The Hill of Dreams

 

Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams, (1907).

 Lucien Taylor, the main character of Arthur Machen's novel The Hill of Dreams, takes himself to have solved the mystery of the alchemists when he hits upon the primacy of the imagination and language over physical reality. The historical, popular focus on the alchemical transformation of lead to gold is myopic and that change is usually understood in a way that largely misses the point. For Lucien, the change is a matter of a shift of mind, imagination, and conceptualization. Finding the base world appallingly cruel and miserable, Lucien changes it. For him, things start with language, with words; words to generate images in the mind. Finding the right words, the right poetry, the right prose--this is the magic. The magic is powerful and all too effective. Lucien ends up transforming himself into something non-human and that comes with a cost. The default interpretive view is that the price Lucien pays is much too high, but it is worth considering whether the alternative, remaining human, is even worse.