Read Not In Kansas Anymore for Free Online

glowing effect was gas, they said, and that’s what we’d been looking at. It was never a jack-o’-lantern at all. And we said, ‘Aah, that’s what it is.’
    â€œOnce the scientists explained it, nobody ever saw a jack-o’-lantern again. Because once you put magic to a spotlight it disappears. When you explain it away it goes away. It’s never there anymore. So Cousin Charles Walker, who got hopelessly lost following that mysterious ball of light when I was a kid, was the last person on Sapelo ever to see the jack-o’-lantern.
    â€œThen the scientists explained away the hag, the one that sometimes would fly from Raccoon Bluff to Lumber Landing and Shell Hammock and ride three people all in one night, and then the old people would say, ‘That hag was busy last night.’
    â€œThat was probably a case of poor blood circulation, the scientists said. Your blood was circulating in your body poorly. ‘Who the hell they think they are?’ Grandma said. ‘What do they know about the hag?’
    â€œThe teachers at school also started telling us there wasn’t any such thing as the hag, and the kids my age looked at each other and said, ‘Gosh, everybody is saying the same thing. There’s no such thing as the hag.’ While all those thoughts were whirling around in our heads, the hag went, ‘Uh-oh. Time to go. Too many people coming over,’ and it flew away. All of a sudden, the hag didn’t come visit anymore. Nobody had the sensation of being in bed and waking up with this heavy weight on top of you, being ridden all night by a mysterious hag and being so tired in the morning you couldn’t move. It was just gone .
    â€œBut where did the hag go? Did it fly off somewhere where there was less modern know-how? Was the hag ever coming back? And did that many people have poor blood circulation? Adults and children alike?
    â€œSoon the old people said, ‘Chile, I remember when the hag would come ride me all the time. Things sure change.’ It was the beginning of the end of magic as we knew it on Sapelo and nothing would ever be the same.”
    Most of us can mourn that loss with the Geechee people and, at the same time, agree that there wasn’t really a hag or a jack-o’-lantern. Right? They’re better off now. Right?
    But the scientists aren’t just changing the Geechees’ perceptions of the world; they’re changing ours too. Author Russell Shorto claims that we have a little scientist living within us who is constantly keeping tabs on the rationality of ideas, testing and weighing to make sure that whatever we accept fits the scientific model. Every time science explains a little more of the world to us, we incorporate that knowledge and use it to process events around us. Some of the most exciting new research on the brain tells us that what we perceive to be happening around us and to us, even what we remember about our past, may not be true at all.
    As William James noted, science is “callously indifferent” to the experiences that make up the lives of most people. Life is personal and romantic, he wrote. Premonitions, apparitions, omens, visions, dreams, answers to prayers, miracles, and other “unnatural” events are woven into our lives in ways that are almost below our consciousness. Because human beings are helplessly committed to making meaning out of what happens to us, and these things do happen to us, it’s hard for us to resist the sense that “events may happen for their personal significance,” as James put it. Forswearing such connections may not be to our benefit at all. To accept that transcendence is imaginary, that epiphany is delusional, is to accept a state of spiritual impoverishment that hasn’t been required of any other human beings.
    We do not want to be irrational. That would be among the worst of modern sins, but the corporeal and the ethereal are often