Einbildungskraft - The Power of the Imagination

The first time I got a place of my own, well, my own lodgings, I was living in a house in glorious Nether Edge in Sheffield, on Montgomery Road no less.

It was something of a golden time for me. I was sort of lodging, sort of house sitting, as the lady whose house it was worked in Glossop and was away all through the week. I had the house to myself. I only went in the kitchen downstairs and I had the entire second floor to myself. I had one big room to myself and an en suite.

The other half of the attic space was an office, and it was supposed to be out of bounds. Although I am not a dishonest person, I will admit to being a little nosy, especially when it comes to sealed old musty rooms full of books, so one day I went in the forbidden room and had a look round. Naturally I was drawn first to the books.

I felt something that I have been lucky enough to feel a few times in my life. I have a poetic expression for it.

I call it the brush of angels' wings.

The man whose office it had been, the estranged husband of the woman whose house it was, was a psychologist. Clearly he and I shared many similar interests. Although I had abandoned my degree because I thought it was a load of horseshit, I had been training as a psychologist myself. I felt that there was some kind of path that I was unknowingly following, that it was kismet that I was there in that dusty old room with the books and the keepsakes from some old academic whose life had whisked him off to America to rarely return.

He apparently was also a scholar of German, as there were several books in that language.

I remember leafing through one such book off one of the shelves and it opening at a page on which I found the German word 'einbildungskraft'. It meant 'the power of the imagination'. The hairs on the back of my neck went up. I have remembered that word ever since.