Old Hag once told me a story. She claimed it to be a truism.

“There was once a man whose mind had a cellar,” she said.

“The cellar had dark recesses. The recesses he thought hid horror. The man was terrified to enter, and avoided it like a festooned cadaver. For what if the darkness sheltered dragons, and what if they were to spit fire, and set him ablaze on his own fuel?

“But once in a long while he found light, and the light lubricated him against fear so he slipped within. He entered the mind and the cellar and off he went deeper and deeper, until the darkest of the recesses was lit.

“And standing there were no dragons, but a tiger, raring to be set free, to whose roars he had been always deaf.

“For elsewhere the lack of light may sharpen our other senses, but the darkness of the mind makes us not merely blind.”