TWENTY FIVE

[the illustration of the Tibetan letter is not included in this text]

The only language I know of (though there are surely many others) which formally
acknowledges sound as enshrined in a kingdom of its own is Tibetan, which also, although not an
ideographic language, takes the physical process of writing seriously – so much so that I can tell
you who wrote the syllable with which this section starts, since that information is included with it
in the book from which I’ve reproduced it:

The letter “A” on the cover of this book was written by the Venerable Kalu Rinpoche. This
letter symbolizes the uncreated, utterly pure expanse of the Void (Dharmadhatu) and its
sound is the basis of the sounds of all the others.

For a Tibetan, at least in theory, the griefs and joys of individual human lives, and the
individualised meanings of the terms of the sacred language itself, are written (though carefully
written) in invisible ink on the void; and sound, though it may lend itself for the purposes of
meaning to be segmented and varied and twisted into patterns, is never other than lent – and seeks
always by repetition, the incessant repetition of prayer formulae for instance, to remind us that its
true place and function is to be void of all these griefs and joys and meanings.
I find that my heart clings to individuals, to their separate reality, so much that I’m
not willing to be a Buddhist. I find that I want to defy the void; but that I’m glad it’s there to be
defied. I find that to think of human language as an act of defiance –

That in black ink my love may still shine bright-

causes one to value it differently. - a time will come (as perhaps it has almost come with Welsh)
when the language I am writing now, the shapes and sounds it has known and found to have
meaning, will have utterly disappeared from human view. The particular complicated marriage
between sound and human meaning which constituted the English language will be unrepeatable.
And yet I am not a Buddhist; I don’t think (or want to think, which is the same thing perhaps) that
that particular specialisation of sound that existed in English was illusory and meaningless.- If I
did, this might be a way, curiously, of finding myself back with the linguistic theorists who think of
the sounds of words as arbitrary: except, of course, that to say the sounds are arbitrary and of no
importance (linguist) is actually very different from saying the sounds are arbitrary and sound
symbolises final importance (Buddhist).
The importance and the independence of sound I feel to be undeniable. But I feel,
too, that when approached by a human mind and invited to the act called language it truly discovers
things about itself that partly acknowledge the intention of the mind that stirred it but also partly are
themselves and require of that stirring mind in its turn acknowledgement. So openness to the
unexpected is required on both sides; as it is between friends who are close in understanding and
who connive together in understanding, but who are also pleased to discover difference,
strangeness. - Or let me say it is like the handful of mud and water that made my body: I’m sure
the slime was surprised, as I was, to discover that we could walk, and when it is slime again will
treasure that memory, along with other less conniving slimy experiences – it is perhaps the Christian
doctrine of the resurrection of the body which most clearly asserts that the memory of a human
1
individual is indelibly stamped on the slime, even as Alexander passes through the guts of a beggar
or stops a hole in a wall.
All this is not a theory, or a position. It is more a determined holding in the arena of
all the things I want to be so, no matter how much they make faces at each other, or growl. -
Keeping the peace between them may today mean I must argue in one way, tomorrow in another.
And I may discover something else I want to be there as well, and have to find room for it. - And
still there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy; so I hope that
by my showing my working (like children doing arithmetic) rather than any presenting of
conclusions, your dreams may find some point of connivance with mine.

* * * * *

2
TWENTY SIX

Why do I like a shabby chair (of the kind I’m sitting in) but not a damaged clock? Or
a well-worn book but not a book with a broken spine? - There’s a nineteenth-century Shakespeare
sitting on the shelves to one side of me that came to me in several bits, and to my great and
continuing pleasure I managed to repair it so unobtrusively that it would be difficult to see that it
had even been broken, so that it has had the benefit of repair without the indignity of renewal.
Something broken has ceased, while it remains broken, to exist. It has to such a
degree collided with another part of reality that it has been unable to adapt to it. Someone’s hands
opened that book too far, or wound the spring too tight. Once it has met its Waterloo the thing, if
not repaired, will rapidly begin to fall apart into other things, cog-wheels, bits of paper, kindling
wood, or whatever.
But shabbiness should not, I think, be taken as an approach to this kind of collapse.
Rather to the contrary, it should be seen as evidence of strength. Something shabby has
accommodated itself to commerce with other things without ceasing to be itself. There is more than
a touch of noli me tangere about whatever is consciously new, or at least tangere only on my own
terms. - It’s perhaps why bright new words are so difficult to get on with. Unlike the second-hand
stuff all around them in the sentence, they steadily demand special attention, special privileges, and
they consent to mean something only if they can dominate their fellow-words. So that technical
vocabulary, specialised theoretical words are equipped with the semantic equivalent of an on/off
switch. For some readers they will be on and will so dazzle the sight that nothing much else can be
seen; for others they will be off, so that the passage has holes or blanks in it – my own favourite
hole or blank is the word ‘text’, used of a piece of writing instead of poem or play or novel. It
produces the effect an odd word of Greek has if the reader has no Greek, a sudden buzz, or jamming
noise (or sometimes a sudden icy chill). - And if ‘text’, or one of its extensive family of specialised
literary words, appears too often in a passage, it will tend to switch off the whole thing.
Ordinary words are equipped not only with on/off switches but with a range of
sophisticated dimmers and filters. They’ve been in the game longer. This is not to say, of course,
that they can’t suddenly shine forth in a kind of naked, new-born glory:

Little Lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed,
By the stream and o’er the mead;

It is not to say that my shabby Shakespeare can’t all at once be splendid in a newly
seen beauty, like the abruptly seen subtlety of line in an old chair, or the sudden agelessness of an
old face.- the thing, though, about technical jargon, about language self-consciously invented to
make the reader bow before the newly devised mysteries (and their priests), is that they make a
profession of being new, and that with extraordinary rigidity they can never be anything else. So
that when they shine for a reader they do so like a powerful spotlight in the eyes, blinding him to all
else; and not like the benigner light of Blake’s lamb which lights up transformingly everything
round it.
A word which has come forth from among its fellows, and knows it must live with
them on ordinary terms again before long, will be anxious not to riffle too haughtily in silks on its
own account, no matter how prominent the part in the play it’s playing. - And a single word long in
the language will have had great experience of many parts, everything from lamb of god to lamb
chop. A few minutes with a dictionary of quotations will fill in the descending scale, or rather the
3
Jacob’s ladder:

he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he
openeth not his mouth.

The lamb must yield to slaughter, not only the animal to the deed but the word to the word, and to
the suffering man. But this slaughter is not of the kind to produce lamb chops, as you can tell by the
formality with which ‘slaughter’ moves in its part, accompanied by its definite article, conferring
dignity on what is associated with it:

There is no flock, however watched and tended,

But one dead lamb is there!
There is no fireside, howsoe’er defended,
But has one vacant chair!

The light is dimmer here, I think, but the poet is aware that there are other places that word has been
in:

As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

And what a ludicrously trivial thing to be hanged for in any case, an assemblage of tasty chops, no
more. - I very much doubt whether the ‘self-reflective text’ could ever recover from the butcher’s
slab; too conscious of its dignity; but about the shabby words that knock around in the language,
available for many purposes, there is an enormous power of regeneration, the constantly present
possibility of being new-born out of the womb and in the embrace of the old.

* * * * *

4
TWENTY SEVEN

The difference between words and music as language is that music, unlike words, is
not paraphrasable. - This is commonly said, but I’m not sure how far the difference will survive
contemplation, or in what form. The gap can be narrowed by proceeding in two opposed directions;
towards a feeling that this verbal assembly, whatever it may be, is unique and cannot be changed
without vital loss, so that any reordering of it into other words will have less life, or a different life;
and towards a feeling that in this piece of music there is a striving to express something, a series of
repeated attempts, an accumulation round a common core, so that one attempt in sound is
replaceable by another.
A musical sound is perhaps more nearly the thing itself than a word: in its natural
state, as it were. A perfect fifth is a house with only a few rather small rooms inside, a house
consisting mostly of its own outer walls, and so very quickly filled with significance, whose flavour
is likely only to be rather marginally affected by the neighbours – and the same goes for a horrid
sound, a diminished fifth. - And can it be said that the very unwillingness of a musical sound to be
much other than itself accounts for the extraordinary suggestiveness of a large group of musical
sounds, a symphony or a concerto? The imagination of the hearer very soon tires of sitting docilely
in these small rooms and begins sitting on the roof instead, or climbing the chimney for a better
view of who knows what country.
The composer may have had some country in his mind, but he has chosen a means of
communication that stops its ears to his precise demands of it – or perhaps he has chosen this means
because he had no precise enough demand to make, no clear sense of the country – too far beyond
his furthest view. And indeed music which seems to set out to paint a fairly precise scene, or to
convey a fairly definable emotion, always has about it a sense that it isn’t functioning in a fully
musical sense, with full freedom. - When music is itself, then its limitations offer themselves for
constant transgression, the imagination of composer, player and hearer flooding out beyond them
and meeting together in a friendly unwillingness to define what it is that must be meant.
There can be a similar generosity about language when it is extremely simply used:

And when queen Guenever understood that king Arthur was slain, and all the noble knights,
Sir Mordred and all the remnant, then the queen stole away, and five ladies with her, and so
she went to Almesbury, and there she let make herself a nun, and wore white clothes and
black, and great penance she took, as ever did sinful lady in this land, and never creature
could make her merry, but lived in fasting, prayers, and alms-deeds, that all manner of
people marvelled how virtuously she was changed.

There is a simplicity not unlike that of music here, not only of language but of life
and deed. The queen becomes a nun when her king is slain and his noble knights; she wore white
and black, and did penance for her sin, and so became a queen in virtue where before she was queen
in Camelot.
If this were a novel by George Eliot instead of a story by Malory, then words like sin
and virtue, or states of life that seemed simple, would very likely be vast houses, full of unexpected
corridors, or (like the castle I spend part of my life in) with whole staircases under the floorboards.
A guide would be needed so that the reader would not be lost in the complexity of possibility
consciously offered. - The house would be big inside, certainly, but there would be no getting away
from the guide; and getting out on to the roof would be very much frowned on.
If I ask myself why, of all the Arthurian romances of the European Middle Ages, it is
Malory in English which has survived as still alive, then the answer may have to do with Malory’s
5
simplicity. ‘With a tale forsooth he cometh unto you’, just a story of what happened, no elaborate
interpretation, no attempt at saying what it all might ultimately mean – but the events, and the
words, suggestive beyond and because of their own limited boundaries. And what is suggestive can
jump like a spark from mind to mind where the heavier traffic needs pretty good roads.
Perhaps, like Cobbett, I’m against turnpike roads. For the moment, at any rate, I am;
and am aware that even heavy traffic will not arrive in the condition in which it was despatched, or
affect the receiver exactly as it did the sender. - Of course I might be glad to find a stretch of
turnpike late at night, and in the rain, even though it had been laid down by the tax-eating critics.

* * * * *

TWENTY EIGHT

The supposition that education is more about doing something than being something
can be traced like a muddy stream with many unexpected little tributary rills through the whole of
our school and university system, through the whole of our society. If you are born intensely
musical, then it is not taking proper advantage of these gifts to be a lover of music; you must learn
an instrument and be for ever doing proficiency exams.
The parable of the talents is perhaps for us the source of the feeling that gifts must be
turned to measurable account, though that parable had to wait until the Protestant reformation and
the doctrine that God himself took no account of human effort or achievement, to be most
passionately embraced: as though man would supply the interest that God did not feel. For so long
as God was interested in talents breeding profit, as he was in the Catholic Middle Ages, then his
eye, which saw finely into the heart of man and could measure with a subtlety and even a tricksiness
beyond human measuring, could see and so define profit with a delicacy that had no need to demand
evident action rather than hidden being. The man who hid his talent in the earth and so made no
profit was not then to be confused with the man who went secretly to his chamber to pray.
The Protestant, or more precisely Calvinist, idea that the predestinating will of God,
for good or ill, heaven or hell, was fixed for all eternity and took no account of human merit or
demerit seems to have released Western man, at any rate, in the last four hundred years, into a
frenzy of autonomous self-justification. - One is told that in Muslim cultures the doctrine of the
overriding will of Allah has made for fatalism, a sense that nothing much need be done or can be
done. But Christianity for most of its course has not been a fatalistic religion, and has succeeded
rather extraordinarily in reconciling the omniscience and omnipotence of the Almighty with the
genuine independence of man and an assertion that he can merit the reward of salvation. - Though
to be sure there have had to be anxious adjustments, and the ball of orthodoxy, to use Gibbon’s
image, has vibrated between the extremes of an Augustinian predestinating pessimism about man’s
will and a Pelagian optimism which seemed to define God’s omnipotence as irrelevant.
Since the Reformation the idea of human merit has sprung free of the hidden eye of
God who sees in secret, because God’s now wholly predestinating eye sees only the secrets of his
own heart; and the feeling that an individual man can steer his own way to salvation, for which
there was always necessary space in the Christian religion, has become either (in rather rare cases) a
relentless and undiluted individualism which cares nothing for other judgements, or a freedom to act
which is now under the appraising eye of other men, who naturally have eyes for what is solid and
visible, for money made, virtues practised, reputation gained, examinations passed; and who are
often not unwilling, if they are still believers, to bring in God in a walk-on part to confirm the value
of what they see as good or bad. The Calvinist God who judged men without reference to their
merit and sent them to heaven or hell as the result of a decision about them made before they were
6
born has, unlike Allah, luckily dropped entirely out of sight. Indeed he only had a very short run of
about a hundred years.
Neither an opaquely individualistic God nor undiluted human individualism much
attract me, though the latter as a human response to tyranny can make the trumpets sound. - The
tyranny is now not of God but of man. Or one could say this if we think in terms of the shape
sketched out in these last pages, which no doubt has as much and as little to do with the experience
of a human life lived then or now as a landscape painting has to do with hedging and ditching in
that same stretch of country. –
We pull away from the tyranny of authoritative external human judgement and yet
keep ourselves from isolation, by valuing in ourselves and in others being rather than doing –
because perhaps doing is a bad translation of being into the common current coinage which can be
weighed and counted by the common measures; whereas what I am, or you are, is in fact unique
untranslatable reality. - And so with books, or pictures, or whatever: the reason why I like or
dislike hasn’t to do with the story, with what it’s doing – it’s not the information you’re giving me,
but something deeper, something less tangible, that I’m responding to, which I don’t consciously
weigh and judge but rather try to understand. - In this area of experience the ordinarily
recognisable human hierarchies disappear, and the most vital part of the communication is what is
most elusive, diaphanous, most difficult to see, visible only in a certain angle of the light. Two
speakers may repeat the same line, or tell the same joke in identical words, and the resemblance
between the two things heard will to a sensitive audience be what is of least importance. And what
variously is prized about the one speaker or the other, or both, will not be something put against a
yardstick and so found excellent, but rather will be simply the thing prized; reasons why,
explanations for, will be losing their grip and sliding off. - I’m reminded that Lord Melbourne
liked the Order of the Garter because there was ‘no damned merit in it’.

* * * * *

7
TWENTY NINE

Understanding and explanation are often found linked together, the one permitting or
enabling the other. But it seems important to emphasise how different they are. An explanation
thoroughly absorbed is not itself an understanding of what is explained, though it may provide the
conditions in which an understanding may arise. And again there may be an understanding, for
instance of the particular force of meaning of a word in a certain context, or of the effect of a certain
tone or inflexion, which tries in vain to equip itself with an explanation, or which may have to make
do with a form of explanation which is felt to fall far short of adequacy.
It is true I suppose that a request for an explanation, even a pressing for an
explanation, can exercise and develop an understanding; true also that an explanation ruthlessly
enough required or too readily produced can drown the understanding. I seem to see quite distinctly
what kind of impulse of belief in the untrammelled mystery of God it was that caused William of
Occam at the end of the Middle Ages to sweep away the whole system of scholastic explanation of
the Almighty, all the ladders and scaffolding leading up to God and criss-crossing the face of
heaven, by asserting that universals, the main structural feature of the whole system, were not real
but just names: universalia sunt nomina. This nominalism it must have been that gave birth to, or
rather rebirth to, the idea we know as Calvinist that God is wholly inexplicable in his ways, which
are not our ways.
The drift of what I have been writing in this section is friendly to this development,
where in the last section it was hostile: as can be seen in the melodious way I have just described
the Calvinist God. William of Occam said that God could, if he had chosen, just as well have
become incarnate in a donkey as in a man, and Calvin gave him a form of moral judgement no more
lucid to us than a donkey’s would be. There is a defencelessness about the absurdity of Occam’s
boundless belief in, understanding of, the mysteriousness of God – why did he choose a donkey?
Perhaps because Christ rode on a donkey into Jerusalem, he himself choosing the absurdly
inappropriate and giving this laughably ungainly animal his ‘far fierce hour and sweet’.
It is Occam’s defencelessness, his pursuit of the direction that led towards release,
that makes him sympathetic as he dismantles the structure of explanation, and leaves only
apprehension of God. But there are equally times and circumstances when it is explanation which
leads in the direction of release. A mystery, an incommunicable, inchoate understanding, can be a
kind of imprisonment as well as a kind of freedom: and it may be characteristic of human beings, or
of whole cultures, to oscillate between understanding and explanation as their main emphasis. The
turning from one to the other may have to do with the degree to which one feels bullied by the one
or the other. If the God of the Protestant reformation had decided mysteriously from all eternity that
all men were finally to come to bliss; that, in Dame Julian’s words, all would be well; then how
gladly would one have abandoned any attempt to explain how this might be, with what sensitivity
could one simply have understood in some way beyond explanation that the very unlikelihood that
all this evil and suffering with which we are surrounded could come to good made it the more
certain that it would.
It was not to be. The Christian God (though doubtless not the true God) drags hell
behind him like Marley’s chain. And we must as a consequence devise explanations which will
defend us against him, keep him under control, or best of all explain him away entirely as any sort
of genuinely independent reality. An explanation, thank God, is not an understanding; and may in
this instance keep our feet clear, fence round the quicksand of mystery that invites our intuitive
response. - Perhaps the scholastic philosophy of the end of the Middle Ages sprang in part from
fear; and perhaps simply Occam wasn’t afraid of God. And perhaps the one extreme bred the other
as the Middle Ages ended. There are certainly extremes of fear, in the dance of death for instance,
8
and of familiar, almost domestic love of Christ in his suffering humanity, as the fifteenth century
comes to a close.
What of our modern literary scholastics? - The face of literature is now, after the
last hundred years or so, densely criss-crossed by the judgings and explainings and theorisings.
There is no doubt who is the bully boy now. Children at school trying to pass A level are equipped
with an explanation of King Lear. They don’t see or read the play, they study it. The play becomes
matter for the explanation, a useful quarry for quotes to prove things. - Better to look at the sun,
the friendly sun, with ignorant eyes:

You must become an ignorant man again

And see the sun again with an ignorant eye

* * * * *

9
THIRTY

I find I no longer want to say what I have written in this section. Time passes, understanding
changes.

* * * * *

10
THIRTY ONE

I remember when I was at Oxford that an acquaintance of mine gave his hair for a
first in Mods. He worked so hard for the two terms before the exam that his hair fell out. A
different case, I think, from that of Eucolpus the centurion’s servant in Martial’s epigram, who
vowed his boy’s long curls to Phoebus so that his master should get the desired promotion. - There
is a different context for self-sacrifice here, aside from the fact that the boy’s hair would have grown
again.
The pressure of some externally proposed ideal, whether of youth, or beauty, or
holiness, or learning, can sometimes so bear upon the spirit of a man that he clicks suddenly into
obsession, that he yields all of himself to it. The real trouble with an ideal is that it isn’t grateful for
this yielding of self, it gives nothing in return, unlike the centurion. An ideal, whether good or bad,
will steadily consume a man, yielding none of its allegorical power to his various and non-
allegorical humanity, until there is no humanity left, until an observer casting about for the man will
find him embodying the ideal, or in reality embodied by it. The higher the ideal, the more deadly
the danger.
Real contact with another real human being protects us from the ideal. I’m sure the
boy looked awful with his hair cut off and that the centurion thought so, his sense of the act of self-
sacrifice having to compete with the actual result of it. His admiration for the virtuous act qualified,
brought into the muddle of humanity, by the wish that the boy’s hair had not been cut off, by his
now even greater love for the boy which made him wish all the more that he hadn’t had his hair cut
off, that he had selfishly kept it and damn the promotion. - I wonder whether anyone said to the
Oxford man that he looked awful without his hair, or whether teachers and parents and friends
instead congratulated him on his first and kept their opinion as to his appearance to themselves.
Probably the latter; and he was afterwards a first-class man, even a first-class mind, and not a first-
class bald mind.
The reality that surrounds our human muddle has much of it an allegorical quality; in
this sense, that the cat on my desk, tree or sky outside my window, the instinct of the tiger with his
prey or the hen with her chicks, are all of them centrally and no more than what they are. What we
generally call allegory is perhaps the attempt to turn the world of the human psyche into a collection
of things like this, unworked upon by the tricksy spirit of man. So that we have the moral vices and
virtues carefully planted, like cut flowers in sand, in a schematised version of a human
psychological landscape. Some writers, Bunyan for instance with his ear and eye for the real human
being brought with truly appalling skills to the service of an inhumanly allegoric creed, some
writers are able to animate these landscapes quite convincingly. - I remember spending months
when I was writing my thesis (itself an activity, like being put to the galleys, that no human being
should have to suffer) being obsessed by the picture of the holiness of a young counter-Reformation
saint painted in the hagiographical account I read of his life. My sense of the indisputable reality of
myself, which no one ought to deny, was already badly drained by scholarly labour in the reading
room of the British Museum; an inextinguishable voice asked me why I was not holy like that. I
knew the answer already then; it was just that I had no courage to formulate it, because of the inner
tumult I feared if the authority of these external categories was cast off –
Because allegory, although I have spoken of it as working against humanity, is a
humanly imported presence within us – imported, I suppose, precisely as a controlling agent, like
the graphite or whatever it is that keeps a nuclear reactor within bounds, or the ash with which I half
choke my big stove during the winter to stop it becoming red hot. - This is not quite the image I
want. Better a version of one I’ve used before, with the entrance of a schoolmaster quelling chat.
If this awful stuff that makes your hair fall out is so vital a control mechanism, then
11
we can perhaps see why allegory should have arisen like a giant within literature in the plays and
poems of the end of the Middle Ages, at just the moment when it was losing ground in philosophy
under the influence of William of Occam. Or why - I venture further into the bog of speculation –
no one cares about allegory at all today in its old recognisable form, because it now surrounds and
grips us in the shape of Schedule E tax forms, one of which is authoritatively and unintelligibly (or
shall I say with unapproachable intelligibility?) sitting on my desk at this moment. I guess that we
may only start to talk about a control mechanism as allegory when we cease to acknowledge its
authority.
Jacobean drama, for instance, is writhing with allegory wherever you look. Like a
kind of bindweed it grows round and through the human characters, cauterising their variousness
with a hint of paradise or a touch of the rake, forcing them into silence and deep ambiguity if they
are to preserve themselves from becoming creatures in a morality play. The struggle, sometimes
lost sometimes won, won at the cost, willingly paid, of moral intelligibility, is to shake off the
morality play. - Perhaps because the King’s head was about to drop into a basket to make way for
the doctrinal state and the Protector, which all looks allegorical enough to us now in its turn – in
retrospect.

* * * * *

12
THIRTY TWO

I went home to see my mother the other day and was talking about willow trees to a
gardener in the village. He was shaking his head at the tree twenty yards from the corner of the
house. He wouldn't have one within a hundred yards because of the distance the roots will travel for
water and the havoc they make of foundations. - It was the blindness of that extraordinary acuity
of energy that struck me. Mole vision not eagle vision, to borrow an image from Blake; the tree
comes abroad upon the earth so generously, offers itself so variously to the imagination, and birds
shelter in its branches; but below, furious, detailed, short-sighted, long distance grubbing.
All created things, like Richard III in reality, are in some sense born with teeth, but
flourish more gloriously to the extent that they learn not to use them. This is as true of what is born
of the mind as what is born of the earth. We can all of us feel the overwhelming presence of power
laid aside, and by contrast the mucky little kingdom of an argument that will for ever be excavating
one’s words for its own purposes, clinging to what you’ve said and feeling for the cracks in it, all
with a terrible mockery of proper attentiveness.
The cherry trees in the woods near Heidelberg in mid-summer may have had dark
roots, but I think of them rather as offering me what they had received in more casual abundance
from the common sun – not water from a leak in another man’s cistern. You could in a way not
trace the path by which their fruit had ripened as you could trace the green leaf of the willow tree to
the poking tentacle of root.
All this playing with pictures in search of a meaning that might by chance arise from
them is, of course, at another extreme from allegory, and allows the kind of independence to the
pictures themselves, the kind of primacy in their own sphere, that Blake desired and got for his sick
rose and his worm ‘that flies in the night’. - It is the willow tree after water like a lawyer in search
of his fee, and standing in the hot sun with Martin eating cherries, that are most energetically in my
imagination, and I dip them more or less at random into my thought for the pleasure of their
company – as though I were entranced by the whizzing round of a circular saw and cut this and that
with it to have an excuse for keeping it going.
The consecrated attention to the experience of the moment or to the memory of it
confers a wholly anarchic freedom, for good or ill. Blake perhaps of all poets conveys the force and
wildness of that freedom as he steps out of the golden cage of meaning prepared for him by the
conventions of his contemporary culture. But there is wildness somewhere in all great poetry, to be
missed the more certainly, the more painstakingly its meaning is attended to.
Blake, though, has always made me uneasy because I want an anarchic freedom for
love and not for hatred. Blake likes teeth:

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.

The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.

and he would not have minded, as I do, the willow root concentrating on its own nosing. I wonder
even, at times, whether he is not outraged by the suffering of the oppressed in the Songs of
Experience because it allows him to strip the disguising and falsely explanatory and justifying
system from the oppressors to reveal them naked and tigerish in their energy.
I will have the freedom to love without the freedom to hate and if you explain that
freedom must be confined by custom, law, explanation, meaning and the sacrifice of spontaneous
love so that hatred may be kept in check, I shall ignore you and trust some obscure instinct that this
need not be so. - “What if everybody had the same opinion? There would be chaos!” - Well,
13
there might or there might not be worse chaos than there is now; but in any case they won’t.
And after all, the great creations of the human mind and imagination are also always
on the outer edge of the possible:

His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem

Of a slender palm, stood but a day;

there are those that fall and those that do not, but it is perhaps those that fall which intrigue and
affect one most, the boundary of the possible not moving out beyond them. The spire in William
Golding’s novel is more potent in its half collapsed state than if the bracings of wood and stone had
fully answered the demand of the wildly driving imagination. And towers that do stand attract our
attention, our love, our loyalty because they ought not to stand: the bits of stone not built for flight,
the words not designed for any mysteries, ought not to inhabit the regions they do. It’s
temperament, perhaps, that decides whether it is the towers that just stand or those that just fall
which most attract us, but in neither case could it have been planned by any sane man, it was a
possibility snatched from beyond the reach of art.

* * * * *

THIRTY THREE

I know that the undiluted terror that waits within me has really been only mythically
faced and overcome and will be held off for just so long as the myths hold true (and I think perhaps
they are). For so long as I am young (and youth is a belief which though not difficult now, will be
so, and more so), for so long as I am open to desire, reached and held by desire, mine and others,
then there will be enough human presence crowded within me to keep the darkness at bay, and we
shall say bravely irresponsible things about it. But if I grow old and am left master of my own
judgements and experience, if I see (or rather cannot persuade others any longer that I don’t,
because it would be preposterously undignified in an old man not to) that my views have weight,
then I shall no longer be desired but respected, my crowds of friends (those in bodies and those in
books) will melt away to a respectful distance, I shall be left alone in the dark, and that will be the
end.
As I write this in the middle of the night I don’t feel very brave about the dark,
though writing and speech itself has mythic strength against it – just as, whether he believed it or
not the instant before he said it, and out of the unpromising material of Goneril’s and Regan’s lust,
the bastard in King Lear could be gallant fair knight to his lady - ‘Yours in the ranks of death’ - and
could exclaim in wonder against his darkness:

Yet Edmund was belov’d

Shakespeare saw that to be a king was a death sentence, the freedom and the power
only a mocking voice enforcing the irony. I seem to understand that Lear needed Cordelia’s words
at the beginning of the play, not the purity of her ‘nothing’, needed her to be reckless with words,
not to care about moral ambiguity, not to care that the desire that had just before, in her sisters’
speeches, flowed in those channels of words was corrupt – needed her desire for him if he was not
to be king and in the dark. His ineffectual attempt as the play opens at struggling with himself to
shake off kingship, all the ritual flim flam, was actually going to stand or fall by Cordelia’s desire
14
for him. And when Cordelia can only manage to articulate respect, the more profound the worse,
for him as father and king, then those roles which he is desperate to abandon snap round him and
trap him with terrible allegorical force and he banishes her in an autocratic fury. - Morality is not
enough.
The outward and evident shape of the situation at the beginning of the play is that the
king proposes to exchange life for death, to give away his kingdom so that he may ‘unburden’d
crawl toward death’. Even in that phrase, however, there is something odd, since ‘unburden’d’
removes a good deal of the force of ‘crawl’; and many people have seen in this first scene a king
preparing to dance along the primrose path a bit under cover of formal crawling. I want also to
think of the possibility that there is an attempt at a more radical reversal of the formal, surface
situation, that clumsily and more than a little unwillingly Lear is trying to turn from power to love,
from death to life. In all the wrong ways he tries to give himself by giving his kingdom, unaware
that there is no real giving until that is given away, but he is trying, and Cordelia doesn’t seem to
understand, and so rejects or seems to him to reject the love he offers. He is heartbroken before he
is again a king:

But goes thy heart with this?

Only the anarchy of a blindly instinctive love, of a rush of unpremeditated kindness

on Cordelia’s part could save Lear now; but she has found goodness and love in a system of
morality which gives it reasons, parcels and weights it out for all the world as though it were the
land her sisters were after:

Haply, when I shall wed,

That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.

That the act of love is untamedly present, forgetful of even immediate past and
future, that love is not a fixed finite commodity but springs new born out of this or that other
moment of union which for this or that moment is all, Shakespeare understood and Cordelia did not
– and Shakespeare with his typically subtle eye for the odd complexity of things allows her sisters at
any rate to say it. Whoever could not say in some moment to his beloved:

Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty;

Beyond what can be valu’d, rich or rare;
No less than life

has never loved.

* * * * *

15
THIRTY FOUR

To be permanently possessed by disciplined thought, to be the slave of a linear

process which leads from premises one thought pleasant and with a good view to conclusions one
hadn’t quite expected and doesn’t much like; or to find reality in belief and not in oneself – the
sentence hardly needs concluding.
But there is a kind of linear mind, the mind of a novelist perhaps, a George Eliotish
mind, which can achieve great strength and subtlety of understanding by a pitilessly disciplined
elaboration of what inevitably follows, in all its ramification of closely related detail. A novel of the
kind I have in mind is born only once, and thereafter grows, flourishes, matures, and dies into a
conclusion, its task completed. It doesn’t, of course, have the ghastly after-life of a theory, which
will not so easily consent to die when its book is finished. The novel may possess the reader, as it
did the writer, as it is being read; it may ask that the reader should accompany it and not take part,
should listen and not speak; but in the end, after the reading is over and the novel is settling into the
hills and valleys of memory, it becomes in its turn the possession of the rememberer. And it may
just turn out to be that the linearity of its procedure was only the accomplishing of a rather long
drawn out instant, not different except in its extension from the multiple instants of a poem or a
play, the multiple births, the unexpectedness.
I acknowledge the imaginative power of a novel like Middlemarch by understanding
it as the microscopically elaborated investigation of an instant. To a mind habitually moving in a
reality slower than mine by many orders of magnitude the reading of a novel of that length might
seem over in a flash of time, it might seem no more than a word in a line of poetry. To a mind
moving in immeasurably faster circumstances than mine the reading of a word in a line of poetry
might seem to take up half a lifetime of linear effort as the pattern of sound slowly accomplished
itself.
In saying this I am suggesting that even the apparently sturdiest linearity of mind
must allow that to remain alive means undergoing again and again the trauma of birth. To sink so
deep into a linearity of thought as to forget that what you are doing is simply writing a word, to
imagine that you are set upon a path that leads onwards to some final goal in the distance rather than
upon a path which will be reborn unpredictably as a path leading now somewhere else, is to be like
Casaubon with his Key to All Mythologies. The tenacity of his mind was for Casaubon a death
sentence. He was not the poet that in some way or another, at some speed or another, all the living
have to be.
A man must be born again if he is to live, and again, and again. Each time it will be
as awful as we are told it was for each of us the first time. The floor of the world gave way, the
foundations of the world were shaken and the ground opened beneath us and pitched us into the
darkness of light. After a while we became so used to our mother’s arms and to the world of our
family that the womb by contrast would have seemed the terrifying and imprisoning darkness. -
And so as we grow up and are educated there comes the point where that pattern is repeated and
what we have learnt is the womb that opens, naturally or by Caesarian section; and for a time
understanding seems a process of unlearning what we thought we knew.
Some books will be more womb-like for us and some more willing to be midwives.
There is room for both because premature birth is dangerous, and we may need a prolonged
immersion in a long instant. A poem perhaps, or a play by Shakespeare will always be more likely
to make the infant kick and wriggle than a novel, which feeds him more steadily, though we may
experience many little daily births in our mind and heart without precipitating anything more
cataclysmic.
Physical birth is cataclysmic for the child. Later births may lack the physical
16
collapse and reordering, they may take much longer than the physical labour of childbearing
(though some may be accomplished in a much shorter time, a moment’s thought or experience); but
they may well involve credal or emotional collapse, perhaps to such a degree that it is difficult to
see what it is of the old that is reincarnated in the new. The persisting sense of continuity across the
change of rebirth, not embodiable in a formulation, is evidence of one’s self, a mysterious area not
to be grasped, only experienced, not to be caught and defined in the criss-crossing lines of the
psychological graph, as though one were to try to say that my self is the point through which the
lines of whatever I have or will love or believe will pass. That point, I fancy, would seem bloodless
and minimal, and not the all-pervading sense. You might just as well set out to say what Hamlet
essentially was by selecting the most commonly recurring features of a hundred critical views. -
What you would get would be precisely what he was not. The heart of the mystery is only to be
known if it is left untouched, unthreatened by understanding, treated as the most fragile of things;
once its fragility is respected, its strength and persistence (which is no mere surface tenacity) may
seem miraculous.

* * * * *

17
THIRTY FIVE

As Eliot says in the Four Quartets:

Words after speech, reach

Into the silence.

When you understand and are understood (by which I mean love and are loved) well enough, then
that understanding can drift in and out of words, and the silences are a delicate counterbanlancing of
the sounds, almost allowing the words more speech as they reach into the silence. The words reach
even as they fade, reach a further freedom, unexpected or perhaps envisaged but only shyly and
apprehensively by the speaker.
It may seem rather unstartling to say that not everything is sayable. It is common
enough not to be able to get something into words; and common enough to meet people who think
some things ought not to be said, whether about sex, or race, or whatever. But the silence that
reigns in these cases is a negative one, the silence of frustration or denial, imprisoning, cramping,
disciplining. - What I mean to suggest, by contrast, is that there are circumstances in which the
imprisoning thing is to speak. I remember Sunday after Sunday when I was small hearing the vicar
talk from the pulpit about love. He was a good man and I have no doubt that he spoke with great
earnestness and sincerity, but he had simply spoken about this thing far too often and it seemed to
have died on him, the love of God choked out of existence by preaching about it, by constant
handling and carrying about in the little suitcase of words. Even the word love itself, by constant
repetition, had taken on an oddly distorted sound quality, the suitcase a bit out of shape, and the
distortion is all I remember of the many sermons I heard; it was a constant private unofficial delight
when I was a child which would have evaporated instantly if I had remarked upon it, because my
perception of it was not unkind, or even irreverent, as it would have had to be in words, when the
delight would have become a little sarcastic or spiteful as it drove the engine of language.
Religion, which is (where Christianity is concerned at any rate) the outer and
authoritative saying of so many intangible things, can easily, it seems, lose the sense of being
surrounded and interpenetrated by the unspoken, the unevident, the inexplicit. It can set up its
empire of words, attitudes and practices and think there is nothing beyond, no angels silently
weeping. Mary McCarthy was right perhaps to suggest, as she looked back on her own Catholic
childhood and the confidently ghastly pious relations who looked after her, that religion was only
good for people who were already good, ‘for the others it is too great a temptation – a temptation to
the deadly sins of pride and anger’. - And it is true, that it is when God is spoken about by those
who are on his side that he becomes truly intolerable: arguments are used to clear him of
responsibility which wouldn’t hold water in any court of law, his unquestionable authority is
invoked to enable outrageous conclusions.
The power of words can be used to challenge the power of God, and then one seems
to be rather on the side of words (unless of course they defeat God entirely and he becomes
unknown because disregarded); or words can be put supinely at his disposal, and then one is
against, for that unholy alliance of power with power, of the word with the Word, threatens to
destroy the freedom to be silent, reserved, exploratory, tentative. And as that freedom is threatened
we see with great clarity that what will not or cannot be known is a reality in its own right and not
just barbarian darkness beyond the empire of making sense. Religious words at their best are at
neither extreme, but use their human confidence to conclude that God is incomprehensible and then
play with that unknowable silence which has created their understanding –
as any word in a line should play with the space about it. It’s not altogether trivial to
18
say that what distinguishes poetry from prose is that it occupies less of the space on the page, nor
does it seem irrelevant that a page of handwriting with no margins is selfish and claustrophobic. It’s
a good idea to try sometimes quite deliberately to read the spaces, or to listen to the silences in a
piece of music.
Some words, some musical sounds, some sights interact more with the space about
them than others, advancing and withdrawing, oscillating within it. A safety pin, for instance, is not
a great mover, whereas God is, as the reader will have noticed in reading this section. Indeed God
really is the most energetic mover of all since the word can draw upon the realisation both that there
is nothing that is not God and that there is nothing that is. Words of the energetically moving kind
sort very uneasily with rigidly defined shapes of argument, either held in some defined position with
a force that seems damagingly to limit their significance, or perhaps quietly exploited to give a
measure of freedom the argument refuses to acknowledge relying on. - It seems better to accept
that such words bring manoeuvring space with them even into apparently the most watertight of
arguments, that kind of argument that fills all the margins by shrinking the size of the page. And to
accept them for what they are. It may be difficult to build houses with bricks that continually
change shape (though no doubt a sufficiently subtle view of a brick would see that it does constantly
change shape, so that the house is not an unmoving entity); but persuasive sentences are much more
obviously alive and moving than houses and they will hold on to the moving words they contain as
a sailor uses the pocket of wind in his sails.
A sailor reaches forward in the direction in which he wants to go by constant
indirection. He is a point of interaction between many forces as I am at the moment of writing this.
If I were to try to drive my argument in a straight line I would sink as the sailor would if he sailed
his boat in a straight line. To describe how it is that a sailor produces direction from indirection
would be impossibly complicated, but someone born to be a good sailor will quite rapidly develop a
feel for the way you do it. And the same is to be said of the good talker or writer, I think; he will
know from instant to instant whether words are needed or not, whether to throw his weight against
the tiller or let other forces arrange themselves about him.

* * * * *

19
THIRTY SIX

I once delivered a truly disastrous sermon in the college chapel – it was an

experiment on the part of the chaplain which was not repeated. I chose to think about the raising
from the dead of the son of the widow of Nain, and I couldn’t help speculating, not on the goodness
of God in doing that, but on its curiously focussed quality. Why that dead son of a widow and not
the previous one, or the next? How could any singleness of good demonstrate, as in this case it was
alleged to do, the boundless goodness of God? The goodness of God is supposed by theologians to
be systematic, extensive, and significant, to admit of no qualification, but there is no help for it, if it
is to appear at all on earth it must be in isolated and motiveless occurrences and acts and God must
consent (but will he?) to be meaningless. There is an almost total breakdown of communication
between God and man in this vital matter. If it had been simply a man doing a good act in the story
of the widow’s son we would be content with its goodness because we apprehend goodness in its
unmixed form as anarchic, almost motiveless or causeless, as standing outside or coming from
beyond the nexus of reasons why things are done – otherwise it isn’t truly good. To be good so as
to be rewarded, on earth or in heaven, is enlightened (even though perhaps very enlightened) self-
interest. Real goodness, by contrast, just arises within us and is almost impersonal in its own
internal force of love – the delight we feel in it is the delight in being its channel. To take a good
action and use it to demonstrate something else, or even to speculate about it, is to corrupt it.
Goodness goes off very easily, like chicken in aspic. As soon as it begins to be used it rots away,
falls to bits. Theologise the bringing back to life of that dead boy and it becomes evidence of the
malice of God who like some Oriental potentate chooses to confer his favours here and not there for
his own amusement, in order to enjoy his power.
I wonder whether excellence of any sort can be commented on, as distinct from
being acknowledged and contemplated. The function of the guide is not to expound and explain, to
surround with words and his own bustle, like those guides in great cathedrals who seem to suppose
that in some way the beauties they inhabit are to their own credit. The function of the guide is to
bring you to the best vantage point and then leave you alone. Anything else is in the strict as well as
the not so strict sense impertinent. - Proper literature, or painting, or music can’t be used, put to a
purpose, any more than goodness. It doesn’t perhaps so much rot away in such circumstances as
quietly conspire to disappear. Indeed it might be one of the touchstones of genuine excellence of
this sort that it is impatient of comment.
I remember a year or two ago seeing a boy standing at Carfax in Oxford one summer
evening – not going anywhere, not doing anything but full of a beauty he seemed unconscious of. It
was then not the freedom of beauty from the practical concerns of the world that struck me, not that
it wouldn’t be put to use, but that it was useless, pointless. Human life was scampering away at the
crossroads of the city and the beauty that made you catch your breath was of no benefit to the
possessor, the temporary possessor. - The dark side of the freedom of beauty or of goodness is that
the naughty world mocks it, and quite rightly. It sees (what is true) that it is of no consequence.
Beauty, or goodness, cannot both assert a freedom and compel a following.
Those who do follow can only keep to the track so long as they are in no expectation
of gain, or so long as that inevitably present expectation is muffled or lost, allowed itself to wander
off. To try to convert beauty into the currency of money or status (social or intellectual) or
possessed knowledge is to attempt what is simply impossible. A plainly ambitious academic
quoting some great line is stripped naked by it or perhaps more often turns it into something tedious
or hideous that his audience must recover from the memory of. I seem to have heard a lot of
lectures that one could only do one’s best to forget.
There must be some subjects cultivated within universities which are generally
20
unaffected by the selfishness of the cultivator. It is those subjects which can make the strongest
claim for objectivity which are least at the mercy of the motives of those who profess them. To do
chemical experiments for personal gain seems (if unpleasant) not evidently absurd; to talk or write
about poetry or music or painting for personal gain is to allow a distortion of focus upon an object
so much more delicately and tentatively present than hydrochloric acid, so much more dependent
for its existence on the variety of ways in which it is seen, that it may begin to disappear or suffer
strange mutations.
Subjects which have to do with beauty or goodness (and perhaps even the most
evidently objective study can in certain circumstances come to be such, as even a brick may change
shape, given the heady freedom of the sympathetic space of a loving and tactful attention), such
subjects are the justification for the existence of universities in their own understanding of
themselves as disinterested institutions. But both these subjects properly pursued and the
disinterested ideal that goes with them are rather rarely actually to be encountered.
- I instantly feel uneasy at having reached the inhumane idealistic self-satisfaction of
that last sentence, and I want to admit my mistake and say that the path away from selfishness is not
disinterestedness but something less bloodless, something with desire about it, desire muddy as well
as shining – better a Yahoo than a Houyhnhnm. It is perhaps that what I have called the expectation
of gain has come to expect too little gain, has come to be too fastidious, too much reduced to simply
money or reputation. There is such a depth and extent of pleasure, of gain, in beauty and goodness
– such a muddy as well as shining pleasure even in goodness – that it seems a sin to shrink either to
self-interest on the one hand or to disinterestedness on the other. The raising of the widow’s son
somehow shows God shining as well as muddy and not a plaster-cast God who does everything by
the book as God ought to do - God good but God also partial, to this woman, this boy; attracted to
manifest his goodness in these striking circumstances. - One would naturally be more intensely
kind and selfless with another human being who aroused one’s lust. - I’m reminded of the monk
asked whether his devotion to a life of penance wasn’t as much in expectation of the reward of
heaven as in the serving of God, who replied that of course it was.

* * * * *

21
THIRTY SEVEN

In 1805/6 while he was living in Königsberg, Kleist wrote a letter to Rühle von
Lilienstern about the way thought gradually accomplishes itself in the act of speaking - Über die
allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden – speech, and of course writing, not being the
vehicle for the publication of a knowledge or a shape already arrived at, but intimately part of the
process of arriving. He thinks of the way, too, in which the precise relationship between two human
beings can determine to an unsuspected degree what is said, just as the relationship between two
electrical bodies will determine how the current flows, with what voltage, in what direction, at what
instigation.
We have little idea, before the event, of what may be the things which trigger or
determine the course of an experience, thinking of all experience as a kind of conversation. The
overwhelming may be separated from the ordinary, not by the intervening space normally
prescribed, but by what seems to be almost nothing, a comma, a fractional hesitation. To have this
in one’s mind is to live in a state of constant excited anticipation amid the ordinary. Kleist considers
the possibility that what precipitated the overthrow of the old order in France was a twitching lip or
an ambiguous playing with a cuff as Mirabeau was speaking what emerged as his famous words.
After he had unburdened himself of that excitement of words against the King he
was empty, like one of Kleist’s bottles, and there was room again for fear and caution. - I feel
sometimes, too, after a lecture, that speech has taken thought away with it, so that there’s nothing in
my mind at all as I go back to my room, as I retreat from the encounter. - Words spoken full in the
act of thinking and of feeling are irreparable, like human life in Vergil, and one may often feel, even
if a kingdom is not at stake, a little apprehensive at having said them. - It’s not that what is
important must flow out from the self, but that what is important, in speech or writing, is the self
flowing out, and the result is a temporarily alarming exhaustion and sense of having gone outside
the walls.
Little things bring one back to ordinariness, just as little things may have jolted one
out of it, but whereas before it was the sudden significance of littleness that was evident, afterwards
it is littleness itself which is significant. One returns to the ordinary with a sense not only that there
is much that lies beyond it, but also that it is itself of incalculable value, like the common air we
breathe. Passing and repassing the boundary between the prosaic and the poetic makes one
increasingly uncertain what the boundary is and where it is, though the feeling of passage remains:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

The more one thinks about the two worlds, mean and deep, the closer they are woven
together in one’s mind, not by becoming similar but by differences that answer each other, warp and
woof. The ordinary world, coffee inside me this morning, the flame bubbling quietly away in my
fire, this ordinary world is common in the sense large, everywhere to be experienced. That tiny
bubbling in the middle of black coals, struggling for its devouring life, could also open to me a
poetic world that would be momentary, strange, specialised, not a big shape but a sliver of
possibility. - And the reverse of this contrast is also true, making a chiasmus. That the poetic
world is unconfined in possibility and extent though the door into it may be tiny and difficult to
find; whereas the prosaic world, barn doors swinging invitingly and obviously open, exists as a set
of circumstances, physically and psychologically, of the most highly specialised kind.
Raise or lower the ambient temperature by a fractional amount and I die. Alter the
intensity of light by a fraction of the possible range and I am blind. Change my acoustic
22
circumstances by the smallest degree in certain directions and I become laughable and then
incomprehensible. With small variations these constricting boundaries are the same for all of us,
but perhaps for each individual the set of psychological circumstances which can be called ordinary
life is even more delicately pin-pointed. I had a very large, very old wireless set in my bedroom as
a child that would receive really distant stations very well if the weather was right and if it was
propped at an angle and some of the knobs tapped delicately in certain ways. Sometimes it seemed
to benefit from a general shake; and all the time it appeared to be melting because there was steadily
more wax on the floor of the cabinet. - This seems a good image for my own psychological state. I
can think of half a dozen words that would knock out the wedge and reduce me to silence or a
jumble of atmospherics; and I suppose other people’s equipment is in different ways just as
temperamental –
and that thought or feeling has a lot to do with twitching things. The plan soberly
and carefully thought out beforehand and then smoothly put into operation doesn’t exist. The essay
carefully planned in advance and sturdily unresponsive to mood or the fluctuations of insight is
invulnerable to the changes and chances of life only because it is not itself alive. - But I must
remember, too, that we need to know that ordinariness is ordinary, that plans can be securely put
together, that essays can be thought out in detail. This reliance on something more than the instinct
of the moment is a human distinguishing mark. The sensitive man will speak out of what he really
is at this moment; another, or he at another time, will wisely say nothing that has not been weighted
beforehand. Kleist was just as wrong as right.

* * * * *

23
THIRTY EIGHT

Richard of Haldingham’s map of the world, made about the year 1290, hangs above
the stove in my study. The world consists of Europe, Asia and Africa, with Jerusalem in the middle,
and can bear no relation to anything he knew though to a good deal that he believed. - Little is
known about him apart from his map, the original of which now hangs (still I hope) in the north
aisle of the choir of Hereford Cathedral where, though a Lincolnshire man, he held the prebend of
Norton.
When it was made, everyone who knew anything must have known it was no good
as a geographical map. He must have known it himself if he had any sense of the shape of his own
country and its position in relation to neighbouring countries. - Of course, he was a long way from
the sea in Hereford and it is the shifting shapelessness of the sea against which the shape of the land
can be defined – the sea being shapeless not because it has no shape but because human beings
don’t inhabit the shape as they do the shape of the land. Even though it is actually in the vertical not
the horizontal plane that the shape of the land we inhabit most engages us, we are very aware of the
horizontal. We are even clear, I think, that the horizontal plane is what most takes the impress of
authority, consisting more largely as it does of legal and other boundaries. Looking up and down,
you might say, is free; looking round is not.
It was the horizontal Richard of Haldingham was concerned with in his map, so
exclusively that his land looks pretty much as docile and lifeless, as uninhabitable, as his sea.
Human beings normally are content that the sea should be docile, horizontal, and think of that (as it
is) as its proper state. But flat land, even to a Lincolnshire man who would be easily contented with
the most modest of rolling country, is a bore; nothing, to use the psalmist’s words, to lift up your
eyes to.
Of course, perspective is difficult in maps, even undesirable, since (whether
geographically, legally, or as here theologically) they have it as their usual function to carry the
impress of authority. They are not landscape paintings, but pedagogic, admonitory. Richard’s map
speaks with a theological authority that has flattened it into a pedagogic instrument. The vertical
extension here, to God, has steamrollered the land. - Normally we like hills, even lift up our eyes
to them, because they are distant, they have to do with aspiration, with what is not immediately
pressing, they are invested with past and future. We don’t at all like them falling on us. Indeed the
tendency of hills of water to rush towards sailors and fall on them is the reason why we prefer the
sea horizontal.
Hills of water don’t make their impress upon the sea from outside, but arise from
within its ordinary horizontal nature; and so the real sea is full of dangerous and unpredictable life
as Richard’s map is not, which contains none of the authority impressed upon it. Authority arising
unpredictably, volcanically, from within an experience, a picture, a set of words, is dangerous but
exciting; what makes for the deathly quality of the thing we normally call authority is the fact that it
bears down from outside rather than arising from within. What has arisen, of course, may itself
oppress someone else (thus my imaginings may do that) and drown or choke him; or, like the
eternal hills, it may simply display itself as having arisen and intend no more than to encourage a
similar arising within the onlooker.
There may have been a time when to write down Jerusalem as the centre of the world
was yeasty and imaginative, not docile. I don’t feel it here, but I can recreate the possibility by the
analogy of England as the centre of the world. - In all flat maps England is in fact central, by the
casual external authority of the historical accident of the Greenwich meridian, but I see more than
accident in the pen that draws the world like this; and this island and the sea that surrounds it seem
not just flat but instinct with human significance, as the English language is. All becomes shapely
24
and precious:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

For those born in different parts of the world, whose loves will be different,
significance will accumulate and arise differently beneath the surface of the map they draw, on
paper or in their mind’s eye. And one significance should call to another, like distant hills, so that
the whole earth is variously transformed, criss-crossed not by the dreary lines of longitude and
latitude but by the contours of familiarity and affection, each with its accompanying strangenesses
and distances.
My affection, my imagination, should not overshadow another; nor should anything I
write block out the sun for anyone else. At least one reason for writing is rather to shed light and
warmth on someone else’s patch of earth, so that the seed which nothing can drag up from the soil,
as Wittgenstein said, may be encouraged to climb for itself, in its own way:

Du kannst den Keim nicht aus dem Boden ziehen. Du kannst ihm nur Wärme und
Feuchtigkeit und Licht geben und dann muss er wachsen.

* * * * *

25
THIRTY NINE

Over the west door of Staunton Harold church in Leicestershire can be read these
words:

In the year 1653 when all things sacred were throughout the nation either demolished or
profaned, Sir Robert Shirley baronet founded this church, whose singular praise it is to have
done the best things in the worst times and hoped them in the most calamitous.

This was the last, as it were, mediaeval church in England, the last that could be built by rote, by
instinct and out of instinct; and it was perhaps that deeply instinctive act that made Sir Robert so
much an offence to the proponents of the new ideas then newly in power. He went to the Tower for
it and died there at the age of twenty-nine.
It may be that what the proponents of new ideas most object to is not the old ideas
they apparently oppose, but the fact that the old ideas are not ideas but ways of life. New ideas
seem in part to aspire to this, to become so much a part of the fabric of things that people will act
unthinkingly out of the midst of them rather than self-consciously in some ratiocinative relationship
with them; but of course for an idea this is also to aspire to self-annihilation. The old way of things
will very often defend itself by other than ratiocinative means, by rhetorical and imaginative means;
which may be as sharp a defence as the ratiocinative, as poised, as subtle – more so often. So Sir
Robert Shirley building his church, or the recusant Lady Cecily Stonor nearly a century earlier
before the justices at Oxford:

I was born in such a time when Holy Mass was in great reverence and was brought up in the
same faith. In King Edward’s time this reverence was neglected and reproved by such as
governed. In Queen Mary’s it was restored with much applause, and now in this time it
pleaseth the State to question them, as they now do me, who continue in this Catholic
profession. The State would have the several changes, which I have seen with mine eyes,
good and laudable. Whether it can be so I refer to your Lordships’ consideration. I hold me
still that wherein I was born and bred, and find nothing taught in it but great virtue and
sanctity, and so by the grace of God I will live and die in it.

What is baffling to the revolutionary is that the old order will not argue its case in a
recognisably rational way. This is itself often thought to be a powerful reason for the abolition of
the old order. If it cannot or will not justify itself rationally then it is an affront to the dignity of
rational beings. - But the matter is more complicated in the business of deciding between the old
and the new.
In weighing the one against the other one is not weighing like with like. Rather one
is weighing experience had against experience yet to be had; and whereas an idea is something in
weighable and measurable form, testable against other ideas, and only real in the measure that it
constantly survives the comparative world it inhabits, experience is unconditionally real. We rejoice
in this when an experience has been pleasant; we try by contrast to reduce unpleasant experiences to
notions that can be given insecure and conditional existence.
Conditional existence sounds thin when put against the unconditional sort; and it is
true that in some circumstances it seems so. The breadth and inevitability of something long
experienced, especially the sense that it makes up a whole order of things, will contrast often richly
with a monomaniac quality about the new. This is particularly true for me if the old order (as it was
for Sir Robert and for Lady Cecily Stonor) is in process of succumbing to the new way. - But it is
26
also true that there is something exhilarating about the conditional, something exciting and
penetrating about the idea that is careless of any history, concerned with present conviction, the
thing of this moment, a tensely concentrated tightrope walker who must be continually moving to
stay upright. - It looks like life, since life is unpredictable and always moving; just as the other
looked like life, since life is survival against the odds.
The new idea will tend to be all the more passionately seized on and believed in, to
the extent that it lacks history; and conviction of a certain very intense sort, paradoxically, is as
much evidence of the conditional, tentative, temporary, as more obvious hesitation. – By contrast
the willingness to qualify, to acquiesce in other possibilities, may in certain circumstances be very
characteristic of the old and settled order. Here is the tightrope walker not continually moving in
order to stay upright, but able to move in many directions because already confident of not
overbalancing. The quality of movement is different. - I think the Restoration gives us a good
example of this. The bringing back of the king shortly after Cromwell’s death was not the
supplanting of one idea by another but the supplanting of intense and self-conscious thought by a
returning ordinariness of life. The king once on his throne again, there could be many different
attitudes to him, all of which agreed he was king. In poems written about King Charles the thought
is easily fantastic, the comparisons far-fetched, because really there is no proper function for it to
fulfil. It seems to have been added onto and not derived from the reality of the king returned, as
though there were a sense that something more than the bare fact of return ought to be described,
even though the rather bare fact, embarrassingly, was all there was. - We think of the theatre and of
comedy as the most characteristic sort of Restoration literature, and we see that Restoration comedy
is not a marriage of imagination and thought but of imagination and devising. Any particular
Restoration comedy cannot in fact even be much thought about, although the way it discourages
thought is different from Sir Robert’s or Lady Cecily’s way.
One might say that Lady Cecily Stonor spoke at Oxford in instinctive and not
ratiocinative terms (distinguishing herself in this respect from the Jesuit missionaries for whom the
Counter-Reformation was an argument first of all) because she knew by heart the ideas that
informed the order she described. When she refers ‘to your Lordships’ consideration’ the several
changes which the State would have ‘good and laudable’, she invites her judges to think if they will,
but she is not thinking herself, she has no need of it. If you like, the order she expounds has its own
fundamental ideas in a solution of human experience. One’s feeling about the Restoration, by
contrast, is that the years of the Cromwellian interregnum had rather seriously damaged the capacity
of the ordinary human experience of the traditional state of things to hold its own fundamental ideas
in solution. The solution was rather thin and insubstantial, so that the returning ordinariness of life,
as I’ve described it, was expected and asserted to be more complete in its re-establishing of the old
reality than it really was.
In a play, then, like The Country Wife, the texture of experience seems trivial, and
this not because it’s a comedy, though comedy has less constant need of deep water than tragedy,
but because no one ever seems to have thought about the urban life it depicts. So that the
intriguings and the smart opinions about life and manners discourage thought, ideas, rather than
making them unnecessary. - The characters in this play would have been as hostile to Sir Robert
Shirley’s undertaking as any republican sectary, though theirs would have been a blank hostility
expressed in a stylish laugh and not a newly and consciously principled anger.

* * * * *

27
FORTY

I have been trying with a Japanese friend to translate into English some Japanese
poems about the coming of autumn, knowing not a syllable of Japanese myself.

at
evening in autumn
a
crow sits
on
a
withered branch

There is the sense here that I’m making an effort, not very successfully, to say
something that won’t be said in English. The poem is carefully odd, like a ship strangely rigged for
some barely possible advantage of wind and weather. - The obvious first difficulty about most
Japanese poems is that they are very short, so that in English they’re over too quickly and seem to
provoke the response ‘so what?’ - Here I’m trying to reproduce the brevity while slowing the
speed.
As we’ve been translating, I’ve talked to Kyoichi a lot about this and related things.
- Speed (or better say brevity, which is speed in a slightly different aspect) may say all if the focus
of intensity is right, the image passing through the shutter of the mind shorn of all but itself because
all is gathered up within it, so no outworks, no foothills or scaffolding. Intense like that it can, need,
never be other than itself, never return the all it has gathered up. It requires, enables, no response
other than profound acknowledgement - and in Japan it will be instantly accorded it by everyone.
Kyoichi told me that when the first autumn wind is felt each year in Japan, the news bulletins
mention it, and all Japanese feel instantly the same response - rather different from the semi-comic
first cuckoo of spring in England. Such a community of response is only possible when nothing is
to be done about it, and it’s true that nothing is to be done about a Japanese poem.
The spots of intensity in Japanese are known and public; in English by and large they
are private and to be discovered and then communicated – English poetry seems to be working
harder than Japanese. Perhaps once found all intensity is brief, a flash, but in English there are
many tracks to and from by which people come looking and go, whereas in Japanese the people are
already there, so there are no tracks to be seen. Or say better the few tracks are well enough known
for the most cursory signposting to be adequate, and Japanese poetry specialises in a cursoriness of
signposting which emphasises commonness of understanding.
It is difficult for me to understand how intensity can be common, known, possessed,
especially since what is to this degree common in English culture is now tawdry, half-dead, the
psychic equivalent of municipal offices or government information. Perhaps there was a time when
the great cathedrals had some psychic counterpart, but the time is long gone, and I gaze at the
cathedral here in Durham in isolation and quiet.
In the West we must admit to being surprised that it is municipal offices and not
cathedrals which have been received from us into Japan as a kind of locus communis like the
coming of autumn. We are in turn urged by our own governments, who have an interest in the
matter, to emulate the fervour with which the Japanese identify as intensely real and important the
government and industrial enterprises to which they have so successfully extended their culture of
communal intensities.
The attempt of governments here in the West is likely to fail, and they are
28
likely to face more and more what seem to them baffling and ironic privacies, just at the moment
when computers and the data they store seem to promise agreed centres of importance and authority.
- ‘They’ve fed it into a computer’ has become, as it were, an attempt at a modern Japanese poem in
Western dress. What it is intended to convey is a sense of completeness, of something well and
effectively executed, a sense of control and understanding achieved. - It is true that there is
something exciting about the shorn and abbreviated language of computers, language that is so
confident of being understood, so confident that it will magnetise its audience, that it need make no
concession to the common courtesies. What to a hostile onlooker seems the crudity of gross
simplification will seem to the devotee the abrupt economy of speech associated with power. Even
the computer’s habit of proceeding relentlessly step by step through a process, omitting no stage,
seems like the formalised movement, the marching and the ritual attitudinising, of human beings in
power or at the service of power.
It is worth remarking that the computer’s habit is to abbreviate its language and
elaborate its system of procedure, never omitting a stage. Both abbreviation and elaboration are
characteristic of the distancing effect of power. One has only to think of a parade ground or a
bureaucracy: the parade ground uses vestigial language to accomplish self-consciously redundant
and fixed elaborations of movement; a bureaucracy will tend to work with acronyms and formulaic
expressions in moving through an accumulation of committees. The Japanese tea ceremony seems
not irrelevant here too.
One might say perhaps that the desire to be simple and the desire to be elaborate
dance attendance on each other in properly human activity, in proper human language, rather as the
semantic complexity, the tonal indirections, of a poem may conspire with the predictability of metre
or rhyme. To separate these impulses so that the one is not allowed to affect the other in any
intimate way, or so that the border between them is not allowed constantly to shift its position, with
a complexity appearing out of a simplicity or the other way about; to make such a separation is to
make what is human more predictable, more machine-like. - It seems best not quite to know what
is simple and what complex, but to feel that simplicity and complexity go always hand in hand. If I
were an educated Japanese I could understand just how long the poem is with which I began this
section, how complicated and unending its privacy.

* * * * *

29
FORTY ONE

Obligation sufficiently dispensed with between the obliged and the obliger creates a
fine and delicate mist of goodwill. I give you what you asked to borrow and beg so earnestly that
you will forget any debt, that between us there hovers an almost impersonal, unlocated pleasure of
good. I do not in this instant own the goodness I have so much beseeched you not to endow me
with; you are not in this instant an owner; so the goodness is present but not anyone’s possession –
In a poem by Ezra Pound called The Study in Aesthetics:

The very small children in patched clothing,

Being smitten with an unusual wisdom,
Stopped in their play as she passed them
And cried up from their cobbles:
Guarda! Ahi, guarda! Ch’e be’a!

And the girl’s beauty is liberated into a space between her and them, in part no doubt because they
are children, not sexually desiring. This is not liberation into an abstraction, an idea of beauty, nor
into an ideal; the beauty, like the flower of a plant, does not only in some other than biological way
confer life on the girl, it also derives life from her and would not survive without her. The capillary
thread of possession is as necessary as having the air at freedom, as a kite will not fly without its
string.
Three years after, the poet hears ‘the young Dante, whose last name I do not know’
stroking the bright fish packed ready for the market in Brescia:

Murmuring for his own satisfaction

This identical phrase:
Ch’e be’a.

The phrase as the boy uses it partly belongs still to that meeting of children and girl
with which the poem started; and partly it arises again independently, three years later, in the
meeting of boy and fish. Just so, every beauty is itself, and is linked, indebted, by capillary lines to
each other beauty.
I am surprised that there is no word for this unpossessing possessing, but very glad
that there is not. The power of it is in the acuity of focus, affected always by the variability of other
factors, and a single word would be too stolid a presence to account for it. Not that there is
anything tentative about the focussed reality while the focus is held.
One’s acutest sense of something real understood is often, I think, at the moment of
feeling that the word used is not quite right, but that there is no other; or at the moment of feeling
that a word is filling a function, occupying a place, which is not quite in its range of advertised
possibilities:

The very small children in patched clothing,

Being smitten with an unusual wisdom.

The force of ‘wisdom’ in those lines has to do with our sense that Pound has
determined to use the word in spite of its inappropriateness. Wisdom has to do with mature
reflection, with age, is not carried away by the experience of a moment. One is not smitten by
wisdom but inhabited by it. The wisdom of these children is, the poet allows, of an unusual kind,
30
but (and this he insists on more) is also penetrating to an unusual degree. The noun is not slackly
used; the semantic equivalent here is of taking a coin intended to be spent and standing it on its edge
so all can see that that was what it was meant to be for, not for common spending. The perception
quivers on the edge of pointlessness, almost but not quite denaturing the common function, but
needing it nevertheless so that the sense of fine-drawn extension, of deliberately claimed freedom,
should be there, as the kite needs its string.
We understand properly in the interstices of our common possessed understanding –
as Eliot put it, ‘between two waves of the sea’. And this world of understanding that is neither mine
nor yours, neither what I know nor what I can be told by you, is, I think, more extensive than the
common world, for all that we see it only in glimpses. - The children are not small but very small,
and they wear patched clothing. And we must say that the poet conveys by these words a
capaciousness of undamaged, unqualified, unpatched reaction. Capaciousness, seamlessness, is
found where we would not expect it; this is not where our experience would teach us to look for it.
We are made, though, to look again at the smallness of the children (they are not small but very
small) and to see great size in it. What we see, in fact, is a world not to be described by the word
small or the word large, which is free of the categories of understanding we approach it with.
I am reminded of the clever animals in Rilke’s first Duino elegy:

Die findingen Tiere merken es schon,

Dass wir nicht sehr verlässlich zu Haus sind
In der gedeuteten Welt.

It takes these clever animals (with their limited animal understanding) to notice that
human beings are not as comfortable as they might be with the world they have made intelligible,
significant. We have built our house of understanding but we are not altogether at home in it. And
as, in a good poem or in some other act of love, the intelligible slips away from us, it rejoices, and
we may share its rejoicing if only we will not lumber after it with the nets of our mind. We should
not try recapture, we should try instead to sing a responsive tune.

* * * * *

31
FORTY TWO

From Gerard’s Herball of 1597 to John Ray’s Historia Plantarum of 1686 the world
of plants shed one significance and acquired another, all the while remaining what it had always
been. Nature tricked out in metaphor, inhabited by a human imagination and moral understanding
which it had been created to echo and confirm, is what we find in Gerard. So also Shakespeare in
The Winter’s Tale:

I would I had some flowers o’th’ spring that might

Become your time of day…. Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength –

Take away the myth and the metaphor and one is left with skeletal debris. Out of
such dry bones a newly jointed world was built up, in the work of John Ray and others, that
culminated in the Linnaean taxonomy where plants found significance according to the number and
placing of their residually metaphorical sexual parts, though sex had now to do with botanical
generation and not bright Phoebus in his strength. Labelled in Latin now, and the old names, like
the old gods, shadowy, almost furtive: sea thrift and yellow rattle, lady’s smock and lady’s tresses,
jack-by-the-hedge and hairy violet, cuckoo-flower and the thrum-eyed primrose.
The reader will know which side I’m on and with what persistence I want to
emphasise that the Linnaean world is as much the product of human desire as the earlier; and that
the merits or attractions of these two worlds should be weighed in the ways we use to measure other
competing or dissonant human desires. I guess that when the country people of Shakespeare’s
boyhood said there’s rosemary for remembrance and rue for repentance, they knew that their human
imagination stood off a little from a natural world whose alien, perhaps chilling, mystery was left
respected, unchallenged, by the human response to it. The response is so confidently human, of
man’s world, that it envisages no umbilical connection with the other. The natural world had been
created to confirm man’s world, but man was utterly different from the natural, non-human creation,
immortal, in God’s image; so that that other creation was in a similar way itself. The nets in which
men caught the flowers of the field, each one with its meaning for man, were known, as it were, to
be nets made of human words – not, as we would say now, just words, but proper real human words,
of ultimate value because the human reality, as God had promised, was of ultimate value. So they
were not meant to grasp and catch, as a poem does not grasp and catch its subject matter, but is
different from what entrances it.
What has followed upon the gradual loss of man’s confidence in his own unique and
immortal reality as the tide of faith has receded is a bewilderingly complex series of adjustments
and compensations, pointing in all manner of different directions. And it seems that one of these is
the change from nature as familiar yet ultimately strange to nature as strange yet ultimately familiar.
- The Linnaean taxonomy, in spite of the strangeness of its Latinate words, does not, I think,
consider itself a thing made of words, because words being merely human inventions are nothing
much. So the Linnaean words are deliberately things no human being could fall in love with, and
these words are used to identify a world sharply distinct from them, not naturally consonant with
them, a world which is real as they are not, and whose reality once plainly seen, without the
32
enchanting glass of human imagination and myth, turns out to be, for all its strangeness,
comprehensible in our terms, like us. We are not alone in the universe. - That this clear-eyed,
scientific, objective understanding of the natural world is in fact itself an enchanted world of human
imagining that deludes us more completely than ever any sonnet its sonneteer could not be
admitted.
The poet may still restore us. Rupert Brooke described things with a fish eye in a
poem called Heaven:

And there (they trust) there swimmeth One

Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin
The littlest fish may enter in.

It’s a funny poem, I suppose, critical of human religious behaviour. But curiously
too a very touching poem, with genuinely other impulses amid the fun; a religious poem, enabled to
be so because about fish, who are there to teach us about ourselves with a sureness which can be so
steady because its delicacy is also assured by the tonal admission the poem constantly makes that it
is funny, that fish are not like this, as we all know from biology lessons, that the whole thing is
composed of words not fish. - But they are not just words, rather words that enchant, and so create
a resonance between the human and the fishy kingdom, besides allowing the fishy kind to swim off
also into an otherness totally remote, passing through the smiling and contented admission that this
is a funny poem to a place we are content not in any way to understand, absolutely remote and alien.
The only kind of understanding of a fish we can have is a human invention, a human joke, and
rather a better joke, surer of itself, more attractive, than the scientific shapes of modern piscine
taxonomy:

Oh! Never fly conceals a hook,

Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.

* * * * *

33
FORTY THREE

For a Hindu, I am told, it is meritorious to build but not to repair, so that India is full
of buildings sagging into ruin; and there it would be easy to understand the abandoned wood-pile of
Frost’s poem:

I thought that only

Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork in which
He spent himself, the labor of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

It is a Western poet who has to suppose and assign a reason for the neglect of the
fruits of human effort, though Frost does not choose a reason, like illness or death, which would
thoroughly evacuate the neglect of the wood-pile of all significance. A more prosaic Western
observer might have done that. Perhaps in India, however, it would not have needed a poet to
understand that the wood-pile abandoned to its slow smokeless burning had itself a strange reality
and importance, not to be diluted with reasons for its abandonment.
- For Frost, it is true, there would have been no poem without that mysterious
abandonment; but there is no prolonged meditation on the setting aside of human effort. And yet I
think we should understand that both doing and the careless abandonment of what is done have
value, both creating and the abandonment of what is created. More than that; that not to preserve or
put to use can itself be homage to the effort that had been made.
I find it easiest to suggest what I mean by noting that conservation as we are now
familiar with it springs from a curious disrespect for the past it conserves. The past must be given
the only kind of importance we fully accept, it must be made new and present. The working of time
upon buildings or paintings must be erased or stopped, so that what we exclaim at is not the old
getting older and yet still somehow surviving, but rather the old forever, creepily, young, by a
miracle of preservation. There is greater respect for the past in its pastness when it is simply, in an
unthinking way, given a crumbling place amid the present. So that the past is neither abolished nor
painted an inch thick, but is there for the present to grow out of or into, like a new house in Rome
built into part of an old one.
What a conservationist present cannot tolerate is useless decay. Decay must be
harnessed to production where it is allowed to happen, the wood usefully producing heat or the
building pulled down to make way for another. This is properly then, of course, destruction not
decay and is not, as decay is, homage to the unique quality, the unrepeatability, of the effort once
made.
Human reality, it must be admitted, is a matter of repetition as much as of the
unrepeatable, and there is room for the tranquillity of evident and skilful repair, repair respecting the
original skill, as for abandonment to decay. Conservation may seem to fall between these
possibilities since its aim is to make new what has in fact not just been made and because it hasn’t.
- That ‘may seem’ is, I realise, a caution bred of the sense that I’m not at ease with the pattern of
my sympathies and antipathies as I dimly perceive it and authoritatively feel them at the moment. -
Perhaps I ask that a thing should either be old or new, that it should beg no covert assistance from
the other state. To have nor youth nor age, and to try for a form of continuance which is neither the
shocking state of being new in every moment nor the equally shocking remoteness from present
34
care of evidently decaying or evidently repaired and supported age, seems to me like an after dinner
sleep, torpid and heavy on the spirits.
So that when I introduced the idea of repair by saying that human life was as much
repetitious as unrepeatable, I feel I wasn’t thinking well enough. Repair that acknowledges and
proclaims the old is repetitious only as a new note of a different pitch chiming with an old note is
repetitious. Continuance, by contrast, that rests on an idea of repetitious sameness, always more of
exactly the same, seems to have about it both a meretricious excitement and a meretricious
reliability, like an advertisement for the latest washing powder.
I see how the genuinely young and the genuinely old, like the upper classes and the
working classes, can unite in a feel for life. Many things in the middle state of life, presided over by
what the psalmist calls the noonday devil, may unexpectedly genuinely aspire in the one living
direction or the other; but many things in the middle state may also aspire shoddily, for mercantile
reasons, without a saving disinterest, a saving carelessness. - Perhaps I can say that youth and age
are simply themselves, they are not there for anything, they are disengaged from the kind of
meaning achieved and asserted by effort, unlike the striving middle part. There is, by contrast with
such striving, a meaning in simply existing, more difficult to understand, more difficult to talk
about, since talk is itself so easily a form of striving. St. Augustine, thinking about God, understood
that he loved God for being; and he saw in God age and youth simultaneously present, begging no
covert assistance from each other, utterly and freely distinct and so the same, like other things about
the Christian Trinity:

sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi.

* * * * *

35
FORTY FOUR

Sitting at last watching my cat Julia sitting watching the fire, I wonder what it would
be like to have a tail. She curls it round the base of her upright form like the outer edge of a plinth.
When speaking to me or looking at me her tail conducts an independent examination of the situation
and comes to its own conclusions, so that physically she is never the single flawlessly pitched note
you would expect from so graceful a creature, but a perfect and sometimes startling chord – never a
diphthong. God preserve us from diphthongs.
- at least in the sense of muddy compromise between purities – not that a diphthong
understood in a certain way, taken in a certain way, cannot itself be a new birth, a tertium quid, a
focussed purity like the harmonic range of a boy’s voice singing those bewitching high notes from
Allegri’s Miserere, or a bewitching boy singing those high notes from Allegri’s Miserere: the boy
and the sound being a single chord, two intensely related realities one is not prepared to abandon
into a new single birth which is neither of them; and two realities each utterly uncompromised by
the close proximity of the other, not a diphthong –
In trying to understand things, I find I always tend to notice what doesn’t fit, or
alternatively what disconcertingly fits, so that in psychic terms at any rate I do seem to have a tail,
though physically I lack one (other than the Latin one, which has less ironic ways than Julia’s, even
though it is rooted subtly inside me). - This is perhaps why I am attracted to literature, because a
truly imaginative act always has the air at freedom, fails wholly to serve the purposes of its deviser,
may even, as in the story of the Goat’s Tail which comes last in a little booklet I have of Tibetan
tales (the appropriateness, I guess, unintended), come adrift entirely from the body proper and start
being magic:

An old couple separated after many years and pulled apart the goat which was their chief
possession, the wife being left only with the tail - She was about to throw the goat’s tail
away, as useless, when it spoke. ‘Mother!’ it said, ‘Do not throw me away, for I will render
you good service!’ ‘Nonsense!’ replied the old woman, ‘What can you possibly do to help
me?’ ‘I can bring you food and drink from the rich man’s house’, replied the tail – and it
did, and riches as well.

You can never tell what useless thing, useless in the usual terms, might save you. And poets, as
Sidney knew, deal in such trivia: ‘with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth
children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.’ - But Sidney in the Apology for Poetry
is uneasy, and I think I am too, about the completely uprooted, detached act of imagination. Ariel
disappears from Shakespeare’s play once wholly free of Prospero, and we are glad that Prospero has
the courage to free him in the end unconditionally; but that very act of kindness and bravery, that
releasing into the air, hovers about the epilogue Prospero then speaks, and though he confesses
‘Now I want/Spirits to enforce, art to enchant’, Ariel has as it were even more subtly, even less
visibly than before, returned to preside over the final release of his master, who finds in his
weakness, because of it, that he is an enchanter still. The imagination returns and acknowledges
what is humane, human – nothing can be more important than that, not kings, not wealth, power,
fame, mastery, understanding:

What! A speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A good leg will fall, a straight back will
stoop, a black beard will turn white, a curled pate will grow bald, a fair face will wither, a full eye
will wax hollow; but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon.

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