Three writers' words on two kinds of pain

Extracts from L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery's Green Gables letters have appeared in several articles in the past. 

Ephraim Weber, the recipient of these letters, was someone to whom she could express her true thoughts and feelings about many mundane, metaphysical and philosophical topics and experiences. She was very lucky to have this kindred spirit in her life.

She covered a lot of ground: she wrote about envy, writing, religion, the flowers in her garden, books, housework and many other things. Her letters also contain some amusing anecdotes. 

The inspiration for this article comes from some thought-provoking words that she wrote about two kinds of pain. 

As with the extracts in the previous article, this one was chosen because it reminded me of something that I had read in the works of other writers.

Two kinds of pain
L. M. Montgomery said this in a letter dated May 8th 1905:

“...I agree with you in regard to one kind of pain. There are two kinds, don’t you think! The pain God sends to us and the pain we bring on ourselves; the former is the fire of heaven, the latter the flame of hell. 

God’s pain is indeed one of his ministering spirits. Great mysteries of soul-birth and soul growth are bound up in it and if we have the courage and the endurance to make a friend of it it will bring great gifts to us. But the pain we bring on ourselves through folly or wilfulness or even simple blindness! Ah, it is horrible; it is degrading; there is no fine, high ministry in it; it burns and scars and defaces for our punishment.”

This is strong stuff; it is all very biblical. It contrasts the purifying flames of Purgatory with the everlasting fires of Hell. 

This is not the place to go into the events in L. M. Montgomery's life that caused her to develop these ideas about pain – and at this point the worst was still to come. For now, I just want to give examples of two other people's words on two very different kinds of pain.

The Library of Things!

The article about the future of public libraries was intended to be the final one in the series, but I have recently learned of an interesting new development that is worth highlighting. 

I said previously that public libraries have changed with the times in their fight for survival. For example, some of them are providing various community educational services and calling themselves Idea Stores. 

I came across another new community initiative when I went past a library on a bus and saw a notice in the window advertising items for hire. Cleaning, camping, gardening, DIY and events were among the uses mentioned.

This seemed like a great idea to me. I investigated online when I got home, and found that there is a new social enterprise called the Library of Things.  

The company lends tools, equipment and other useful objects rather than books, and they do this through the public library system. Their aim is to promote community spirit and the sharing economy and reduce excessive consumption:

Why buy when you can borrow?

Borrow useful Things for your home, projects and adventures.

Affordable. Convenient. Kinder to the planet.

Of the steadily growing number of participating libraries,16 are in London. The one I saw is in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. 

London's first Library of Things opened in Crystal Palace in 2018. Their collection of 50 useful items included an ice cream maker, a carpet cleaner, a lawn mower and a ukulele:

Public libraries need all the help they can get
Many councils are reported to be facing effective bankruptcy, which means drastic cuts in funding, slashed services and the closure of yet more public libraries. 

Many campaigners are fighting to save their local branches. Guardian cartoonist Tom Gauld has some useful suggestions:

Library of Things encourages people to join or start new campaigns to bring the community borrowing service to their neighbourhood. 

I really hope that this new scheme will help to keep some public libraries open.

It certainly gives 'browsing the shelves' a new meaning:

A few more quotations from L. M. Montgomery's Green Gables Letters

Many elements in the life, letters and works of L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery are of great relevance to this blog; several topics and publications associated with her have been featured or referenced on here in various articles in the past. 

This article contains some further extracts of interest from The Green Gables Letters, which were written by Lucy Maud to her pen friend Ephraim Weber between 1905 and 1909. 

Each of these extracts reminds me of something that I have read in the works of another writer.

More wise words about writing
Everything that L. M. Montgomery has to say about the art of writing, the compulsion to write for example, is of great interest and worth highlighting. 

This is her advice to Ephraim Weber:

“...don’t give up writing; it’s the best method of soul cultivation there is; even if you never published another thing the writing of it would bring you a beatitude.”

This reminds me of what Steve Hassan has to say about how cult leavers benefit from writing their story down.

The battle between the Orange and the Green
The connection between Irish Catholics and the colour green  has been mentioned earlier. Their long-term enemies the Irish Protestants favour the colour orange. 

The battle continued when Irish people emigrated to the New World. 

This amusing anecdote describes an incident outside the building of L. M. Montgomery's American publisher L. C. Page & Company:

“In July a big party of Orangemen were going on a picnic. At the Boston North St. station, they saw a copy of Anne of Green Gables bound in green on a newsstand. They took, or pretended to take—they were likely half drunk—the title as a personal insult, marched across to the Page building, the band playing horrible dirges, and nearly mobbed the place. One of the editors came out and told them that although the title might be offensive “the heroine, Anne, had hair of a distinct orange hue.” Thereupon they “adopted” Anne as their mascot, gave her three cheers and went on their way rejoicing.”

So the Orangemen accepted Anne's orange connection and overlooked the green. 

This story has made me think of the rejection by both the Red and the White sides in the Wars of the Roses of a member of the Prune family because he wore a pink rose!  By coincidence, L. M. Montgomery says in one of her letters that she much prefers pink roses to red ones.

A scene of special interest from a Dion Fortune occult novel

There are a few scenes in Dion Fortune's occult novels that have particular relevance to some of the material on here. 

These scenes contain familiar elements; they provide supporting evidence for some key theories about certain metaphysical influences and phenomena; they enable people to put similar experiences into a wider context and learn some useful lessons.

This post features one of these scenes. It caught my attention when I was skimming through Dion Fortune's novel The Demon Lover (1927). It describes the negative effect that a girl who is being controlled by an evil entity has on someone she encounters.

Bad energy repels the doctor
A mediumistic young girl called Veronica Mainwaring is a major character in The Demon Lover. While she is harmless in herself, everything changes when she comes under the hypnotic influence of a black magician called Justin Lucas.

After his death, he uses her to help him drain children of their vital energy so that he can materialise; some of the children die.

Possessed by the spirit of Lucas, a huge mastiff goes crazy and kills the doctor's son; this man had hoped to marry Veronica, so Lucas saw him as a rival.

Veronica is taking her morning walk when the doctor drives past in his dog cart:

“He gave her one glance, and shaking the reins, drove swiftly past without any other sign of recognition than was conveyed by that look of hate and repulsion.”

The doctor knows nothing but senses everything:

“...there was something about the girl which did not fall within the laws of his three-dimensional universe. What it was, he could not define, even to himself, but he hated and dreaded her as children and dogs hate and fear, without reason assigned, yet with an unerring instinct.“

The doctor senses that Veronica is overshadowed by Lucas's malign influence, he is repelled by the negative energy around her, and his intuition rightly tells him that she was somehow involved in his son's death. No wonder that he hates and fears and hurries away from her. 

Veronica behaves in a similar way towards the huge killer dog, which she has inherited from Lucas. She is a dog lover and at first she quite likes the friendly old thing, but this changes after he comes under the evil influence of the dead Lucas:

“...to Veronica...the whole ‘feel’ of dog, kennel, and surroundings was so repellent that she drew hastily back and hurried away from the yard and its sinister occupant.”

Three cult-related exercises with a wider application

I have mentioned some of Steve Hassan's suggestions in previous articles inspired by his books. Some of the techniques and practices that he promotes have a wider application: for example, people who have escaped from dysfunctional families - some of which can be very cultlike - and are trying to process the past and rehabilitate themselves may also find them worth trying. 

This article features and expands on three pieces of advice that are best followed in sequence: tell the story, rework the story and salvage as much as possible from the time spent in captivity. 

1) Telling the story
Steve Hassan says that cult leavers are stronger for being able to share their personal stories. He also says that the written word is a powerful medium of communication, and that writing the entire story down helps the writer to process and gain a better perspective on the experiences.

This is all very true, but the story-telling exercise may be very time consuming and it may be difficult to know where to start. 

This applies even more to people who are trying to come to terms with and move on from many years of neglect and ill-treatment at the hands of their families. People who are both cult leavers and members of dysfunctional families will have a lot of material to process.

A spreadsheet for topics and timelines provides a good structure and framework for the narrative, and using it to record key elements in someone's life may save time in the long run.

There are so many variables and different stories to tell that it is impossible to design a 'one size fits all' template. 

A good way to get the ball rolling is to set up column headings and sub-headings for basic, useful and important information. It is advisable to start with key items such as people, addresses, dates and milestones. Lists of elements such as food and clothes, schools and jobs, toys and pets, books and music, entertainment, outings and travel will help to fill out the picture of the past. Other categories could include accidents, illnesses and painful incidents such as a family breakup. Political events and news items that made a big impression may also be worth recording.

It is best to concentrate on one aspect at a time and follow it through in sequence over the years of dependency and captivity.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the poisonous old green book covers

When I first trawled through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's essay collection Through the Magic Door in search of article-inspiring material, I noticed that there were many references to the colour green.  After taking time out to create a whole string of articles about this colour using material from other sources, I returned to the Magic Door to have another look at the green items. 

Conan Doyle several times invites visitors to his library to make themselves comfortable on his old green settee while he talks them through his book collection, many volumes of which have green covers.

This may seem harmless enough, but I recently found some unexpected and alarming information: it is not just green shirts and green kirtles that have both good and bad aspects and associations, green book covers do too.

The good side of green book covers
Conan Doyle knows how just looking at the cover of an old book can trigger associations and trains of thought and bring back fond memories of what is inside.

He says this about the books in his library in general:

“There is not a tattered cover which does not bring its mellow memories to me.”

He says this about a book of short stories by Edgar Allen Poe:

“And all this didactic talk comes from looking at that old green cover of Poe.”

He calls his books his noble, silent comrades, his dear personal friends, and is very grateful for what they have done for him:

“...and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past.”

He is not the only one to feel this way; I felt very nostalgic after looking at an online image of the old green cover of the copy of Treasure Island that I once owned.

Conan Doyle has a lot to say about Sir Walter Scott and his works, which he thought very highly of. He makes several references to his collection of books by Scott; he mentions a line of olive-green volumes and the long green ranks of the Waverley novels. 

Here are a few early-edition volumes from the Waverley series:

More quotations from Dion Fortune's occult novels

I have found Dion Fortune's occult novels worth reading more for the occasional neat summaries and thought-provoking, commentary-inspiring remarks than for the plots and people and elements such as robes and rituals, magic and mystery, temples and ceremonies and the Old Gods. 

The quotations in this article come from The Goat-foot God (1936), in which there are descriptions of both occult and everyday activities. The contrast can be very amusing: people invoke the god Pan and fry sausages for example!

Some spot-on comments 

“An empty mind's as uncomfortable as an empty stomach.”

Some people's unsatisfied hunger for knowledge, for food for their minds, does indeed make them very unhappy. The article about the 'eat or buy books' dilemma is relevant here.

“You don’t know what you do want, but you do know what you don’t want.”

This is exactly how many dissatisfied people feel, and not just when  they have not got the right people to interact or share their lives with: it could apply to someone who is trying to find suitable work or the right place to live for example. They don't know what they want because they have never seen or experienced it, but they do know that whatever is currently available to them is not what they want.

The Goat-foot God describes how it feels when someone starts to get an idea of what it is that they have been wanting all this time:

“Doing your best to carry on on wrong lines till you feel you will burst, and then suddenly getting the clue that opens everything out to you.“

I know from experience how liberating it is when the answer finally comes and an escape route from a life that is all wrong opens up: “That's it! That's what I'll do! That's what I want!”