The Law and the Promise (1961)

“Late that afternoon, I went to that record shop to physically enact the scene. Not one detail supplied by the senses had encouraged me to believe I could walk out of that shop with those records. I had been told last September by the same salesman in the same shop the same story my friend had received there before Christmas.

Approaching the salesman I had seen in imagination that morning, I said, ‘Do you have Flagstad’s complete Isolde?’ He replied, ‘No, we haven’t.’ Without saying anything audible to him, I said inwardly, ‘That’s not what I heard you say!’

“As I turned to leave the shop, I noticed on a top shelf what I thought to be an advertisement of this set of records and remarked to the salesman, ‘If you don’t have the merchandise, you shouldn’t advertise it.’ ‘That’s right’, he replied, and as he reached up to take it down, discovered it to be a complete album, with all five records! The scene wasn’t played exactly as I had constructed it, but the result confirmed what my imagined scene implied. How can I thank you?” …F.B.

After reading F.B.’s letter, we must agree with Anthony Eden that “An assumption, though false, if persisted in, will harden into fact.” F.B.’s fancy, fusing with the sense-field of the record shop, enriched aspects of it and made them ‘his’ — what he perceived.

Our future is our imagining in its creative march. F.B. used his imagination for a conscious purpose representing life as he desired it to be and thereby affecting life instead of merely reflecting it. So sure was he that his imaginal drama was the reality — and the physical act but a shadow — that when the salesman said “No, we haven’t”, F.B. mentally said, “That’s not what I heard you say!” He not only remembered what he had heard, but he was still remembering it. Imagining the wish fulfilled is the seeking that finds, the asking that receives, the knocking to which is opened. He saw and heard what he desired to see and hear; and would not take “No, we haven’t” for an answer.