made us both weep: Paul Gallico’s Snowflake . There was plenty of food for Hindu thought in that story of transformation and essence, if I’d noticed, but I took my cue from Mum and wept. How sad and how beautiful it was, the story of the little Snowflake and her pear-shaped water drop of a husband, her progress from snow bank to river to millstream to estuary to the sea. And however much the Snowflake was jostled or scalded, she was aware of a backdrop of love. When Mum reached the end of the story, her voice vibrated in a way I had never heard before.
Eight physical signs
Here the story reached out and held hands with the poem about the girl who dwindled to nothing. The idea of simply evaporating from life was exquisitely beautiful. Its tingle gripped me from head to toe. We were both of us melting in sympathy with the fated life cycle of H 2 O. As Snowflake’s life ended the Sun said to her, ‘You have done well, little Snowflake. Come home to me now.’ We felt the hairs on the back of our necks standing on end, the very shiver of divinity. Without any idea of what was going on, we were visited by four of the eight physical signs of the presence of God. Horripilation (specifically nirvikalpa samadhi , the horripilation that precedes enlightenment), trembling, tears, faltering of the voice. The other signs of divine presence being perspiration, changing of body colour, inability to move (even the limbs), holy devastation. I really appreciate having a technical vocabulary for religious states. It’s one of the great advantages that Hinduism has. When you think about it, there are sodding great holes in the Christian descriptions. Even Paul Gallico, if he had witnessed the glory-babble of Pentecost or St Teresa hovering in the chapel on jump-jets of grace, would have struggled to put it across without a precise vocabulary to hand.
I pestered Mum to get other books by Paul Gallico from the library, and she came back with The Snow Goose . I hated it, perhaps because it was about war. It was also full of dialect, oddly written out, along the lines of ‘We was roustin’ on the beach between Dunkirk an’ Lapanny, like a lot o’ bloomin’ pigeons on Victoria Hembankment, waitin’ for Jerry to pot us. ’E potted us good too. ’E was be’ind us an’ flankin’ us an’ above us. ’E give us shrapnel and ’e give us H.E., an’ ’e peppers us from the bloomin’ hatmosphere with Jittersmiths.’ Mum couldn’t seem to extract the desired accent from this orgy of apostrophes , and we both felt that it wasn’t proper writing somehow.
We went back to Snowflake any number of times, and it always affected us the same way. Mum and I had a strange taste of that sublime state in which the ego melts, to return as a shadow if it returns at all. On the basis of that one little book, Paul Gallico is a great magus and swami, and that’s flat. The image of death as a merging resonates so deeply. People understand that the drop merges with the ocean, but they sometimes forget that the ocean also merges with the drop.
Mum would sometimes leave Snowflake or another book with me when she’d finished reading. I would take it under the bedclothes, understanding that this was a more precious hostage even than Peter’s toy soldier. A boy who was only allowed to move his head and his hands wouldn’t long resist the lure of print.
My favourite book at that time didn’t have words at all. It was a book of What I Want to Be When I Grow Up . It had pictures of various professional uniforms and styles of dress, each with a cut-out circle where the head should be. Mum had mounted a picture of my face at the back of the book, so that I could see myself looking proudly up through a porthole cut in all the pages of rôles and careers. She must have done that before I was ill. I was always excited by the obvious uniforms, soldier sailor policeman, but I was more deeply drawn to the curative, investigative or spiritual professions:
Eight physical signs
Here the story reached out and held hands with the poem about the girl who dwindled to nothing. The idea of simply evaporating from life was exquisitely beautiful. Its tingle gripped me from head to toe. We were both of us melting in sympathy with the fated life cycle of H 2 O. As Snowflake’s life ended the Sun said to her, ‘You have done well, little Snowflake. Come home to me now.’ We felt the hairs on the back of our necks standing on end, the very shiver of divinity. Without any idea of what was going on, we were visited by four of the eight physical signs of the presence of God. Horripilation (specifically nirvikalpa samadhi , the horripilation that precedes enlightenment), trembling, tears, faltering of the voice. The other signs of divine presence being perspiration, changing of body colour, inability to move (even the limbs), holy devastation. I really appreciate having a technical vocabulary for religious states. It’s one of the great advantages that Hinduism has. When you think about it, there are sodding great holes in the Christian descriptions. Even Paul Gallico, if he had witnessed the glory-babble of Pentecost or St Teresa hovering in the chapel on jump-jets of grace, would have struggled to put it across without a precise vocabulary to hand.
I pestered Mum to get other books by Paul Gallico from the library, and she came back with The Snow Goose . I hated it, perhaps because it was about war. It was also full of dialect, oddly written out, along the lines of ‘We was roustin’ on the beach between Dunkirk an’ Lapanny, like a lot o’ bloomin’ pigeons on Victoria Hembankment, waitin’ for Jerry to pot us. ’E potted us good too. ’E was be’ind us an’ flankin’ us an’ above us. ’E give us shrapnel and ’e give us H.E., an’ ’e peppers us from the bloomin’ hatmosphere with Jittersmiths.’ Mum couldn’t seem to extract the desired accent from this orgy of apostrophes , and we both felt that it wasn’t proper writing somehow.
We went back to Snowflake any number of times, and it always affected us the same way. Mum and I had a strange taste of that sublime state in which the ego melts, to return as a shadow if it returns at all. On the basis of that one little book, Paul Gallico is a great magus and swami, and that’s flat. The image of death as a merging resonates so deeply. People understand that the drop merges with the ocean, but they sometimes forget that the ocean also merges with the drop.
Mum would sometimes leave Snowflake or another book with me when she’d finished reading. I would take it under the bedclothes, understanding that this was a more precious hostage even than Peter’s toy soldier. A boy who was only allowed to move his head and his hands wouldn’t long resist the lure of print.
My favourite book at that time didn’t have words at all. It was a book of What I Want to Be When I Grow Up . It had pictures of various professional uniforms and styles of dress, each with a cut-out circle where the head should be. Mum had mounted a picture of my face at the back of the book, so that I could see myself looking proudly up through a porthole cut in all the pages of rôles and careers. She must have done that before I was ill. I was always excited by the obvious uniforms, soldier sailor policeman, but I was more deeply drawn to the curative, investigative or spiritual professions:
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