On the cottage shelves were the works of medieval mystics, such as The Cloud of Unknowing, and later writers such as William Blake and Thomas Traherne and Richard Jefferies. 

I remember listening to a radio performance of Gerald Finzi’s Dies Natalis with my father when I was eleven or twelve.  He put on the table in front of me Traherne’s burning words: 

I was a stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with unnumerable joys; my knowledge was Divine … Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I … The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reap’d nor was ever sown.  I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.*

 Although I didn’t fully comprehend them, these words scorched me.  They branded me.  I knew then there are truths deeper than logic or understanding, deeper than words, and my father knew that I knew.

*Finzi’s free adaptation of the opening of Traherne’s Third Century of Meditations.