“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

But first, the beautiful little house that Jane and I bought in 1975 sits near the top of a moderately steep hill at the western edge of Elmira. We soon came to call it the “hill house,” in person and in our books. (Eventually mail began to arrive addressed to us simply at “The Hill House, Elmira, N.Y.” The people at the post office still see to it that such pieces are delivered. I’m grateful.)

October 10, 1984. Both of us had jobs at the large hospital in my home town of Sayre, Pa., eighteen miles southeast of Elmira, N.Y. The setting and the buildings weren’t like those of the “real” hospital in Sayre, though. It was a gorgeous summer day. Jane was much younger than she’d been when she died at the age of fifty-five. She still had her long jet-black hair, slim active figure and exuberant personality. I could have been my own age, sixty-five. We relaxed upon a large, sloping, very green lawn beside a brick hospital building that was several stories high. Then with great surprise I saw that on top of the near end of the building there sat an old, flat-sided, two-story house with steep roofs, weathered a drab gray and with all of its windows shuttered. Caught in one shutter was a filmy pink garment like a negligee, fluttering in the breeze. Curiously, Jane and I stared up at the house perched so incongruously there, and we talked about trying to get up into it to see what it was like inside.

Then I was in an elevator car inside the building, and rising toward the house on the roof. Jane wasn’t with me. Another, older lady was having trouble repairing a small mechanism that was fastened to the wall beside the car’s door. I offered to fix it for her; this involved my turning some large screws into place by hand. While I was doing so, the elevator stopped at a floor and the door opened. The lady left, and I hurriedly inserted the last few screws while the door stayed open. Just as I finished — or perhaps nearly so — the door began to close. I leaped toward it. I wedged my shoulder between the door and its frame and forced the door open enough so that I could squeeze out into a hallway of the hospital. The door shut behind me.

Some seven and a half years later, Jane had been hospitalized for over ten months. We worked together during most of those days of treatment; by then, also, she had carried nearly to the limit her exploration of both her personal life and her “psychological ‘art’ “ of living. She very creatively considered those journeys and her new goals in the untitled poem that she spontaneously dictated to me from her hospital bed on March 1, 1984. It took her just seven minutes, spanning as it did two interruptions by nursing personnel,

[...] Standing there, silently, I felt Seth near. [...] I knew that I felt that Seth was near, but, intellectually, I was full of questions. [...]

[...] Yes,” I said, near tears. [...]

Suddenly, however, I entered a period of intense creative activity, ending a dry spell that had lasted for nearly a year. [...]

[...] In those days, though, we didn’t know how to proceed, and we had read that such affairs were conducted in near-darkness. [...]

Then Seth told Rob to imagine a man looking at a tree in the near distance on an ordinary street, with intervening houses and sidewalks.

[...] Springtime again — the release of energy, the flowering of a landscape that, by all appearances, had been dead and nearly lifeless only weeks before. [...]

[...] The session continued until nearly 1:00 A.M. The rest of it went into an analysis of the previous ten years, and was directed at both of us. [...]

[...] We didn’t get back from the shopping center until nearly 8:30 and then we began fussing with the recorder. [...]