N

 

Arthur Machen, "N" in The Cosy Room and Other Stories (Rich & Cowan, 1936).

Sitting over drinks, Arnold, Harliss, and Perrott reminisce about the London neighborhoods, streets, and architecture that have changed for the worse over time. The old, narrow, and crooked streets, the charming jumble of different shapes, styles, and building designs, the enchanted mix of architectural eras, all now flattened to practical, uniform, and straight lines in a modern age that erases the spirit of a place to replace it with the concrete, the functional, and the mundane.

Through memory and imagination, these men peel back that modern facade and recall the old days and the old ways. Without moving from their chairs, they mentally walk the streets of London and its suburbs as the city once stood.

There is something eidetic about the tour. As the men talk, they can see the old Strand as it once was. In a telling moment, Arnold even gives directions to the now non-existent St. James’s Market. While Arnold and Perrott can still “see” the old market there, the younger Harliss cannot, as it was torn down before his time.

All of this is a familiar notion when we remember or return to a significant place in our lives that we haven’t visited in some time. Revisiting the town where we grew up after a long absence can elicit thoughts and images of “what used to be there,” juxtaposed with what we see now.

 Through Machen’s narrative, he draws a parallel between this familiar act of imagistic remembering and a much more speculative and transcendental peek at a reality behind the veil of surface appearances. Arnold’s investigations reveal a series of such glimpses. His research centers on a shabby secondhand book, A London Walk: Meditations in the Streets of the Metropolis (1853) by the Reverend Thomas Hampole. The book’s moral reflections hide curious passages about restoring a primal paradise—a “Heavenly Chaos” once fluid and malleable to uncorrupted imagination, now solidified by the Fall. Hampole reports meeting a man named Glanville who posits this Edenic reality that still lies beneath the crust of appearances. He accounts for this appearance/reality distinction in the following way:

“Mr. Glanville often dwelt on a consequence, not generally acknowledged, of the Fall of Man. ‘When man yielded,’ he would say, ‘to the mysterious temptation intimated by the figurative language of Holy Writ, the universe, originally fluid and the servant of his spirit, became solid, and crashed down upon him overwhelming him beneath its weight and its dead mass’”

Furthermore,

“. . . in his opinion that which we now regard as stubborn matter was, primally, to use his singular phraseology, the Heavenly Chaos, a soft and ductile substance, which could be moulded by the imagination of uncorrupted man into whatever forms he chose it to assume.”

Through the accounts of Hampole and Glanville, Machen has extended the familiar act of remembering to something much more metaphysically significant.  Imagination does not merely recall the past; it can dissolve the solid crust of the everyday and reveal (or shape) the fluid reality beneath. As in his novel The Hill of Dreams, Machen shows the visionary power of the mind: ordinary recollection becomes a solvent for the numinous.