Dick :
Do you know how I knew Your Name was Doc?
You know what I'm talking about, don't you?
I can remember when I was a little boy
My Grandmother and I could hold conversations
entirely without ever opening our mouths.
She called it "Shining."
And for a long time I thought it was
just the two of us that had "The Shine" to us.
Just like you probably thought you was the only one.
But there are other folks...
...though mostly they don't know it,
or don't believe it.
How long have you been able to do it?
Shrug
Dick :
Why don't you want to Talk about it?
I'm not supposed to.
Dick :
Who Says you ain't supposed to?
Tony.
Dick :
Who's Tony?
Tony's the Little Boy
that lives in My Mouth.
Dick :
Is Tony the one that...
...TELLS You Things?
Yes.
Dick :
How does he tell you things?
It's like I go to sleep,
and he shows me things.
But when I wake up,
I can't remember everything.
Dick :
Does Your Mom and Dad know about Tony?
Yes.
Dick :
Do they know he TELLS You Things?
Tony told me never to tell them.
Dick :
Has Tony ever told you anything about this place?
About The Overlook Hotel?
...I Don't Know.
Dick :
Now Think real hard, Doc.
Think.
Is there Something Bad here?
Dick :
Well... you know, Doc,
when Something Happens, it can leave
a trace of itself behind.
Say, like... if someone burns toast.
Well... Maybe Things That Happen
leave other kind of traces behind.
Not things that anyone can notice.
But things that people who shine can see.
Just like they can See Things that
Haven't Happened Yet...
...well... Sometimes they can see
Things That Happened a long time ago.
I think a lot of Things Happened right here...
...in this particular hotel over the years.
And not all of them was Good.
What about Room 237?
Dick :
Room 237?
You're Scared of Room 237, ain't you?
Dick :
No, I ain't.
Mr. Hallorann,
What is in Room 237?
Dick :
…Nothing.
There ain't nothing in Room 237.
But you ain't got no business going in there anyway.
So stay out.
You understand?
Stay out!
JOAN'S VOICES AND VISIONS
Joan's voices and visions have played many tricks with her reputation.
They have been held to prove that she was mad, that she was a liar and impostor, that she was a sorceress (she was burned for this), and finally that she was a saint.
They do not prove any of these things; but the variety of the conclusions reached shew how little our matter-of-fact historians know about other people's minds, or even about their own.
There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure.
Criminal lunatic asylums are occupied largely by murderers who have obeyed voices. Thus a woman may hear voices telling her that she must cut her husband's throat and strangle her child as they lie asleep; and she may feel obliged to do what she is told.
By a medico-legal superstition it is held in our courts that criminals whose temptations present themselves under these illusions are not responsible for their actions, and must be treated as insane.
But The Seers of Visions and The Hearers of Revelations are not always criminals.
The inspirations and intuitions and unconsciously reasoned conclusions of Genius sometimes assume similar illusions.
Socrates, Luther, Swedenborg, Blake saw visions and heard voices just as Saint Francis and Saint Joan did.
If Newton's imagination had been of the same vividly dramatic kind he might have seen the ghost of Pythagoras walk into the orchard and explain why the apples were falling.
Such an illusion would have invalidated neither The Theory of gravitation nor Newton's general sanity. What is more, The Visionary Method of making The Discovery would not be a whit more miraculous than the normal method.
The Test of Sanity is not The Normality of The Method but The Reasonableness of The Discovery.
If Newton had been informed by Pythagoras that The Moon was made of Green Cheese, then Newton would have been locked up.
Gravitation, being a reasoned hypothesis which fitted remarkably well into the Copernican version of the observed physical facts of the universe, established Newton's reputation for extraordinary intelligence, and would have done so no matter how fantastically he had arrived at it.
Yet his Theory of Gravitation is not so impressive a mental feat as his astounding Chronology, which establishes him as The King of Mental Conjurors, but A Bedlamite King whose Authority no one now accepts.
On the subject of The eleventh horn of The Beast seen by The Prophet Daniel he was more fantastic than Joan, because his imagination was not dramatic but mathematical and therefore extraordinarily susceptible to numbers : indeed if all his works were lost except his chronology we should say that he was as mad as a hatter.
As it is, who dares diagnose Newton as a madman?
THE EVOLUTIONARY APPETITE
Even the selfish pursuit of personal power does not nerve men to the efforts and sacrifices which are eagerly made in pursuit of extensions of our power over nature, though these extensions may not touch the personal life of The Seeker at any point.
There is no more mystery about this appetite for Knowledge and Power than about the appetite for food : both are known as facts and as facts only, the difference between them being that the appetite for food is necessary to The Life of The Hungry Man and is therefore a personal appetite, whereas the other is An Appetite for Evolution, and therefore a superpersonal need.
The diverse manners in which our imaginations dramatize the approach of the superpersonal forces is a problem for The Psychologist, not for The Historian.
Only, The Historian must understand that visionaries are neither impostors nor lunatics.
It is one thing to say that the figure Joan recognised as St Catherine was not really St Catherine, but the dramatisation by Joan's Imagination of that pressure upon her of The Driving Force that is behind Evolution which I have just called The Evolutionary Appetite.
It is quite another to class her visions with the vision of two moons seen by a drunken person, or with Brocken spectres, echoes and the like.
Saint Catherine's instructions were far too cogent for that; and the simplest French peasant who believes in Apparitions of Celestial Personages to Favoured Mortals is nearer to the scientific truth about Joan than the Rationalist and Materialist historians and essayists who feel obliged to set down a girl who saw saints and heard them talking to her as either crazy or mendacious.
If Joan was mad, all Christendom was mad too; for people who believe devoutly in the existence of celestial personages are every whit as mad in that sense as the people who think they see them.
Luther, when he threw his inkhorn at The Devil, was no more mad than any other Augustinian monk : he had a more vivid imagination, and had perhaps eaten and slept less: that was all.
THE MERE ICONOGRAPHY DOES NOT MATTER
All the popular religions in the world are made apprehensible by an array of legendary personages, with an Almighty Father, and sometimes a mother and divine child, as the central figures. These are presented to The Mind's Eye in childhood; and the result is a hallucination which persists strongly throughout Life when it has been well impressed.
Thus all the thinking of the hallucinated adult about The Fountain of Inspiration which is continually flowing in The Universe, or about the Promptings of Virtue and the Revulsions of Shame : in short, about aspiration and conscience, both of which forces are Matters of Fact more obvious than Electro-magnetism, is thinking in terms of The Celestial Vision.
And when in the case of exceptionally imaginative persons, especially those practising certain appropriate austerities, the hallucination extends from The Mind's Eye to The Body's, The Visionary sees Krishna or The Buddha or The Blessed Virgin or St Catherine as the case may be.
THE MODERN EDUCATION WHICH JOAN ESCAPED
It is important to everyone nowadays to understand this, because modern science is making short work of the hallucinations without regard to the vital importance of the things they symbolize.
If Joan were reborn today she would be sent, first to a convent school in which she would be mildly taught to connect inspiration and conscience with St Catherine and St Michael exactly as she was in the fifteenth century, and then finished up with a very energetic training in the gospel of Saints Louis Pasteur and Paul Bert, who would tell her (possibly in visions but more probably in pamphlets) not to be a superstitious little fool, and to empty out St Catherine and the rest of the Catholic hagiology as an obsolete iconography of exploded myths.
It would be rubbed into her that Galileo was a martyr, and his persecutors incorrigible ignoramuses, and that St Teresa's hormones had gone astray and left her incurably hyperpituitary or hyperadrenal or hysteroid or epileptoid or anything but asteroid.
She would have been convinced by precept and experiment that Baptism and receiving The Body of Her Lord were contemptible superstitions, and that vaccination and vivisection were enlightened practices.
Behind her new Saints Louis and Paul there would be not only Science purifying Religion and being purified by it, but hypochondria, melancholia, cowardice, stupidity, cruelty, muckraking curiosity, knowledge without wisdom, and everything that the eternal soul in Nature loathes, instead of the virtues of which St Catherine was the figure head. As to the new rites, which would be the saner Joan? the one who carried little children to be baptized of water and the spirit, or the one who sent the police to force their parents to have the most villainous racial poison we know thrust into their veins? the one who told them the story of the angel and Mary, or the one who questioned them as to their experiences of the Edipus complex? the one to whom the consecrated wafer was the very body of the virtue that was her salvation, or the one who looked forward to a precise and convenient regulation of her health and her desires by a nicely calculated diet of thyroid extract, adrenalin, thymin, pituitrin, and insulin, with pick-me-ups of hormone stimulants, the blood being first carefully fortified with antibodies against all possible infections by inoculations of infected bacteria and serum from infected animals, and against old age by surgical extirpation of the reproductive ducts or weekly doses of monkey gland?
It is true that behind all these quackeries there is a certain body of genuine scientific physiology. But was there any the less a certain body of genuine psychology behind St Catherine and the Holy Ghost? And which is the healthier mind? the saintly mind or the monkey gland mind? Does not the present cry of Back to the Middle Ages, which has been incubating ever since the pre-Raphaelite movement began, mean that it is no longer our Academy pictures that are intolerable, but our credulities that have not the excuse of being superstitions, our cruelties that have not the excuse of barbarism, our persecutions that have not the excuse of religious faith, our shameless substitution of successful swindlers and scoundrels and quacks for saints as objects of worship, and our deafness and blindness to the calls and visions of the inexorable power that made us, and will destroy us if we disregard it? To Joan and her contemporaries we should appear as a drove of Gadarene swine, possessed by all the unclean spirits cast out by the faith and civilization of the Middle Ages, running violently down a steep place into a hell of high explosives. For us to set up our condition as a standard of sanity, and declare Joan mad because she never condescended to it, is to prove that we are not only lost but irredeemable. Let us then once for all drop all nonsense about Joan being cracked, and accept her as at least as sane as Florence Nightingale, who also combined a very simple iconography of religious belief with a mind so exceptionally powerful that it kept her in continual trouble with the medical and military panjandrums of her time.
FAILURES OF THE VOICES
That the voices and visions were illusory, and their wisdom all Joan's own, is shewn by the occasions on which they failed her, notably during her trial, when they assured her that she would be rescued. Here her hopes flattered her; but they were not unreasonable: her military colleague La Hire was in command of a considerable force not so very far off; and if the Armagnacs, as her party was called, had really wanted to rescue her, and had put anything like her own vigor into the enterprise, they could have attempted it with very fair chances of success. She did not understand that they were glad to be rid of her, nor that the rescue of a prisoner from the hands of the Church was a much more serious business for a medieval captain, or even a medieval king, than its mere physical difficulty as a military exploit suggested. According to her lights her expectation of a rescue was reasonable; therefore she heard Madame Saint Catherine assuring her it would happen, that being her way of finding out and making up her own mind. When it became evident that she had miscalculated: when she was led to the stake, and La Hire was not thundering at the gates of Rouen nor charging Warwick's men at arms, she threw over Saint Catherine at once, and recanted. Nothing could be more sane or practical. It was not until she discovered that she had gained nothing by her recantation but close imprisonment for life that she withdrew it, and deliberately and explicitly chose burning instead: a decision which shewed not only the extraordinary decision of her character, but also a Rationalism carried to its ultimate human test of suicide. Yet even in this the illusion persisted; and she announced her relapse as dictated to her by her voices.
Visualizers will understand this at once. Non-visualizers who have never read Galton will be puzzled and incredulous. But a very little inquiry among their acquaintances will reveal to them that The Mind's Eye is more or less A Magic Lantern, and that the street is full of normally sane people who have hallucinations of all sorts which they believe to be part of the normal permanent equipment of all human beings.
