INSIDE OUT

INSIDE OUT

Do you feel your interior life a separate part of yourself than your exterior, ordinary life?  Is there sometimes a war between the two, or are you one of the fortunate few have you fully integrated the two? 

The Portent by George MacDonald

Duncan Campbell is born oppressed with supernatural hearing and second sight. As with most of the MacDonald genre one is presented with gaps to fill. We are not told what exactly possessed his mother to abandon her infant son for hours after his birth. Whatever the circumstance, Duncan is a child who sees and hears things others do not.

 He finds recluse in nature and has a safe place- a cleft in the rocky Scottish landscape in which he roams.  He has felt the need to come to terms with his ability which he has learned to call "second sight".  He is aware that in the natural world he loves there is 'other'.

Duncan becomes aware that there is an adversary in an otherwise ordinary life. He The danger is signaled by the sound of a horse with a loose clanking shoe no one else hears.

 Characters appear at propitious moments who are able to explain a bit here and there about the apparitions.  An old nurse, a caretaker, simple folk, who know history and have themselves seen things. The story is well propelled by these characters. Trials are predicted, past lives are illuminated. Trials for Duncan are thus found to be ordained and they do not delay in arriving.

The boy has lived by turns his ordinary exterior life which is invaded from time to time by the interior. He struggles with both. Written in early 1864 the story details surprisingly modern psychology about repressed intellect or talent.

 As a tutor of two children in a once great house, Duncan meets the strange and withdrawn Lady Alice who lives with the family in the manse as Lord Hilton's ward, but who is mostly ignored and made out to be a simpleton. or even insane. Duncan is attracted to this lost girl, prisoner like himself in the important way that people who are deemed different by society, those who dream, those who imagine, those who see and hear things others do not and who are locked away by that society that does a better job at suppressing their imaginings.

The two haunted souls begin to meet regularly in the manse's haunted room where no one ever enters.  Duncan and Alice share their hopes of escaping this death they are living.

But, how to escape? How to achieve integration of one's interior and exterior life? How to become one's true self?

MacDonald has written the happy ending his publishers may have required. Or it may be an ending in keeping with MacDonald's faith that all is for God's good in love.  The portent loses its power. The theme of interior life and exterior life unified in what C. S. Lewis noted as a baptized imagination resonates.