“I don’t know where to go.”
“Neither do I. Let’s go together.”
IGNAZIO SILONE
The pattern is set now—though not all set down—and I am looking back upon my life. What do I see? For every life is not only a string of events: it is also a myth.
First of all, perhaps, one should ask: is it possible to see one’s own life? “What the devil then am I?” cried Carlyle at the age of eighty, as he was drying his old bones after his bath. “After all these eighty years I know nothing at all about it.”
To ‘see’ one’s life (though the end is lacking—and perhaps that is why it is so difficult: perhaps, when the end has come, the pieces may fall into place and form a pattern) one should surely try to look back upon it with as much detachment as if it were someone else’s. Humboldt, I think, was saying something of this kind when he spoke of history as ‘a landscape of clouds’. ‘The man who is within it, can see nothing. It is only by looking at it from some way off, that he can perceive how clear and various it is.’ It is the experience of the traveller whose plane has broken through a bank of clouds and who looks down upon a vast, billowy sea, constantly changing its shape, forming new valleys and new peaks.
A friend of mine whom I asked if he could look back as detachedly as this upon his life replied that he had succeeded in doing so in regard to every part of it except the immediate past. He vividly remembered both what he saw and felt up to a few years ago, but could no longer identify himself with his own past emotions, any more than if they had belonged to a character in a novel or a play: “The stage setting is still there, but the lights have gone out.”
I do not think that I could say quite the same, at least not yet, though it would be true of many parts of my life. The child riding her donkey on the Nubian sands; the schoolgirl reading the Iliad with Monti; the self-conscious débutante in the English country house—they are me and they are no longer me. ‘We are like the relict garment of a Saint,’ said Keats, ‘the same and not the same: for the careful Monks patch it and patch it: till there’s not a thread of the original garment left, and still they show it for St. Anthony’s shirt.’
Yet there is something that remains. If I think back, I can sometimes recapture certain intense moments of feeling: the hour beside the Nile when I saw that my father’s tent had been taken up and suddenly knew that he was dead; the evening on which I read, on the terrace of the Villa Medici, the letter from Antonio which, after six months of separation, renewed our engagement and determined the course of our life; the night, forty-four years ago, on which, immediately after Gianni’s birth, I heard the Florentine bells ring out and saw the sky lit up with fireworks for St. John’s Eve, and felt happiness sweep over me. Proust, who cultivated the art of memory as perhaps no-one else has ever done, would say that these recollections have always been part of me. He wrote in Du Coté de Chez Swann that in later life he was able again to hear certain sounds which ‘in reality had never stopped’, the sobs which had shaken him at a certain moment of his childhood. ‘It is only because life is now growing silent about me’, he wrote, ‘that I hear them afresh, like convent bells which one might believe were not rung nowadays, because during the day they are drowned by the city hubbub, but which may be heard clearly enough in the stillness of the evening.’
If Proust is right, I am carrying within me (in spite of all the changes that have taken place) the whole of my life, from the day when ‘the arable field of events’ first lay before me, until the moment in which the typewriter is tapping out these words. And certainly it is also true that some of the memories I can now summon up have a greater intensity than the events themselves seemed to possess at the time, or rather—since memory has a filter of its own, sometimes surprising in what it suppresses or retains, but always significant—some of them stand out in disproportionate clarity to the rest.
Bernard Berenson once said in his old age that if he were a beggarman on a street corner, he would stretch out his hand to every passer-by, begging for ‘more time, more time!’ I do not agree with him. I should like, of course—for I enjoy living—to have a few more years (provided all my faculties remained) in which to watch my grandchildren growing up, to see a little more of the world and of the overwhelming changes that are taking place in it and, above all, to see a little more clearly into myself. But the time I would really beg for, at any street corner, would be time in the past, time in which to comfort, to complete and to repair—time wasted before I knew how quickly it would slip by.
Most of us, however well we may know that remorse is fruitless, carry in our memories some heavy burdens, and perhaps at least one so poignant that we can hardly bear to look back on it: a weight of sadness and regret, a knowledge that we have failed even those who needed us most—especially those, since with other people one is not upon that plane at all. Nor is it of much consolation to realise that almost everyone, while life is actually going on, is constantly being distracted by irrelevances. Just as, in travel, one may miss seeing the sunset because one cannot find the ticket-office or is afraid of missing the train, so in even the closest human relationships a vast amount of time and of affection is drained away in minor misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and failures in consideration or understanding. It is only in memory that the true essence remains.
The question then arises: how much of these memories can be conveyed? How much can or should one tell? ‘I believe,’ said Keats, ‘in the holiness of the heart’s affections.’ But what is holy is also private: as soon as it is told, some of its essence may be distilled, diminished, perhaps lost for ever. Yet one should, I think, at least refrain from suppressing—unless this implies the violation of someone else’s privacy—what has given, in some period of the past, the greatest meaning to being alive at all, and now that this book is drawing to an end I realise that to have confined myself merely to a passing mention of Gianni, of Elsa Dallolio, and of one or two other friends, is so large an omission as to falsify the whole picture. One of the reasons why I have refrained until now has been because I was afraid of saying either too little or too much, and I still fear this now. Yet I found no difficulty in writing about my father. I think that this was partly because I was less than eight years old when he died, so that my memories of him, though poignant, are still a child’s, and I can call them up with a certain detachment. But with Gianni and Elsa I have never achieved this, nor do I wish for it. I remember Elsa once saying, in connection with the waves of longing for Gianni which would sometimes come over me many years after his death, that I should not fight against them, since they were what was left to me of him, his living presence within me. “Otherwise all that is left is memory, which becomes static, a composition of lines and planes, like the rows of graves in a churchyard.” But how can one recapture, except for those who knew him, the essence of a child? I can say: he was generous, gay, sweet-natured, apprehensive, gentle, and above all, loving—but what are all these, but a list of words? A child’s life is movement: if you arrest the movement, choose one quality and pin it down, you give the solidity of a grown-up person’s character; the fluidity, the ever-growing, quick-changing life is gone. He was not a particularly imaginative child, in the sense of living in a world of his own or of making up many ‘pretending’ games; all his imagination seemed to go into his intuition about other people’s feelings, and a consequent gentle considerateness and almost fierce loyalty. He had, too, a quality not unusual in sensitive children, but very difficult to define: a certain spiritual integrity, an instinctive rejection of whatever was insincere, gushing or slightly silly. His greatest security was with his gentle, serene, old English Nanny; his greatest friend, Ugo, the gardener’s little boy at La Foce; but he also had friends everywhere else, both among children and grown-ups. I used to like to watch him sitting on the lawn at Westbrook with his great-uncle Bronson, both apparently equally absorbed in serious conversation, or walking with Charlie Meade, looking up and saying: “Do you know, Charlie?” in a rather confidential grown-up voice.
Gianni
Many people who wrote to me after his death used the same word—‘radiance’—and indeed I can think of no better one. But it cannot bring back the love of life which would shine in his face as he burst into my room in the mornings, or which echoed in his voice, as he snuggled down in his pillow at bedtime, saying, “More fun tomorrow.” Of his long-drawn-out, terrible illness (he died of tubercular meningitis)—during which he himself asked me what death was—I cannot bear and do not wish to write. A few months after his death, some American friends, who had stayed with us in the country with their children a couple of years before, asked me if I would like to see a film they had taken at La Foce. I agreed, not realising what I would see—and then, as we sat in the darkened room, could not believe my eyes: there was Gianni running down the wood path towards me, running and laughing. It is so that I wish to remember him.
* * *
It is still more difficult, in a very different way, to write about my friendship with Elsa. For twenty-five years, whenever I was in Rome, we saw each other almost daily. We worked together during the war in the Prisoners of War Office of the Italian Red Cross—and sometimes, in the evenings, I would join her in her own house with a briefcase of papers, on which we continued to work before the little brick stove in her bedroom, eating our meagre rations, until it was time for me to return home late at night through the darkened, silent city. Later on, after two years of separation, during which she was living in her country house, which was completely destroyed by bombing, on the northern side of the Gothic Line, and I on the southern, neither of us knowing whether we should see each other again—I arrived in Bologna with the President of the Italian Red Cross, two days after the Allied troops, to bring her and her ninety-two-year-old father, General Dallolio, back to Rome again. She was with me when both my daughters were born. She stayed with us, until her health no longer allowed it, at Lerici and La Foce, meeting Antonio there upon common ground, since she, too, was a countrywoman at heart. She helped me with every line of my books. I was with her when she died. She is buried in the churchyard at La Foce. These are the bare facts: they do not reveal the quality of the friendship. Differing in age, in nationality, in upbringing, in our circle of friends, we found, in Montaigne’s words, a friendship ‘in which we could no longer find the seam that had joined us together’. Possibly one thread in the bond between us was the fact that I found with her the relationship that I had always wished and failed to have with my mother, and that to her I was, as well as a friend, the daughter she had never had. But this is an oversimplification, and also suggests an inequality which was certainly not there. Friendship—any close friendship—is so various, made up of so many strands: companionship, the sharing of laughter, grief and anxiety, and then common work and common tastes—in people, books, art, manners, and above all, in values. In addition there is, or can be, between friends of the same sex, a great feeling of relaxation: less danger of emotional complications, nothing to suppress or conceal, but comfort, trust, security, and delight—and an exchange that makes no demands. One can afford to be—perhaps it is only in such company that one ever becomes—fully oneself. ‘Lui seul jouissait de ma vraie image, et l’emporta.’
Not only did we work together during the war, but when it was over, Elsa was the first reader and critic of all my books. I am naturally, in my writing, both impulsive and inaccurate. ‘Three years later’, I would specify (when in point of fact it was five), and many pages would be scattered with incomplete quotations and inaccurate references or dates. All these she firmly set right—but her help came to a great deal more than this. Though she never published a line of her own, she possessed what Leopardi called ‘le grand goût, le goût veritable’, a touchstone for many of her friends, both in art and life. For it was always for other people that she worked, never for herself. Many widely different people relied upon her judgement, her unfailing recognition of what was or was not first-rate—among others, Marguerite Caetani, the founder of the international review, Botteghe Oscure, who seldom reached a decision without seeking her advice, especially about new young authors. Incurably averse to any form of limelight and solitary both by temperament and circumstances, she yet possessed, to the day of her death, ‘l’esprit jeune’, and it was this which drew to her high, shadowy, book-lined room a great many young writers from different countries. They might come the first time a little doubtfully, fearing to find a dull old lady: and then they came back again. For she had another quality, almost unique in the present day: she was always there. She found, too, a great deal of entertainment and interest in these contacts: people and books, these were what she liked best, and by this channel both came to her. In later years, too, many visitors began to tire her, but always her mind remained equally alert and inquiring, though the actual effort of concentration became a burden. Sometimes, then, I would still try to make plans for her—gradually dwindling, as time went on. First they would be for a very small country house in Tuscany, not too far away from ours, to take the place, at least in part, of her own house near Bologna, entirely destroyed during the war; then merely for a small balcony outside her room, on which she could sit out, and grow some flowers—plumbago, jasmine, petunias, and a rose saved from her own old garden—or an occasional drive on a country road or to some Roman sight she wished to see again. For she possessed, both for the beauty of the Italian landscape and for its works of art, the unfading, discriminating passion that is generally only granted to those who have in them also a drop of foreign blood. “I can never understand how one can get accustomed to Italy,” she once said to me: “for me it is always a fresh surprise, which catches at my heart.”
La progettista, she would call me, as I turned up with another plan, and joined me in pretending that it might take shape. But slowly, inexorably, the horizon drew in. I still brought her occasional glimpses of the outer world, so long as they amused her: new books, picture-catalogues, stories about common friends or distant journeys (though these she thought rather unnecessary). What she liked to hear best was news of what was happening at La Foce, in the country life she most missed. “Go on,” she would say, “tell me a story che mi faccia compagnia.” Then, very gradually, even this became too much, too remote from the journey for which she was preparing. I learned fully to accept what I had known, but fought against, for a long time: that the changes that any of us can bring into a friend’s life, however close the bond, are very much more limited than one had believed in youth, that there is only a very restricted field in which we can help each other. Physical pain, acute anxiety, the accumulated burden of the past, these are matters that the most devoted affection may assuage but cannot change or heal. And yet, is this wholly true? In the long run—the very long run—of any deep relationship, who is the giver and who the receiver? In what scales can affection be weighed, and its transmuting power? How far may the ripples in the pool extend, even after the people directly concerned have ceased to exist? One cannot answer these questions: one can only wonder.
All I know is that for many years, up to the last day of her life, to me as to her other close friends, Elsa gave a far rarer gift than any that we brought her: she gave us peace. I have never quite understood—I still do not—how this happened. There she would be, sitting by her window in her dimly-lit, book-lined room, full of papers, pictures and small objects, with a brown rug over her legs and a pen in her hand, sometimes correcting someone else’s proofs—almost always in discomfort, often in pain—and one would come in with a long list of worries, irritations and anxieties, or else of hopes and plans. She would listen and—or so it seemed at the time—hardly interrupt at all, except with an occasional smile or dry comment. But as one came away, one suddenly realised that all the anxieties and uncertainties had fallen into their right place, assumed their true proportions. We had meant to cheer her up and comfort her; we went away comforted.
I should like to say something, too, about some of my other friendships with people of many different nationalities and ages, and belonging to very different social worlds. They have been men and women, old and young, writers, scholars and musicians, lawyers, diplomats and travellers, teachers and social workers, or just—without any label—people with whom I feel secure and at home. But—since I have never belonged anywhere to an enclosed and harmonious social circle—they have seldom felt equally at home with each other. They have had widely different backgrounds and tastes and have often disliked each other. On the whole, these friendships have brought me a more constant and steady happiness than any other factor in my life, and many of them still endure. But the only one that has been upon a plane similar to Elsa’s has been in England, and has been not only with one person but with a whole family—I would almost say, with a house: Pen y Lan, the country house in Wales of my mother’s cousin Charlie Meade, and his wife, Aileen.
I first entered Pen y Lan forty-five years ago, on my first visit to England after my marriage and, until Charlie and Aileen moved to live in London a few years ago, it never occurred to me to go to England without staying with them—always assured of the same unfailing, warm, relaxed welcome. The doors and the French windows into the garden were always open—metaphorically and literally—with children and dogs wandering in and out, and the scent of cherry-pie, pinks and roses mingled with that of the wood-fire and the old leather bindings in the library. One came in, stood for a moment in the hall with its white columns and curved, broad staircase, looked down over the valley—and was enfolded by peace. Aileen might be in the garden, pricking out seedlings, Charlie at his typewriter, writing about the Himalayas (or perhaps not writing much, but travelling back there in his memory, with his clear blue eyes lit up as by a celestial vision); one of the three enchanting little girls—Coney, Pin and Flavia—would be picking raspberries or strumming upon the piano, another catching and saddling her pony, and the youngest dabbling her toes in the garden pool. But as the car drew up, there they would all be around one, and one had come home. Occasionally too, Charlie’s Swiss Alpine guide and close friend, Pierre Blanc, would be staying there, and there would be endless talk between them about old climbs in the Alps or the Himalayas—“Bumbling”, said Aileen—and when suppertime came, “Ah, la bonne soupe!” Pierre would cry. “Ça rafraîchit les intestins, ca ramollit les boyaux!” A very few years later, Charlie’s son, Simon, was born—and it is now he who lives at Pen y Lan with his wife and children, so that the house we all loved is still alive.
Yet in any case, I think, it would still be alive for all of us—since it was, like Heaven, not a place but a state. I still do not quite know how to account for that condition of security and bliss, which innumerable other guests have felt quite as strongly as I. Perhaps it was partly, as at Westbrook and Desart, the emanation of a singularly happy marriage (though of course I am not pretending that its owners, like the rest of us, did not have their share, in the course of the years, of anxiety and grief ), partly the gentle beauty of the lie of the land: the steep green hill behind the house, the little stream beside it, where cyclamen from La Foce swiftly took root and spread, and the wide valley below, with its poplars beside the river and (I always seem to have been there in summer) the fragrance of new-mown hay. Partly that the food was so delicious, that we all laughed so much, that everyone was free to do as he pleased—to ‘help’ (or more often hinder) in the garden, to climb the hill, to wander in the valley, or to sit in the broad library window-seat piled with books, old and new.
I remember a house where all were good
To me, God knows, deserving no such thing:
Comforting smell breathed at very entering
Fetched fresh, as I suppose, from some sweet wood.1
And, in addition to all this, I could talk to Aileen, in particular, as I have never been able to talk to anyone else but Elsa: a completely free, unselfconscious exchange—I think on both sides—which has now lasted for over forty-five years.
Now the old life at Pen y Lan has naturally to some extent changed, but a very odd thing has happened. Charlie and Aileen have moved, partly for reasons connected with their health, to a flat in Onslow Square, in London, taking with them only a few pieces of their furniture and some pictures. Yet, in some strange way, it is still Pen y Lan that one finds in that small square sitting-room. Their children feel this, too, and—apart from their devoted affection to their parents—come back, when they can, almost daily to find it—not of course the space and the beauty, the glowing fragrant garden and the wide valley—yet something that evokes and includes all these.
As for myself, who now only go to England once or twice a year, I have only to come in by the door—greeted by the deafening barks of the small wire-haired dachshund, Tiger—to feel the years slip away and know that I am again secure. The brilliant window-boxes of the first years, containing in miniature the same exquisite mixture of colours as in the flower-beds around the pool at Pen y Lan, or in the posies on the visitor’s dressing-table, are now no longer kept up, but there are still patterns of brocade hanging over the back of at least one of the shabby armchairs—and still, as at Pen y Lan, one thinks it likely that, at one’s next visit, the chair will still be uncovered. Aileen’s welcome is still as warm, even if she cannot now clearly see one’s face, or read the books which used to pile up on her bed; and Charlie’s expression still has the same kindness and selflessness; there is still the same sense of harmony. And here too, as at Pen y Lan, the daughters and their children and grandchildren wander in and out—one bringing a basket of country apples or a great tub of flowers, another setting to work in the kitchen, and yet another just sitting down to gossip and giggle. Then another old friend comes in and reads aloud an absurd headline in the evening paper, or a poem from an old common-place book—and soon everyone is laughing, though I cannot quite remember why. What is it that makes it all so comfortable, so warm? Plainly it can only be something in the essential character of our hosts, that has overcome misfortune, straitened means and the passage of time. I think one can only call it goodness.
Do the walls of a house sometimes become imbued with the nature of its inhabitants? I think so—and indeed, why should it not be so? Many people would agree that there are certain places whose walls are impregnated by centuries of faith and prayer: I am thinking in particular of some little fishing-village churches in Britanny, and of the crypt of San Michele Archangelo on the Gargano, where, throughout the Middle Ages, pilgrims and Crusaders would come to pray before setting off for the Holy Land. And so, too, I believe that, on a more modest scale, the walls of some private houses may also be coloured either by good or evil: in short, by the character of those who live there.
With friends such as these, long ago, all assessments, criticisms or doubts have become irrelevant: one can cast off all unnecessary garments. And perhaps the easy, friendly talk that is then possible is indeed, as Virginia Woolf once suggested, a preparation for a final retreat. ‘Do you suppose’, she wrote, ‘that we are now coming like the homing rooks back to the top of our trees and that all this cawing is the beginning of settling in for the night?’
* * *
And now we are back where we started. If life is indeed ‘a perpetual allegory’, if what we seek in it is awareness, understanding, then the small stream of events I have set down here has only been a means—a means to what? I seem to have been diverted a long way from my original inquiry, but perhaps it has not really been so very far, since it has only been through my affections that I have been able to perceive, however imperfectly, some faint ‘intimations of immortality’, a foretaste, perhaps, granted to the short-sighted of another, transcendental love.
Looking back at the first thirty years of my life, two events have an outstanding significance: my father’s death, when I was seven and a half, and Gianni’s, when he was the same age that I was then. And both of these events are significant for the same reason—that neither of them was an ending. I do not mean of course that there was not the pain of parting—but that separation did not prevent my father’s personality from pervading my childhood, as Gianni’s has pervaded the rest of my life. Since then, a few years ago, there has been the death of Elsa, the closest companion of my middle age, and the same has been true about her. I am not speaking now about an orthodox belief in ‘another life’—nor am I entering upon the complex question of the survival of personality. All that I can affirm is what I know of my own experience: that though I have never ceased to miss my father, child and friend, I have also never lost them. They have been to me, at all times, as real as the people I see every day, and it is this, I think, that has conditioned my whole attitude both to death and to human affections.
It is very easy, on this subject, to become sentimental or woolly, or to say more than one really means. I think I am only trying to say something very simple: that my own personal experience has given me a very vivid sense of the continuity of love, even after death, and that it has also left me believing in the truth of Burke’s remark that society—or I should prefer to say, life itself—is ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. Not only are we not alone, but we are not living only in a bare and chilly now. We are irrevocably bound to the past—and no less irrevocably, though the picture is less clear to us, to the future. It is this feeling that has made death seem to me not less painful, never that—for there is no greater grief than that of parting—but not, perhaps, so very important, and has caused affection, in its various forms, to be the guiding thread of my life.
At the time of Gianni’s death, I received a letter from George Santayana (who in his later years to some extent returned, at least in feeling, to his Spanish, Catholic origins) which expresses, far better than I ever could, my feelings upon this subject.
…We have no claim to any of our possessions. We have no claim to exist; and, as we have to die in the end, so we must resign ourselves to die piecemeal, which really happens when we lose somebody or something that was closely intertwined with our existence. It is like a physical wound; we may survive, but maimed and broken in that direction; dead there.
Not that we can, or ever do at heart, renounce our affections. Never that. We cannot exercise our full nature all at once in every direction; but the parts that are relatively in abeyance, their centre lying perhaps in the past or the future, belong to us inalienably. We should not be ourselves if we cancelled them. I don’t know how literally you may believe in another world, or whether the idea means very much to you. As you know, I am not myself a believer in the ordinary sense, yet my feeling on this subject is like that of believers, and not at all like that of my fellow-materialists. The reason is that I disagree utterly with that modern philosophy which regards experience as fundamental. Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things. These are the only things that, in so far as we are spiritual beings, we can find or can love at all. All our affections, when clear and pure and not claims to possession, transport us to another world; and the loss of contact, here or there, with those eternal beings is merely like closing a book which we keep at hand for another occasion.2
About more orthodox beliefs, I am very hesitant to write, for fear of saying a little more or less than I mean or than is true. I have spent a good deal of my life in various forms of wishful thinking—trying to persuade myself, in one way or another, that things were a little better than they really were: my feelings or convictions deeper, and situations pleasanter or clearer, than was in fact the case—and I think it is time to stop. For this is what Plato called ‘the true lie’, the lie in the soul, ‘hated by gods and men’, of which the lie in words is ‘only a kind of imitation and shadowy image’.
Yet it is also true that all my life (though not steadily, but rather in fitful waves) I have been seeking a meaning, a framework, a goal—I should say, more simply, God. ‘Tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m’avais trouvé,’ was Pascal’s reply—but is this not too easy a way out for a fitful purpose and a vacillating mind? I remember a passage in Julian Green’s Journal: ‘Je lis les mystiques comme on lit les récits des voyageurs qui reviennent de pays lointains ou l’on sait bien que l’on n’ira jamais. On voudrait visiter la Chine, mais quel voyage! Et pourtant je crois que jusqu’à la fin de mes jours je conserverai ce déraisonnable espoir.’
That ‘unreasonable hope’ is always latent: one should perhaps open the door to it more often. Someone to whom I once spoke about these matters suggested that instead of nourishing a sense of guilt for what one cannot comprehend or fully accept, it would be better to start by dwelling upon what one honestly can believe. I think the advice is good, and have tried to ask myself that question.
I have seen and believe in goodness: the indefinable quality which is immediately and unhesitatingly recognised by the most different kinds of men: the simple goodness of an old nurse or the mother of a large family; the more complex and costly goodness of a priest, a doctor or a teacher. When such people are also believers, their beliefs are apt to be catching—or so I myself, at least, have found. It is the Eastern principle of the guru and his disciples: goodness and faith conveyed (or perhaps evil and disbelief dispelled) by an actual, living presence.
The outstanding instance in our lifetime has been that of Pope John XXIII. I do not think that anyone—believer or agnostic—who was present in St. Peter’s Square during the Mass said for him as he lay dying could fail to have a sense of what was meant by ‘the communion of the faithful’, or to receive a dim apprehension of his own vision of ‘one flock and one shepherd’, of the love of mankind as a whole. And if, since then, the realisation of this dream has been full of complexities, and many minds have been disturbed and confused by conflicts, upheavals and innovations, the vision still endures.
I believe in the dependence of people upon each other. I believe in the light and warmth of human affection, and in the disinterested acts of kindness and compassion of complete strangers. I agree with Simone Weil that ‘charity and faith, though distinct, are inseparable’—and I share her conviction ‘whoever is capable of a movement of pure compassion (which incidentally is very rare) towards an unhappy man, possesses, implicitly but truly, faith and the love of God’.
I believe, not theoretically, but from direct personal experience, that very few of the things that happen to us are purposeless or accidental (and this includes suffering and grief—even that of others), and that sometimes one catches a glimpse of the link between these happenings. I believe—even when I am myself being blind and deaf, or even indifferent—in the existence of a mystery.
Beyond this, I still do not know—nor do I feel inclined to examine here—how far I can go. Yet I derive comfort, at times, from a passage in one of Dom John Chapman’s letters. ‘There is worry and anxiety and trouble and bewilderment, and there is also an unfelt, yet real acquiescence in being anxious, troubled and bewildered, and a consciousness that the real self is at peace, while the anxiety and worry are unreal. It is like a peaceful lake, whose surface reflects all sorts of changes, because it is calm.’
A still lake, ruffled only upon the surface: a world of clouds, through which it is possible to break to the light—are these indeed metaphors more true than I can yet fully perceive?
Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him.3