Moriarty reminded us in his YouTube lecture that all time is “once upon a time” time. Once we get into that time, we must let go of the common-sense world, the practical time. We must let go of Aristotle’s world of “A is A” and of non-contradictions. Then we can have a ginger bread house. These stories grow from the once upon a time time. He says “when we enter once upon a time time we are nearer the creative centre of the universe.’ According to the Aborigines of Australia we begin then walking in the creative dream time that is in the beginning.  Bruce Chatwin, a man who made a religion of traveling, in a wonderful book Songlines  talked about his time in Australia wandering with the aborigines. Bruce Chatwin said in his book Songlines, “yet, in the East, they still preserve the once universal concept: that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”  I would put it this way, travel, particularly meandering travel,  helps us to understand that we are one with the universe. And that is magical time.

Once upon a time time is like Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Angus” where he wanders into a hazel wood because there was a fire inside his head and he caught a little silver trout with a berry on a string and it became a glimmering girl with an apple blossom on her head and faded through the brightening air and, he said, “I will find her again as she plucks the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun. The hazel wood is part of your own mind. As Moriarty himself said, he wanted to become aboriginal, or as my granddaughter once put, “aboreligional.” She made up that term but our family has adopted it.

As Professor Moriarty said, “It may be that the fairy stories of the world bring us closer to reality than Newton’s law of gravity.” Once we understand those stories we will be able to walk beautifully on the earth. Like Chatwin did and like the aborigines did.That is what the good professor sought.