of significant detail in scenery is the secret of enjoyment, for such selection can be almost endless....
The hours passed too quickly always, but they provided the energy to face what, to me, was the unadulterated misery of the week to follow. A book was in my pocket and Shelley was in my memory. From the tram to the trees was half a mile, perhaps, but with the first sight of these, with the first scent of leaves and earth, the first touch of the wind of open spaces on my tongue, my joy rose like a great sea-wave, and the city life, with all its hideousness, was utterly forgotten. What occupied my mind during those seven or eight hours it would be tedious to describe.... I was, besides, hopelessly inarticulate in those early days; conclusions I arrived at were reached by feeling, not by thinking; one, in particular, about which I felt so positive that I knew it was true, I could no more have expressed in words than I could have flown or made a million. This particular conclusion that the Sundays in Bronx Park gave me has, naturally, been expressed by others far better than I could ever express it, but the first time I came across the passage, perhaps a dozen years later in London, my thought instantly flashed back to the teapot, the tin mug, and the boulder in Bronx Park when the same conviction had burned into my own untaught mind:
"One conclusion was forced upon my mind ... and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about us, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there are potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness; definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds
of consciousness that exist, and that these other worlds must
