at the back of the north wind by george macdonald

'Indeed I do,' answered Diamond, stroking her hand. You love me when you are not with me, don't you?' 'I think,' said, after they had been sitting silent for a while, 'that if I were only a dream, you would not have been able to love me so. And if the North Wind isn't a dream then who is she? Diamond wonders if the North Wind is real or only a dream he's been having. Who, exactly, is the North Wind? In the final chapters Diamond pushes the North Wind for answers. We also come to discover that Diamond is a sickly child and we begin to wonder if the North Wind is his companion for reasons related to his health.

During one adventure Diamond is allowed to see the land at 'the back of the North Wind,' an idyllic land of peace and beauty. We also learn a bit about the North Wind who can be both gentle and harsh. As their friendship grows we discover the gentile, beautiful nature of Diamond. So begins Diamond's adventures with the North Wind. But the North Wind, manifesting as a beautiful woman, soon appears in Diamond's room asking why he shut her out. Eventually he (with the help of his mother) succeeds. One night Diamond tries to shut a hole in his wall to keep out the howling North Wind. It is a fantasy work about a little boy named Diamond. Many consider At the Back of the North Wind to be MacDonald's masterpiece. If death and I were going to spend a lot of time together we needed to figure out a way to get along. So in college I began searching for a way to make death my friend and companion in life. Still, I have to admit that it is hard to live with death on a day to day basis. And why, you might ask, would I intentionally engage in this odd and existentially unsettling activity? Why not let faith eliminate or repress my death anxiety? Because this path of mine is the only way I know of which can assure me that my faith isn't, to use Sartre's term, bad faith, that my faith has nothing to do with repressing death anxiety or awareness. I try to hold both-faith and death-firmly in view. And if you've read a lot of my work on this blog, then you know how I continue to work through the dynamics of holding onto faith while simultaneously refusing to allow faith to repress death anxiety. I resolved to keep death in view-constantly, daily. So I resolved to do a very peculiar thing. It just seemed too easy, too neat, too quick, too clean. This easy little fix, one teeny weeny little belief, could dramatically eliminate the deepest existential terror in the human experience. So powerfully consoling that it seemed almost a trap. And in the face of this existential panic I became acutely aware of the fact that believing in life after death was a deeply consoling belief. You would think that all this death awareness would ruin me emotionally. And as an existentialist my main preoccupation is finding meaning in the face of death.

At the back of the north wind by george macdonald