[I first heard of A Voyage To Arcturus from a friend who very earnestly recommended it to me in 1973 or so. Twenty two years later, I encountered critic Colin Wilson's brief oblique opinion of the book, stated in his essay Tree by Tolkien (1973). He said, "Judged by the standards of a real work of genius and originality, like David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, it ( The Lord of the Rings ) lacks that final cutting edge of moral perception and seriousness." This tied the knot for me, and I mounted a search that finally turned up a $1 copy at The Book Trader, in Encinitas, CA. Now I see what Wilson meant by "seriousness". Lindsay uses his kaleidoscopic science fiction and fantasy elements strictly as the means to evoke within the reader some perception of an impossibly bewildering array of philosophies and theologies, which finally converge, in a most mystifying, dramatic and alarming way. Lindsay's prose may be awkward at points, but his ideas and images are unique and are engaging at the deepest levels of the psyche. Very few books have affected me as powerfully as A Voyage to Arcturus and very few have left me so... disquieted. - WA, 23 Feb 97, 6 Dec 97]

   Presently, however, he was confronted in mid-stream by a hideous monster, of the size of a pony, but resembling in shape -- if it resembled anything -- a sea crustacean... They stared at one another, the beast with wicked eyes, Maskull with cool and wary ones. While he was staring, a singular thing happened to him.

   His eyes blurred again. But when in a minute or two this blurring passed away and he saw clearly once more, his vision had changed in character. He was looking right through the animal's body and could distinguish all its interior parts. The outer crust, however, and all the hard tissues were misty and semi-transparent; through them a luminous network of blood-red veins and arteries stood out in startling distinctness. The hard parts faded away to nothingness, and the blood system alone was left. Not even the fleshy ducts remained. The naked blood alone was visible, flowing this way and that like a fiery, liquid skeleton, in the shape of the monster. Then this blood began to change too. Instead of a continuous liquid stream, Maskull perceived that it was composed of a million individual points. The red color had been as illusion caused by the rapid motions of the points; he now saw clearly that they resembled minute suns in their scintillating brightness. They seemed like a double drift of stars, streaming through space. One drift was traveling toward a fixed point in the center, while the other was moving away from it. He recognized the former as the veins of the beast, the latter as the arteries, and the fixed point as the heart.

   While he was still looking, lost in amazement, the starry network went out suddenly like an extinguished flame. Where the crustacean had stood, there was nothing. Yet through this "nothing" he could not see the landscape. Something was standing there that intercepted the light, though it possessed neither shape, color, nor substance. And now the object, which could no longer be perceived by vision, began to be felt by emotion...

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