Welcome again to Lent with Niggle. This is the fifth installment. Did you miss the first, second, third or fourth installment? No problem, here are the links:
As far as the story line goes, here is where we are at in this fifth week of Lent:
Niggle is, in fact, let out of the ‘Workhouse’ and ushered onto a train again – a pleasant little train, painted in cheerful colors. Upon asking where he is going to go, the Porter tells him that his destination does not have a name yet. Hint: You will learn the name in our sixth and last installment of “Lent with Niggle”, or can find it out earlier by reading the final paragraph of the short story Leaf by Niggle.
After a short ride through a pretty landscape under blue skies, Niggle arrives in said unnamed place. It has neither station nor town, only a green embankment and a wicket-gate with a yellow bicycle with Niggle’s name standing by it.
Niggle pushed open the gate, jumped on the bicycle, and went bowling downhill in the spring sunshine. Before long he found that the path on which he had started had disappeared, and the bicycle was rolling along over a marvellous turf. It was green and close; and yet he could see every blade distinctly. He seemed to remember having seen or dreamed of that sweep of grass somewhere or other. The curves of the land were familiar somehow. Yes: the ground was becoming level. as it should, and now, of course, it was beginning to rise again. A great green shadow came between him and the sun. Niggle looked up, and fell off his bicycle. Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide. ‘It’s a gift!’ he said. He was referring to his art, and also to the result; but he was using the word quite literally. (…) Niggle walked about, but he was not merely pottering. He was looking round carefully. The Tree was finished, though not finished with – ‘Just the other way about to what it used to be,’ he thought.
It appears that Niggle arrived precisely where he had spent most of his life. The country now before him is the world he created, in his own head as well as on his canvas. While Niggle was wholly unprepared for his final journey, he had spent the greater part of his life shaping the world he would journey to. Niggle’s pursuit was artistic in nature. He craved Beauty (with a capital B) and strove to express this craving, however imperfectly he went about doing so. This is why, when all his life’s dross is burned off in the crucible of the Workhouse, the refined Niggle enters a country of such beauty.
O Sanctum Sacramentum, Corpus et Sanguis, Anima et Divinitas, adoramus Te.
Offerimus praeclarae majestati Tuae de Tuis donis ac datis Hostiam puram, Hostiam sanctam, Hostiam immaculatam, Panem sanctum vitae aeternae et Calicem salutis perpetua.
Alleluia Veni Sancte Spiritus Reple tuorum corda fidelium Et tui amoris In eis ignem accende.
