TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

12? September 1949

I don’t think your objection to ‘setting yourself up as a judge’ is cowardly. It may spring from the fact that you are the injured party and have a v. proper conviction that the plaintiff cannot also be on the Bench. I also quite realise that he didn’t feel the sin as a Christian wd: but he must, as a man, feel the dishonour of breaking a promise. After all constancy in love thunders at him from every love-song in the world, quite apart from our mystical conception of marriage . . .

As you say, the thing is to rely only on God. The time will come when you will regard all this misery as a small price to pay for having been brought to the dependence. Meanwhile (don’t I know) the trouble is that relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done . . .

The reason why I am saddled with many people’s troubles is, I think, that I have no natural curiosity about private lives and am therefore a good subject. To anyone who (in that sense) enjoyed it, it wd be a dangerous poison.

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

22 September 1949

The intellectual problem (why some children lose one or both parents in this way and other ways) is no harder than the problem why some women lose their husbands. In each case, no doubt what we regard as a mere hideous interruption and curtailment of life is really the data, the concrete situation on which life is to be built . . . When the data are of the kind we naturally like (wealth, health, good fathers or husbands) of course we tend not to notice that they are data or limitations at all. But we’re told that they are: and what seem to us the easiest conditions may really be the hardest (‘How hardly shall they that have riches’ etc.) . . .

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

27 September 1949

Yes, yes, I know. The moment one asks oneself ‘Do I believe?’ all belief seems to go. I think this is because one is trying to turn round and look at something which is there to be used and work from—trying to take out one’s eyes instead of keeping them in the right place and seeing with them. I find that it happens about other matters as well as faith. In my experience only v. robust pleasures will stand the question, ‘Am I really enjoying this?’ Or attention—the moment I begin thinking about my attention (to a book or a lecture) I have ipso facto ceased attending. St Paul speaks of ‘Faith actualized in Love’. And ‘the heart is deceitful’: you know better than I how very unreliable introspection is. I shd be much more alarmed about your progress if you wrote claiming to be overflowing with Faith, Hope and Charity.

TO DR WARFIELD M. FIROR: from Magdalen College (Dr Firor had come over to visit Jack in the summer of 1949.)

15 October 1949

To-day the less pleasant side of Autumn has showed itself for the first time. Up till now it has been paradisal, the sort of weather which for some reason excites me much more than spring: cool, cobwebby mornings developing into the mildest sunlight, and exquisite colours in the woods. It always gives me Wanderlust & ‘divine discontent’ and all that. To-day we have had a low, dirty, smoke-coloured sky racing overhead and a steady down-pour. That, however, has no causal connection (chronology proves it) with the subject that is uppermost in my mind and has been for some days: Old Age.

You are a bit further on the road than I am and will probably smile at a man whose fifty-first birthday is still several weeks ahead starting his meditation de senectute. Yet why? The realisation must begin sometime. In one way, of course (no, in two) it began much earlier (1) With the growing realisation that there were a great many things one wd never have time to do. Those golden days when one could still think it possible that one might some time take up a quite new study: say Persian, or Geology, were now definitely over. (2) Harder to express. I mean, the end of that period when every goal, besides being itself, was an earnest or promise of much more to come. Like a pretty girl at her first dance: valued not chiefly for itself but as the prelude to a whole new world. Do you remember the time when every pleasure (say, the smell of a hayfield or a country walk, or a swim) was big with futurity and bore on its face the notice ‘Lots more where I came from’? Well, there’s a change from that to the period when they all begin to say ‘Make the most of me: my predecessors outnumber my successors’.

Both these two feelings—the twitch of the tether and the loss of promise I have had for a long time. What has come lately is much harsher—the arctic wind of the future catching one, so to speak, at a corner. The particular corner was the sharp realisation that I shall be compulsorily ‘retired’ in 1959, and the infernal nuisance (to put it no higher) of patching up some new sort of life somewhere. You will not suppose I am putting these things as lamentations: that, to a man older than oneself, wd be very odd. They are merely the data. (Add, of course, among them, the probable loss of friends, especially if, like me, one has the imprudent habit of making more friends among one’s seniors than among one’s juniors.) And as usual, the result of all this (wd you agree?) is almost entirely good.

Have you ever thought what it wd be like if (all other things remaining as they are) old age and death had been made optional? All other things remaining: i.e. it wd still be true that our real destiny was elsewhere, that we have no abiding city here and no true happiness, but the un-hitching from this life was left to be accomplished by our own will as an act of obedience & faith. I suppose the percentage of di-ers wd be about the same as the percentage of Trappists is now.

I am therefore (with some help from the weather and rheumatism!) trying to profit by this new realisation of my mortality. To begin to die, to loosen a few of the tentacles which the octopus-world has fastened on one. But of course it is continuings, not beginnings, that are the point. A good night’s sleep, a sunny morning, a success with my next book—any of these will, I know, alter the whole thing. Which alteration, by the bye, being in reality a relapse from partial waking into the old stupor, wd nevertheless be regarded by most people as a returning to health from a ‘morbid’ mood!

Well, it’s certainly not that. But it is a very partial waking. One ought not to need the gloomy moments of life for beginning detachment, nor be re-entangled by the bright ones. One ought to be able to enjoy the bright ones to the full and at that very moment have the perfect readiness to leave them, confident that what calls one away is better . . .