Mistletoe’s Dream
She was a daughter of Pan and had been wandering in a landscape of trees and flowers. The air was sweetened with amaranth. There were acorns on the grass. A chain of ochre mountains ranged all around her, bare and stark and oddly beautiful. She knew that the mountains were the forms of sleeping gods, the ancient forgotten gods.
It was a brilliant day. The sun was benevolent in its universal golden splendour. There were a few lovely clouds, and within one of the clouds was the exact form of an angel in flight.
She was in the homeland of human happiness. She was happy, and had been eternally happy, like a fortunate child. She had known no suffering and had always been surrounded with love.
But as she wandered in this realm of happiness she came upon three men who stood puzzled before a gigantic tomb.
The men were shepherds.
She had never seen them before.
They were grizzled, but seemed harmless.
On the enormous tomb there was an inscription, which read: ET IN ARCADIA EGO.
She was one of the daughters of Pan, and yet the inscription troubled her. The men fretted over the inscription and kept pointing at it, while their shadows took on sinister shapes.
She noticed that the man who pointed most ardently at the word ARCADIA had formed the shadow of a man with a scythe. This troubled her more.
They asked her about the tomb.
But she had never seen a tomb before. They explained what it was. She turned pale.
They contemplated the inscription and the mystery of the tomb till the shadows grew shorter and stranger on the wind-quivering grass. The world had darkened into tones of a deep bright sombre beauty.
Sadness seemed to be leaking into the happy kingdom of the earth.
And when she left the men, who remained discussing the inscription for what seemed like the rest of their lives, she was never quite so happy again.
And her life now seemed as a bright golden dream of ambiguities when she woke up in the dark.