From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, secretly in honor of a certain K.

Here's a quotation from our Spotted in the Wild blog that we wished to share here, too:

"What else is the world than a figure? Life itself is but a symbol. You must be a wise man if you can tell us what is reality." —William Somerset Maugham, The Magician

We've long collected summations of the meaning of life, and we couldn't resist sharing this marvelous one by the immortal John Cowper Powys in his novel Porius.  Note that he distills the meaning of life down to one key word:

What an absurd nonsense it all was!  Why couldn't people see that the whole business was a lively, amusing, horrible, comical, pitiful, cruel Incomprehensibility?  For that was what it was.  Not a tragedy, for it was too pitiful.  Not a farce, for it was too cruel.  Not a mystery, for the physical was too tick, and our capacity for response to everything else too quickly at its limit.

It clearly couldn't be very serious or matter very much.  We were all comparatively soon dead; and meanwhile life could be deliciously pleasant and appallingly unpleasant.  It could be endurable.  It could unendurable.  It could be first the one and then the other.  Good and evil in it were hopelessly mixed up, as also were justice and injustice.

An Incomprehensibility—that's the only word for it!  And what applies to men applies to the gods also.  "If I could magic myself into an eagle of Zeus and carry all the people up through those black clouds into the moonlight on my wings, would I do it?" he thought.  "No, I would not do it!  Why should I do it?"

It would only be from one incomprehensible dream into another!

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, for the author of The Can of Yams:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

An invisible moon, whether hidden by clouds or by a film of vapor or by the horizon itself, is "possessed of the power to substitute a totally different element as a darkness disperser from that of either daylight or torchlight" —John Cowper Powys, Porius.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, inspired by Jeff Hawkins:

"We're like handshadows illuminated by stars, and the shadow on the wall, lit by a star, is really a shadow of what isn't us." —Gary Barwin

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, for Navid Sinaki:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

A doll possesses a "dim, vague, blurred, vicarious, secondary consciousness of a soul embodied in an intensely loved but inanimate companion" and looks forward to encountering "the legendary doll of dolls" (John Cowper Poyws, Porius).

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook: