Voyager Threshold Quotes

Composers do not remember this lost fatherland, but each of them remains all his life unconsciously attuned to it; he is delirious with joy when he sings in harmony with his native land, betrays it at times with his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back on it, and it is only by scorning fame that he finds it when he breaks out into that distinctive strain the sameness of which—for whatever its subject it remains identical with itself—proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul. But in that case is it not true that those elements—all the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, which exteriorises in the colours of the spectrum the intimate composition of those worlds which we call individuals and which, but for art, we should never know? A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

An ‘Initiate’ is someone who has ‘crossed the boundary (or threshold).’ The greatest Initiates have crossed the boundary of death and have returned — they have been called the twice born, the born again, or those born from above. These Initiates are often referred to as the Enlightened. However, the spiritual voyage consists of many steps, and thus in reality there are many initiations that the seeker experiences on the path to knowing the Divine. Each initiation is the badge of having overcome some challenge or barrier.

To the threshold of the century…three hundred years had gone by since the discovery of America, and in the great changes of that period oceanic enterprise had been a causative agent at least as important as any other. The rate of change, slow at first, had steadily increased, but it was still in reasonable proportion to the duration of man’s life and the capacity of his mind. Since then the rate has quickened out of proportion to that factor fixed by Nature. Man now is born in one world and dies in another, alien altogether to the world of his formative years. It is stimulating if unhealthy, and where it will lead, none knows. But for good or ill it is the process of modern history. J.A. Williamson, 1938.

The guard looked again at the card, and then said as he handed it back, “Nexialism? What’s that?” “Applied whole-ism,” said Grosvenor, and stepped across the threshold.