The Singing Sands

I finished Josephine Tey's The Singing Sands yesterday. So above is a picture of our own sands, which don't sing. and I guess if they did they would be drowned out by "the grating roar" (to quote Matthew Arnold) of the sea at high tide.

Reading it has given me a strange feeling. I am sure I read it when I was young, in my teens, but remember nothing about it beyond the little rhyme that sets the mystery:

The beasts that talk
The streams that stand
The stones that walk
The singing sand...

There are two missing lines, and the poem ends That guard the way to Paradise.

So once again I see a lament for the Garden of Eden.  But I think it gave me a strange feeling as reading it was like being transported back to my youth. It is so much of its time.  

Anyway, I want to quote from the book, as it is this mysterious poem about the way to paradise, found scribbled on a newspaper by a man who - apparently - has died in an accident, that sets our sleuth on the trail, which takes him to Scotland, with its mythical paradise Tir nan Og. And the author, who was Scottish, has this to say about the paradise of the Gaels:

Looking out for Tir nan Og. Which as Mr. Grant might know, was the Gaelic heaven.  The land of the eternally young. It was interesting, wasn't it how each people evolved their own idea of Heaven?  One as a feast of lovely women, one of forgetfulness, one as continuous music and no work, one a good hunting grounds. The Gaels, Mr. Tallisker thought had the loveliest idea. The land of youth.

Two things strike me there.  Firstly that people confuse heaven and paradise, which it is important to know are, according to the Bible, two different places.  Our first parents lived in paradise, in the Garden of Eden, and the wonderful prospect put before them was turning the whole earth into a paradise and living forever upon it.

Heaven is where God and the angels are, and of course, those who are the saints - the holy ones. The hope for most of us is to live forever in paradise, right here on the earth.

But I love the idea of "the land of youth".  Yes, that  would be paradise, as we were never meant to get sick and wither away and die, as we do now.

That would have meant nothing to me the first time I read it - not only was I very young, but I had no idea about where or what paradise was back then.  So that was a whole new aspect of it.

And also I saw a very different way it could have ended.  So could I work that ending into a book of my own?  

My energy has gone out like the tide, only with no prospect of its coming back in this side of Armageddon.  And whether I will be there the other side remains to be seen.  As Jesus himself said:  But the one who has endured to the end will be saved.

And after Armageddon, in the paradise earth, if we do write fiction, we will have new stories, ones we cannot even imagine now.  At the moment it seems our only plot is the one we are living in: Things have gone wrong, they need to be put right.

IF I do manage to write it, I wonder if  I could call it The Singing Susan? If I did though, the Captain would probably point out that the Singing would have to be in inverted commas.

Mine is the kind of singing best drowned out by a loud and pebbly tide.