The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses)

space with its light. It seemed to be distending and pushing apart the walls with its brightness, to be filling the room, the bed, the cupboard to bursting. I stood gazing at it for a moment. Then, stepping out onto the balcony, I looked down on the long glittering path it had laid on the water and heard the waves splashing softly far below. All at once a feeling I find it difficult to describe came over me—a sense of some enormous force and beauty existing around me: a presence, a state that promised unspeakable delight and happiness if only I could join myself to it. But I could not so join myself. I was my ordinary self, carried suddenly into an over-charged, over-resplendent world. For a time I stood there, overcome by the sheer transcendency of the spectacle, then gradually the impression faded and I went away.

Brenan’s vision in fact has more in common with Lucius’ than does that of Cleaver; particularly interesting is the suddenness of his “sense of some enormous force and beauty existing around me,” which closely parallels Lucius’ instant conviction that what he sees is a manifestation of the goddess whose power controls the workings of the whole universe (11.1). Even more interesting, perhaps, is the contrast between Lucius’ voluntary submission to the dominion of the goddess and Brenan’s stalwart refusal to abdicate his selfhood.

No less apparently authentic is the lyrical description of the spring morning to which Lucius awakes after his vision (11.7). This sense of rebirth, of the newness of everything, can also be paralleled in conversion narratives, but is not exclusive to them. It can be brought about by a sudden reprieve—from a sentence of death by execution or cancer, for instance—or by anything which takes one right out of oneself, such as being in love:

It was not the first time they had seen trees, blue sky, green grass, not the first time they had heard running water and the wind blowing through the leaves; but certainly they had never yet admired it all as though nature had only just come into existence, or only begun to be beautiful since the gratification of their desires.

It can be convincingly expressed by any writer with experience of life who has the gift of identifying with the emotions of his characters. This was what Dickens, who was an accomplished actor and less like a miser than any man who ever lived, did with Scrooge:

Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!