Let Lord of Cities take you on a dreamy journey through serene landscapes and the peaceful village of Wrellisford. We navigate through deep woods and autumn-hued fields, leaving no stone unturned, stirring your imagination and evoking a sense of serenity amidst the chaos of daily life. Prepare yourself for a poetic exploration filled with picturesque landscapes, where the road ends on a grassy slope leaving an awe-struck feeling of the road less travelled. So, snuggle up in your blankets and have sweet dreams.
BetterHelp Visit our sponsor at BetterHelp.com/dreamful for 10% off your first month.
AquaTru Use code "DREAMFUL" for 20% off any water purifier!
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Let Lord of Cities take you on a dreamy journey through serene landscapes and the peaceful village of Wrellisford. We navigate through deep woods and autumn-hued fields, leaving no stone unturned, stirring your imagination and evoking a sense of serenity amidst the chaos of daily life. Prepare yourself for a poetic exploration filled with picturesque landscapes, where the road ends on a grassy slope leaving an awe-struck feeling of the road less travelled. So, snuggle up in your blankets and have sweet dreams.
BetterHelp Visit our sponsor at BetterHelp.com/dreamful for 10% off your first month.
AquaTru Use code "DREAMFUL" for 20% off any water purifier!
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Welcome to Dreamful Podcast, Bedt ime Stories for Slumber. I would like to start off this episode by thanking our newest supporter, Zabrina Arnovitz. Thank you so much, Zabrina, and I hope you have the sweetest of dreams. If you'd like to support the show and gain access to the subscriber only episodes while receiving a shout out, visit DreamfulStories. com and, on the support page, find a link to become a Buzzsprout supporter or subscribe via Supercast if you listen on Spotify.
Jordan:
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Jordan:
Have you ever struggled doing what's good for you? Most people have, especially when dealing with depression, an addiction or disorder. We know how to make healthy choices, only to get in our own way when it comes time to act. For instance, I have a hard time taking time for myself, even though I know that I need it to prevent burnout, but every year I reach a point where I get burned out and only have myself to blame. Therapy can help when it comes to setting boundaries and figuring out what's holding you back, so you can work with yourself, not against yourself. If you are having a hard time taking care of yourself and doing what's good for you, I recommend giving BetterHelp a try. Just take a few minutes to fill out a questionnaire and get matched with a licensed therapist. It's conveniently online and suited to whatever your schedule may be. Make your brain your friend with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelpcom slash dreamful today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H E L P dot com slash dreamful.
Jordan:
In this episode I will be reading another dreamy story by Lord Dunsany that I believe is perfect for the first episode this October, Lord of Cities. So snuggle up in your blankets and have sweet dreams. I came one day upon a road that wandered so aimlessly that it was suited to my mood. So I followed it and it led me presently among deep woods. Somewhere in the midst of them, autumn held his court sitting, wreathed with gorgeous garlands, and it was the day before his annual festival of the Dance of Leaves, the courtly festival, upon which hungry winter rushes mob-like. In. There arise the furious cries of the North Wind triumphing and all the splendor and grace of the woods is gone and Autumn flees away, discrowned and forgotten, and never again returns. Other autumns arise, other autumns fall before their winters.
Jordan:
A road led away to the left, but my road went straight on. The road to the left had a trodden appearance. There were wheel tracks on it and it seemed the correct way to take. It looked as if no one could have any business with the road that led straight on and up the hill. Therefore, I went straight on and up the hill, and here and there on the road grew blades of grass undisturbed, in the repose and hush that the road had earned from going up and down the world. We can go by this road, as you can go by all roads to London, to Lincoln, to the north of Scotland, to the west of Wales and to Relesford, where roads end Presently.
Jordan:
The woods ended and I came to the open fields and at the same moment to the top of the hill and saw the high places of Somerset and the downs of will spread out along the horizon. Suddenly I saw underneath me the village of Relesford, with no sound at its street but the voice of the Reles roaring as he tumbled over a weir of the village. So I followed my road down over the crust of the hill and the road became more linguit as I descended and less and less concerned with the cares of a highway. Here a spring broke out in the middle of it and here another. The road never heated. A stream ran right across it. Still it struggled on. Suddenly it gave up the minimum property that a road should possess and, renouncing its connection with high streets, its lineage of Piccadilly shrank to one side and became an unpretentious footpath. Then it led me to the old bridge over the stream, and thus I came to Relesford and found, after travelling in many lands, a village with no wheel trucks and a street. On the other side of the bridge, my friend, the road struggled a few yards up a grassy slope and there ceased. Overall, the village hung a great stillness, with the roar of the Reles cutting right across it, and there came, occasionally, the bark of a dog that kept watch over the broken stillness and over the sanctity of the untraveled road.
Jordan:
That terrible and wasting fever that, unlike so many plagues, comes not from the east but from the west. The fever of hurry had not come here. Only the Reles hurried on his eternal quest, but it was a calm and placid hurry that gave one time for song. It was in the early afternoon and nobody was about. Either they worked beyond the mysterious valley that nursed Relesford and hid it from the world, or else they secluded themselves within their old time houses that were roofed with tiles of stone.
Jordan:
I sat down upon the stone bridge and watched the Reles, who seemed to me to be the only traveller that came from far away to this village where rose and and passed on beyond it. And yet the Reles comes singing out of eternity and tarries for a very little while in the village where roads end and passes on into eternity again. And so surely do all that dwell in Relesford. I wondered, as I leaned upon the bridge, in what place the Reles would first find the sea. Whether, as he wound Ily through meadows on his long quest, he would suddenly behold him and, leaping down over some rocky cliff, take to him at once the message of the hills. Or whether, widening slowly into some grand tidal estuary, he would take his waste of waters to the sea. And the might of the river should meet the might of the waves, like two emperors clad in gleaming mail, meeting midway between two hosts of war. And the little Reles would become a haven for returning ships and a setting out place for adventurous men.
Jordan:
A little beyond the bridge there stood an old mill with a ruined roof, and a small branch of the Reles rushed through its emptiness, shouting like a boy playing alone in a corridor of some desolate house. The mill wheel was gone, but there laced no great bars and wheels and cogs, the bones of some dead industry. I know not what industry was once lured in that house. I know not what revenue of workers mourns him now. I only know who is lured there today in all those empty chambers.
Jordan:
For as soon as I entered I saw a whole wall draped with his marvelous black tapestry, without price because inimitable and too delicate to pass from hand to hand among merchants. I looked at the wonderful complexity of its infinite threads. My fingers sank into it for more than an inch without feeling the touch, so black it was and so carefully wrought, somberly covering the whole of the wall, that it might have been work to commemorate the deaths of all that ever lived there, as indeed it was. I looked through a hole in the wall into an inner chamber where a worn out driving band went among the many wheels, and there this priceless and imitable stuff not merely clothe the walls but hung from bars and ceiling in beautiful draperies, in marvelous festoons. Nothing was ugly in this desolate house, for the busy artist soul of his present lord had beautified everything in its desolation. It was the unmistakable work of the spider in whose house I was, and the house was utterly desolate but for him, and silent but for the roar of the relice and the shout of the little stream. Then I turned homewards and as I went up and over the hill and lost sight of the village, I saw the road widen and harden and gradually broaden out till the tracks of wheels appeared and it went afar to take the young men of Relsford into the wide ways of the earth, to the new west and the mysterious east and into the troubled south.
Jordan:
And that night, when the house was still and sleep was far off, hushing hamlets and giving ease to cities, my fancy wandered out that aimless road and came suddenly to Relsford and it seemed to me that the travelling of so many people for so many years between Relsford and Johnna Grotes, talking to one another as they went or muttering alone, had given the road a voice. And it seemed to me that night that the road spoke to the river by Relsford Bridge, speaking with a voice of many pilgrims. And the road said to the river I rest here, how is it with you? And the river, who is always speaking, said I rest nowhere from doing the work of the world. I carry the murmur of inner lands to the sea and to the abysses, voices of the hills. It is, I said, the road that do the work of the world and take from city to city the room of each.
Jordan:
There is nothing higher than man in the making of cities. What do you do for man? And the river said Beauty and song. I hire the man. I carry the new seaward of the first song of the thrush, after the furious retreat of winter, northward In the first Timid and Namony learned from me that she is safe and that spring has truly come. Oh, but the song of all the birds in spring is more beautiful than man In the first coming of the hyacinth, more delectable than his face. When spring is fallen upon the days of summer, I carry away with mournful joy at night, petal by petal, the road of dendrons bloom. No late procession of purple kings is nigh so fair as that. No beautiful death of well beloved man hath such a glory of forlorness. And I bear, far away, the pink and white petals of the apple blossoms, youth when the laborious time comes for his work in the world and for the bearing of apples. And I am robed each day and every night anew, with the beauty of heaven, and I make lovely visions of the trees.
Jordan:
But man, what is man? In the ancient parliament of the Elder Hills, when the grey ones speak together, they say not of man but concern themselves only with their brethren, the stars. Or when they wrap themselves in purple cloaks at evening, they lament some old, irreparable realm or uttering some mountain hymn, all more in the set of the sun. Your beauty said the road and the beauty of the sky and of the road, of dendron blossom and of spring live only in the mind of man and accept in the mind of man. The mountains have no voices. Nothing is beautiful that has not been seen by man's eye. Or if your road of dendron blossom was beautiful for a moment, it soon withered and was drowned, and spring soon passes away. Beauty can only live on in the mind of man. I bring thought into the mind of man swiftly from distant places every day. I know the telegraph, I know him well. He and I have walked for hundreds of miles together.
Jordan:
There is no work in the world except for man and the making of his cities. I take wares to and fro from city to city. My little stream in the field there, said the river, used to make wares in that house for a while once. Ah, said the road, I remember. But I brought cheaper ones from distant cities. Nothing is of any importance, but making cities for man I know so little about him, said the river. But I have a great deal of work to do. I have all this water to send down to the sea and then tomorrow or next day all the leaves of autumn will be coming. This way it will be very beautiful.
Jordan:
The sea is a very, very wonderful place, but I know all about it. I have heard shepherd boy singing of it and sometimes, before a storm, the gulls come up. It is a place all blue and shining and full of pearls, and hasn't it? Coral islands and aisles of spice and storms and galleons and the bones of Drake. The sea is much greater than man. When I come to the sea, he will know that I have worked well for him, but I must hurry, for I have much to do. This bridge delays me a little. Some day I will carry it away. Oh, you must not do that, said the road. Oh, not for a long time, said the river, some centuries perhaps.
Jordan:
And I have much to do besides. There is my song to sing, for instance, and that alone is more beautiful than any noise that man makes. All work is for men, said the road, and for the building of cities. There is no beauty or romance or mystery in the sea, except for the men that sail abroad upon it and for those that stay at home and dream of them. As for your song, it rings night and morning, year in, year out, in the years of man that are born in Wellsford. At night it is part of their dreams, at morning it is the voice of day, and so it becomes part of their souls. But the song is not beautiful in itself. I take these men, with your song in their souls, up on the edge of the valley and a long way off beyond, and I am strong and Dusty, rode up there and they go with your song in their souls and turn it into music and gladden cities. But nothing is the work of the world except work for men.
Jordan:
I wish I was quite sure about the work of the world, said the stream. I wish I knew for certain for whom we work. I feel almost sure that it is for the sea. He is very great and beautiful. I think that there can be no greater master than the sea. I think that someday he may be so full of romance and mystery and sound of sheep, bells and murmur of mist, hidden hills which we streams shall have brought him, that there will be no more music or beauty left in the world and all the world will end. But perhaps the streams shall gather at last, we all together, to the sea, or perhaps the sea will give us at last, unto each one his own again, giving back all that he has garnered in the years the little petals of the apple blossom and the mourned ones of the rhododendron and their old visions of the trees and sky. So many memories have left the hills. But who may say, for who knows the tides of the sea, be sure that it is all for men. So the road for man in the making of cities, something had come near on utterly silent feet. Peace, peace is said. You disturb the queenly knight who, having come into this valley, is a guest in my dark halls. Let us have an end to this discussion. It was the spider who spoke.
Jordan:
The work of the world is making of cities and palaces, but it is not for man. What is man? He only prepares my cities for me and mellows them. All his works are ugly. His richest tapestries are coarse and clumsy. He is a noisy eyeler. He only protects me from mine and me. The wind and the beautiful work in my cities, the curving outlines and the delicate weavings, is all mine.
Jordan:
Ten years to a hundred it takes to build a city For five or six hundred more.
Jordan:
It mellows and is prepared for me. Then I inhabit it and hide away all that is ugly and draw beautiful lines about it to and fro. There is nothing so beautiful as cities and palaces. They are the loveliest places in the world because they are the stillest and so most like the stars. They are noisy at first. For a little. Before I come to them they have ugly corners not rounded off yet and coarse tapestries. And then they become ready for me and my exquisite work and are quite silent and beautiful and there I entertain the wringonights when they come there jeweled with stars and all their train of silence and regale them with costly dust. Already noughts in a city that I want, of a lonely sentinel whose lords are dead, who grows too old and sleepy to drive away the gathering silence that infests the streets. Tomorrow I go to see if he be still at his post. For me, babylon was built and still man built my cities. All the work of the world is the making of cities, and all of them I inherit.
Jordan:
It's my honor to be a part of this work. I am the winner. I will be the judge. I will be the judge. I am the judge. I am the judge. I am the judge. I am the judge, I am the judge. I am the judge. You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you.
