (101)
- Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams
21 September 1849
I am reading another book on Charlotte Brontë and specifically about Jane Eyre this time: Elisabeth Imlay’s Charlotte Brontë and the Mysteries of Love: Myth and Allegory in Jane Eyre (1989;1993) and am inspired and moved; spiritually, philosophically and poetically—by the insights I am gathering from the text!
I came across this quote above last night and stopped!
I deeply relate to what Charlotte here says. How many times in my life – too many to count – has Imagination lifted me out of the mire and the gutter? The mire of mere ordinariness and the boredom that comes of being enmired in it. The gutter of inauthenticity and the attendant lack of resolve to emerge from it?
Is it part of my ‘religion?’ Only if by ‘religion’ might be meant the religio that I practice; a poetic naturalism and the disciplines that I use to orient myself to Earth & Spirit.
I will defend this ‘faculty’ to the end of my life_ and beyond the mortal world, if there is such an existence.
Her “three months ago” can stand – for me – for all of those hundreds of times over the last 60 years when an inspiration has lit me up and opened me to realms beyond the ‘Given’ – into the Imaginative Worlds wherein we can be re-sourced and find our truest selves – if only after long journeying and questing in that ‘Beyond’ – manifest in dreams, stories and characters that speak to our earthen souls.
The Imagination is, for me, a depth-sounding of reality. While it can degenerate into a vehicle for mere escapism – a reflection of our alienation from our true lives – in its full power it can be – and has been for me – transformative. So mote it be!
