"No;he is still in the Evil Wood,fighting the dead.""Where is the Evil Wood,that I may find him?""You will not find him;but you will hardly miss the wood.It is the place where those who will not sleep,wake up at night,to kill their dead and bury them.""I cannot understand you!"
"Naturally not.Neither do I understand you;I can read neither your heart nor your face.When my wife and I do not understand our children,it is because there is not enough of them to be understood.God alone can understand foolishness.""Then,"I said,feeling naked and very worthless,"will you be so good as show me the nearest way home?There are more ways than one,I know,for I have gone by two already.""There are indeed many ways."
"Tell me,please,how to recognise the nearest.""I cannot,"answered the raven;"you and I use the same words with different meanings.We are often unable to tell people what they NEED to know,because they WANT to know something else,and would therefore only misunderstand what we said.Home is ever so far away in the palm of your hand,and how to get there it is of no use to tell you.But you will get there;you must get there;you have to get there.Everybody who is not at home,has to go home.You thought you were at home where I found you:if that had been your home,you could not have left it.Nobody can leave home.And nobody ever was or ever will be at home without having gone there.""Enigma treading on enigma!"I exclaimed."I did not come here to be asked riddles.""No;but you came,and found the riddles waiting for you!Indeed you are yourself the only riddle.What you call riddles are truths,and seem riddles because you are not true.""Worse and worse!"I cried.
"And you MUST answer the riddles!"he continued."They will go on asking themselves until you understand yourself.The universe is a riddle trying to get out,and you are holding your door hard against it.""Will you not in pity tell me what I am to do--where I must go?""How should I tell YOUR to-do,or the way to it?""If I am not to go home,at least direct me to some of my kind.""I do not know of any.The beings most like you are in that direction."He pointed with his beak.I could see nothing but the setting sun,which blinded me.
"Well,"I said bitterly,"I cannot help feeling hardly treated--taken from my home,abandoned in a strange world,and refused instruction as to where I am to go or what I am to do!""You forget,"said the raven,"that,when I brought you and you declined my hospitality,you reached what you call home in safety:
now you are come of yourself!Good night."
He turned and walked slowly away,with his beak toward the ground.
I stood dazed.It was true I had come of myself,but had I not come with intent of atonement?My heart was sore,and in my brain was neither quest nor purpose,hope nor desire.I gazed after the raven,and would have followed him,but felt it useless.
All at once he pounced on a spot,throwing the whole weight of his body on his bill,and for some moments dug vigorously.Then with a flutter of his wings he threw back his head,and something shot from his bill,cast high in the air.That moment the sun set,and the air at once grew very dusk,but the something opened into a soft radiance,and came pulsing toward me like a fire-fly,but with a much larger and a yellower light.It flew over my head.I turned and followed it.
Here I interrupt my narrative to remark that it involves a constant struggle to say what cannot be said with even an approach to precision,the things recorded being,in their nature and in that of the creatures concerned in them,so inexpressibly different from any possible events of this economy,that I can present them only by giving,in the forms and language of life in this world,the modes in which they affected me--not the things themselves,but the feelings they woke in me.Even this much,however,I do with a continuous and abiding sense of failure,finding it impossible to present more than one phase of a multitudinously complicated significance,or one concentric sphere of a graduated embodiment.
A single thing would sometimes seem to be and mean many things,with an uncertain identity at the heart of them,which kept constantly altering their look.I am indeed often driven to set down what Iknow to be but a clumsy and doubtful representation of the mere feeling aimed at,none of the communicating media of this world being fit to convey it,in its peculiar strangeness,with even an approach to clearness or certainty.Even to one who knew the region better than myself,I should have no assurance of transmitting the reality of my experience in it.While without a doubt,for instance,that I was actually regarding a scene of activity,I might be,at the same moment,in my consciousness aware that I was perusing a metaphysical argument.