THE LITTLE LOCKSMITH
I HAVE an island in the palm of my right hand. It is quite large and shaped like an almond. To make this island, the fate line splits in two in the middle, then comes together again up toward the Mount of Jupiter. I don’t know what an island means in palmistry. No two people ever interpret it alike. But it looks to me, and that is enough for me, as if it meant that a quiet respectable fate were suddenly going to explode in the middle of life into something entirely new and strange, and then be folded together again and go on as quietly as it began. And because something of this kind has happened to me I get a rather foolish magic-loving satisfaction from believing that my island represents that period, the cycle of precious experience which befell me and which I am going to write about in this book. I treasure that little thing in my hand. I pore over it reminiscently, gratefully. I like to know it is there. It is the lucky coin that saved me. It is the wafer of beneficent magic that made everything all right at last. It is the yeast that made my life rise.
When I was young I was so sure of the marvelous way my life was going to unfold that I never wasted my time looking for signs and portents. But something went wrong. The future I expected didn’t come, and so I began to be superstitious and sometimes took a furtive look at the palm of my hand when I was alone. And there I found the curious and possibly hopeful island. If the subject of fortune-telling came up in a roomful of people I secretly hungered for my turn. I put on a cool, superior air as I watched the others, and I made an exaggerated pretense of being reluctant and skeptical when my turn came—while inwardly of course I was no more reluctant and skeptical than any other ambitious willful people are in the late twenties, and then in the early thirties, and then in the middle thirties, if their lives are being held at a complete standstill during those heartbreakingly precious years. As foolishly and fiercely as I had believed in myself, so foolishly and fiercely I came to believe in gypsies, astrologers, card-readers, crystal-gazers, or anyone else who would give me any hope. And as each year dropped off my life I felt an almost unbearable longing to know what the great thing could be that was going to happen to me when I reached that amazing island in the palm of my hand.
Now I know what it was. It has happened. And it really was an island. The things that happened there made a period that was complete in itself, and so separate from the rest of my life that it was almost unrecognizable as mine. It was a period that seemed unreal and half enchanted, because it was so foreign to me and to everything that I had thought and been before. It floated like an island in the rest of my life.
Since then I have been thinking about islands, those explosions of apparently uncharacteristic experience that occur in certain lives. Most of the people we know are terribly afraid of such islands. They see one looming ahead and they hurriedly steer off in another direction. In order to save one’s life, as has been said, one must be willing to let it be tossed away, and not many of us are willing. All well-brought-up people are afraid of having any experience which seems to them uncharacteristic of themselves as they imagine themselves to be. Yet this is the only kind of experience that is really alive and can lead them anywhere worth going. New, strange, uncharacteristic, uncharted experience, coming at the needed moment, is sometimes as necessary in a person’s life as a plough in a field. Yet those people who are most capable of continuous development, because of their rich and fastidious and subtle natures, seem to feel a passionate fear and resentment of any really new experience. Change must always come, to them and in them, evenly and slowly and always in a given direction. If it takes a sudden sharp turn, or seems to be leading them into a place that they think is not fit for them, they refuse to follow it. Oh, lucky beyond most human beings is the refined and well-brought-up person who comes upon an utterly unfamiliar island flat in the middle of his fate line, and who is bold and crazy enough to defy the almost overwhelming chorus of complacency and inertia and other people’s ideas and to follow the single, fresh, living voice of his own destiny, which at the crucial moment speaks aloud to him and tells him to come on.
Then what happens is like the Japanese fairy tale of the man who visited a lady in her palace under the sea. It is romance, and it becomes legend. One reaches the island, is tossed ashore and stays one’s allotted time, and one leaves the island in the end. One leaves it, but the island floats there still, separate from all the rest of one’s life, foreign and almost incredible. But there it is, and it is enough that it is there, even though one can never go back to it again. As one looks back upon it, it comes to seem like an allegorical tale. It throws light on everything that went before, and on everything that comes afterward. One recognizes it as the true heart of one’s life, for without it one’s life would have been empty. Some fortunate lives unfold without obstruction or flaw, and these do not need islands.
