#the willows

“The winds were about and walking, I remember saying to myself, for the winds often move like great presences under the trees.”

“The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows."

Concerning this alternate world, Blackwood has few doubts; his clarity of description in turn sheds light on the invocation of these worlds by others. It is “a place unpolluted by men,” that is, both inhuman and unhuman, “a ‘beyond region’ … another scheme of life, another revolution not parallel to the human.” A “veil” separates this place from our more familiar regions, a veil usually opaque but sometimes diaphanous, one that can occasionally be penetrated (or seen through) in either direction (184).