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As a scribbler, I am occasionally asked the question “Where do you get your ideas from?” Until recently, I would respond with some boilerplate drivel – you know the kind of thing: a newspaper clipping, or an overheard snippet of conversation between a pair of ingrates in a bus queue, or a startling and profound insight, while eating breakfast, into the bewildering complexities of the human condition. Sometimes I might reply that I got my ideas while staring vacantly out of the window at the drizzle and the duckpond or, like Immanuel Kant, at the old tower of Löbenicht. And every now and then, if the circumstances were propitious, I would simply ignore the question and instead thump my interlocutor on the head with a stick.

None of these, not even the last, was a wholly satisfactory answer to the question. So I was extremely pleased to stumble upon a chunk of text which, duly memorised, I now recite, as if I have just made it up, whenever I am asked the source and wellspring of the teeming ideas splattered, on an almost daily basis, on the Hooting Yard website. I quote these words of Margaret Fuller:

Behold the far off luminary suspended millions and billions and trillions of miles in space; then turn the eye yonder and see that infinitesimal point of vegetation, earth – a speck, countless multitudes of which heaped and piled together would form but a point compared with that majestic sun! Yet behold it move and expand beneath the long fibrous rays which that effulgent orb sends down through so many billions of miles to the place of its minute existence. Even as that poor little existence shoots out its fibres to meet those rays which have travelled such great lengths, so a spirit in the spheres feels the quickening, effulgent rays thrown out by the brain of some prophet or poet existing millions and billions and trillions of miles away on some distant spirit planet, and his thought expands and enlarges beneath the warming action of that far-off brain, until it assumes a shape and form which its own emulation never prophesied.

To be precise, these are the words not of the corporeal Margaret Fuller, but of her spirit, dictated to Henry J Horn and transcribed in his book Strange Visitors, A Series Of Original Papers, Embracing Philosophy, Science, Government, Religion, Poetry, Art, Fiction, Satire, Humor, Narrative, And Prophecy, By The Spirits Of Irving, Willis, Thackeray, Bronte, Richter, Byron, Humboldt, Hawthorne, Wesley, Browning, And Others Now Dwelling In The Spirit World, Dictated Through A Clairvoyant, While In An Abnormal Or Trance State (1871). I heartily recommend this very sensible work to all Dabbler readers, whether resident on earth or on some other planet or plane of existence.