ABSTRACT
To illustrate his meaning, William Gerhardi narrates the story of a certain year in his life. In this narrative, a masterpiece of imaginative comedy, the humour is rooted in a perception not of what is socially incongruous, humour’s usual subject matter, but of what is spiritually incongruous. The habit, which still lingers on, of regarding humour and religious insight as incompatible derives from the Old Testament conception of the divine. Humour and the universe have enlarged their boundaries together, and the subject matter of humour is now the whole range of temporal experience; for humour in its highest development is the other side of ecstasy, the soul looking back at its strange movements when it was tethered to the tree of Time, as ecstasy is the soul untethered and content.
