TIME STOPS

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1688, 19 November 1925, Page 6

TIME STOPS

In J. M. Barrie's admirable little discourse on courage he tells of a monk who went out one day in the woods and heard a lark singing. He listened for what he thought was about fifteen minutes, and then went back to the monastery. There he met a stranger at the gate who asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted "in." The gate-keeper said he did not know him, but on looking up the records it was found that about one hundred and fifty years before a monk had disappeared in the woods and never been found. It was this same monk. While the lark was singing time stopped.

We have all of us had moments of ecstasy /when the world seemed to cease to wag. This moment may be a moment of supreme love. Or it may be that experience which a gambler seeks in the turn of a card. It is the same kind of intoxication that the drunkard desires when he fills himself with whisky.

In other words, what is most desired by the average person of the human race is to forget himself and his surroundings. When the soul can absorb itself in something else we say that it has found ecstasy. An orator does not move his audience profoundly until he has forgotten himself and remembers only his message.

A 'writer or a musician cannot be a supreme artist unless he forgets himself. A play is a success when it is absorbing, when it holds other interests so that we forget the passage of time.