O'Flaherty, F. R. Higgins, and Patrick Kavanagh. Nations conceive of themselves as guided or sustained by a divine wisdom, and I have wondered in what manner impulse might flow from Heaven to Earth. Out of my meditation on this came The Interpreters. Those who take part in the symposium suppose of the universe that it is a spiritual being, and they inquire what relation the politics of Time may have to the politics of Eternity. . . . The Interpreters may be taken as a symposium, between scattered portions of one nature dramatically sundered as the soul is in dream. - from author's Preface In his biography of Æ, Henry Summmerfield relates of him that probably in mid-1884 he "began to experience waking dreams of astonishing power and vividness which seemed to be thrust into his consciousness by a mind which was not his. Images of cosmic happenings and other worlds overwhelmed him with a majesty far removed from anything of which he was aware in his own being. 'I remember how pure, holy and beautiful these imaginations seemed,' Æ wrote in later years, 'how they came like crystal water sweeping aside the muddy current of my life. . . . The visible world became like a tapestry blown and stirred by winds behind it. If it would raise but an instant I knew I would be in Paradise." ' The Interpreters is surely imbued with the force of this powerful inner life.