Yet out of this "unpleasantness" (a favourite word of my father's) theresprang what I still reckon, by merely natural standards, the mostfortunate thing that ever happened to me. The tutor (in Surrey) to whommy brother had been sent was one of my father's oldest friends. He hadbeen headmaster of Lurgan when my father was a boy there. In asurprisingly short time he so re-built and extended the ruins of mybrother's education that he not only passed into Sandhurst but wasplaced among those very few candidates at the top of the list whoreceived prize cadetships. I do not think my father ever did justice tomy brother's achievement; it came at a time when the gulf between themwas too wide, and when they were friends again it had become ancienthistory. But he saw very clearly what it proved about the exceptionalpowers of his teacher. At the same time, he was almost as sick as I ofthe very name of Wyvern. And I never ceased, by letter and by word ofmouth, to beg that I might be taken away. All these factors urged him tothe decision which he now made. Might it not after all be best to giveme my desire? to have done with school for good and send me also toSurrey to read for the University with Mr. Kirkpatrick? He did not formthis plan without much doubt and hesitation. He did his best to put allthe risks before me: the dangers of solitude, the sudden change from thelife and bustle of a great school (which change I might not like so muchas I anticipated), the possibly deadening effect of living with only anold man and his old wife for company. Should I really be happy with nocompanions of my own age? I tried to look very grave at these questions.But it was all imposture. My heart laughed. Happy without other boys?Happy without toothache, without chilblains, happy without pebbles in myshoes? And so the arrangement was made. If it had had nothing else torecommend it, the mere thought, "Never, never, never, shall I have toplay games again," was enough to transport me. If you want to know how Ifelt, imagine your own feelings on waking one morning to find thatincome tax or unrequited love had somehow vanished from the world.
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If nothing else suggests this resemblance it is at least suggested bythe fact that we can make exactly the same mistakes on both levels. Youwill remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life bya vicious subjectivism which made "realisations" the aim of prayer;turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to producethose states of mind by "maistry". With unbelievable folly I nowproceeded to make exactly the same blunder in my imaginative life; orrather the same pair of blunders. The first was made at the very momentwhen I formulated the complaint that the "old thrill" was becoming rarerand rarer. For by that complaint I smuggled in the assumption that whatI wanted was a "thrill", a state of my own mind. And there lies thedeadly error. Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed onsomething else--whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods ofAsgard--does the "thrill" arise. It is a by-product. Its very existencepresupposes that you desire not it but something other and outer. If byany perverse askesis or the use of any drug it could be produced fromwithin, it would at once be seen to be of no value. For take away theobject, and what, after all, would be left?--a whirl of images, afluttering sensation in the diaphragm, a momentary abstraction. And whocould want that? This, I say, is the first and deadly error, whichappears on every level of life and is equally deadly on all, turningreligion into a self-caressing luxury and love into auto-eroticism. Andthe second error is, having thus falsely made a state of mind your aim,to attempt to produce it. From the fading of the Northernness I ought tohave drawn the conclusion that the Object, the Desirable, was furtheraway, more external, less subjective, than even such a comparativelypublic and external thing as a system of mythology--had, in fact, onlyshone through that system. Instead, I concluded that it was a mood orstate within myself which might turn up in any context. To "get itagain" became my constant endeavour; while reading every poem, hearingevery piece of music, going for every walk, I stood anxious sentinel atmy own mind to watch whether the blessed moment was beginning and toendeavour to retain it if it did. Because I was still young and thewhole world of beauty was opening before me, my own officiousobstructions were often swept aside and, startled intoself-forgetfulness, I again tasted Joy. But far more often I frightenedit away by my greedy impatience to snare it, and, even when it came,instantly destroyed it by introspection, and at all times vulgarised itby my false assumption about its nature.
It was late in the winter term of 1916 that I went to Oxford to sit formy scholarship examination. Boys who have faced this ordeal inpeace-time will not easily imagine the indifference with which I went.This does not mean that I underestimated the importance (in one sense)of succeeding. I knew very well by now that there was hardly anyposition in the world save that of a don in which I was fitted to earn aliving, and that I was staking everything on a game in which few won andhundreds lost. As Kirk had said of me in a letter to my father (I didnot, of course, see it till many years later), "You may make a writer ora scholar of him, but you'll not make anything else. You may make upyour mind to that." And I knew this myself; sometimes it terrified me.What blunted the edge of it now was that whether I won a scholarship orno I should next year go into the army; and even a temper more sanguinethan mine could feel in 1916 that an infantry subaltern would be insaneto waste anxiety on anything so hypothetical as his post-war life. Ionce tried to explain this to my father; it was one of the attempts Ioften made (though doubtless less often than I ought) to break throughthe artificiality of our intercourse and admit him to my real life. Itwas a total failure. He replied at once with fatherly counsels about thenecessity of hard work and concentration, the amount that he had alreadyspent in educating me, the very moderate, nay negligible, assistance hewould be able to give me in later life. Poor man! He misjudged me sadlyif he thought that idleness at my book was among my many vices. And how,I asked myself, could he expect the winning or losing of a scholarshipto lose none of its importance when life and death were the real issues?The truth is, I think, that while death (mine, his, everyone's) wasoften vividly present to him as a subject of anxiety and other emotions,it had no place in his mind as a sober, matter-of-fact contingency fromwhich consequences could be drawn. At any rate the conversation was afailure. It shipwrecked on the old rock. His intense desire for my totalconfidence co-existed with an inability to listen (in any strict sense)to what I said. He could never empty, or silence, his own mind to makeroom for an alien thought.
So far, so good. But it is at the next step that awe overtakes me. Therewas no doubt that Joy was a desire (and, in so far as it was alsosimultaneously a good, it was also a kind of love). But a desire isturned not to itself but to its object. Not only that, but it owes allits character to its object. Erotic love is not like desire for food,nay, a love for one woman differs from a love for another woman in thevery same way and the very same degree as the two women differ from oneanother. Even our desire for one wine differs in tone from our desirefor another. Our intellectual desire (curiosity) to know the true answerto a question is quite different from our desire to find that oneanswer, rather than another, is true. The form of the desired is in thedesire. It is the object which makes the desire harsh or sweet, coarseor choice, "high" or "low". It is the object that makes the desireitself desirable or hateful. I perceived (and this was a wonder ofwonders) that just as I had been wrong in supposing that I reallydesired the Garden of the Hesperides, so also I had been equally wrongin supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply asan event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All thevalue lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quiteclearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. In a way, I hadproved this by elimination. I had tried everything in my own mind andbody; as it were, asking myself, "Is it this you want? Is it this?" Lastof all I had asked if Joy itself was what I wanted; and, labelling it"aesthetic experience", had pretended I could answer Yes. But thatanswer too had broken down. Inexorably Joy proclaimed, "You want--Imyself am your want of--something other, outside, not you nor any stateof you." I did not yet ask, Who is the desired? only What is it? Butthis brought me already into the region of awe, for I thus understoodthat in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, acommerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with anyobject of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or socialneed, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaimsitself sheerly objective. Far more objective than bodies, for it is not,like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though ourimagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined,desired.
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