Bruce Charlton's Notions

Thoreau was probably the first writer of the Romantic movement (called Transcendentalism in New England) that I deeply engaged-with, some four decades ago; and he has continued to be a favourite - I have read several scores of books by and about him. I regard Thoreau as one of the greatest prose writers ever, a genius of high rank, and one with whom I feel a special affinity.

But...

But if considered in terms of the evolutionary development of human consciousness, Thoreau was a dead-end; and indeed a clear exemplar of where Romanticism went wrong and failed to fulfil its destiny as intended the future of Man.


In the first place, Thoreau abandoned Christianity - replacing it with a very relativistic, fluid, not really serious, imprecise kind of deism and interest in Hinduism. This was a disaster, intellectually speaking; because it is never clear in Thoreau whether he regards nature as truly meaningful, or merely a 'projection' of his own psychological wishes. Indeed, there are passages of Thoreau in which he seems to regard the world almost solipsistically - as if the essence of his relationship with the world was only the maximisation of his own psychological gratifications. In the Economy chapter of Walden he explicitly depicts Life as a zero-sum transaction between his own selfishness and the world's demands on him; and expresses a determination that he will get the best of this bargain.

By abandoning any serious theism; Thoreau rendered his entire thought arbitrary - and opening his interpretations to the gravitational pull of the modern hedonic bottom-line of Life-as-therapy. It is in this sense that Thoreau can justly be called escapist; in that he advocates (and to some extent practised - although not consistently) the idea of avoiding responsibility, living for the moment (ie short-term gratification), living for oneself (pleasing oneself, self-training an indifference to the evaluations of anybody else).


But, putting that aside - let us concentrate on Thoreau's consciousness. In the autobiographical Walden, Thoreau's own consciousness is depicted in a very appealing fashion. The Thoreau character in the book lives in nature in a fashion and with a thoroughness that is most appealing to alienated modern Man: he notices everything in nature and is sensitive to the slightest changes, he responds powerfully, and is deeply-satisfied by his responses... His whole life is depicted as simply moving from one intense, epiphanic experience to another - all the while in an elevated, ecstatic stream of consciousness...

Of course this is writing. And Walden was written and re-written many times over many years - it is a carefully, brilliantly, crafted artifact - it is not an account of Thoreau's actual life or his mind. If we compare the book Walden with Thoreau's journals, we can see that his working life at about this time consisted of walking and writing; he would take walks, during walks he would make notes, and then he would write-up these walks for his journal; the journals were then the source of his books (some of them only published posthumously). The walks, the life, the experiences were (in a sense) fuel for the writing.

However, the point is that Thoreau's consciousness was a modern self-consciousness; he was not immersed-in nature in the way that American Indians were (or seemed to be). Thoreau had a great love for, and knowledge of, the American Indians - but the consciousness he saw in them was not his own consciousness. They were in nature in a largely unselfconscious and passively-accepting way that was utterly alien to Thoreau. By contrast, when Thoreau experienced nature it was purposively, to be remembered, reflected-on and written-about.

My point here is that this actuality is concealed in Walden and the other books. The Thoreau character is depicted rather as if he were himself an Indian.


In essence, Thoreau's consciousness - his experience of Life, including Nature - took place with full self-consciousness and in thinking. (And of course writing - but primarily in thinking.) Yet he did not depict himself as a man who experienced Life in the way he actually did; and furthermore, he seemed to regard the actuality as an intrinsically second-rate and still-alienated way of being.

My contention is that for Thoreau to have taken to completion the impulse of Romanticism, he would have needed to depict himself as he was: that is, a man who lived primarily in thinking. It was in thinking, self-consciously, in full alertness, that Thoreau was aware of Nature and of himself in nature - and the two were brought together deliberately, purposively, in the process of actual thinking.

Yet the yearning, the aspiration, the hope of Thoreau is seemingly for a life immersed and unselfconscious; a life like an idealised Indian who simply is, within nature, a part of nature.

What would have been needed for Thoreau to fulfil the destiny of Romanticism, would have been for him to develop a Christian understanding of the world as creation, as having meaning and purpose and himself as a part of this - but with his own unique role; an agent and an active co-creator, not merely a passive component.

And Thoreau would need to have recognised that his own self-conscious thinking was not only the place and activity within which he actually lived; but that this was a good thing, indeed the best thing! Instead of implicitly denying (by leaving-out) the aware observer, his world view should have recognised that this was exactly his destiny.

It would have been a matter of validating in theory what he actually did in practice.

And instead of trying to lose-himself in the epiphanic moment, and claiming that the moment included all; Thoreau should have aimed at strengthening his active, aware thinking so that it could match and surpass the power of the unselfconscious, passive, immersed experience.

This would, of course, have entailed a recognition that thinking is not merely a second-rate version of experience; not merely a pale reflection of the engaged life; but that thinking is Real Life; that thinking is real, really-real - that, in thinking, Man is potentially tasting the divine life and and becoming an actual co-creator. 


In saying that about what Thoreau should have done, I am asserting also that Thoreau really could have done this. Had he made different choices, he really could have taken this other path I outline above.

Why did he not? Well, in a nutshell, because he made bad decisions, wrong decisions - he equated Christianity (and theism) with Calvinism and churches and rejected both; he accepted that thinking was merely theory and experience was superior; he focused more upon crafting a work of genius (Walden) and seeking recognition for this, than on living life as a genius; he came to regard politics, and telling other people what was right and what to do, as being more urgently important than Man living a truly spiritual life - or, at least, he dishonestly tried to conflate the two.

The work that Thoreau chose not to do has still not been done; although we who live now have the good fortune that Owen Barfield has been able to explain all this; building on the insights of the early Rudolf Steiner.

But the primary task remains; and the solution has been indicated in theory and our task is to realise it in practice; in our own lives. The task is to live spiritually, as the Thoreau character mostly does as depicted in Walden. But to realise that to attain this entails a new and better kind of thinking, which is more like that practiced by Thoreau in the process of writing Walden.

This entails achieving a metaphysical understanding of thinking which recognises its validity and potential; and then practising this in our own living, as best we can - and (while patiently) this as our first, most urgent and significant priority.

This was a Thoreau morning - the kind of morning which always makes me think of Henry David Thoreau - his Journals, the memoir Walden, or some of the essays. The weather was sunny, the temperature below zero (unusual for this time of year), the birds were singing - spring just becoming visible even in the trees.

For decades, ever since I first encountered him in my mid-teens, Thoreau represented a kind of ideal for me - the life he described always eluded me, was always beyond my grasp - but it was about the best I could imagine (especially if I was trying to do without other people as much as possible - to be autonomous).

Always out of grasp because it required a certain kind of person to be content and fulfilled with that life of solitude, contemplation, walking and writing (mostly journalizing - for private consumption) - and I am not that kind of person: not really.

But then, neither was Thoreau. The life, and the person who was fulfilled by it, was a literary creation - not something which Thoreau actually did, any more than I myself did (i.e. momentary glimpses only). Thoreau's real life was very different - and indeed much more mundane and normal.

But even as an ideal, with the perfect Thoreauvian person living in the ideal situation and everything going according to plan - is not enough, is indeed radically incomplete and does not make sense even by its own account.

It is a vague and appealing daydream - a daydream in which the epiphanic moment is somehow expanded into forever - yet the same daydream itself denies the reality of 'forever' and claims that the momentary epiphany is enough (and all that there actually is).

As a guide to life Thoreau was the best I had, for a long time: the pinnacle - yet paradoxical, self-refuting, incomplete - and based on a literary creation and aspiration; not on achievement. 

The Thoreauvian perspective still retains a powerful appeal to me - but to suppose it is enough now seems absurd; to suppose it could replace and go beyond Christianity seems ludicrous... Clearly the Christianity of Thoreau's time was one which saw God more as a tyrant than a loving Father, clearly it was a Christianity which depicted this world as dead, purposeless, unmeaning, uncommunicative. It was almost intolerable (a kind of living death) for a man of Thoreau's sensibility.

But how I wish Thoreau had put his genius into expanding and refocusing Christianity - so it could contain those wondrous attributes he had in his writings - rather than in mocking, rejecting and attacking it...

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The New England transcendentalists were a loose group of thinkers and writers gathered around Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord Massachusetts - the best known of the group is Henry David Thoreau who was some 13 years younger than Emerson and also lived in Concord.

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For quite a long time - especially from about the mid 1990s to mid 2000s - Emerson and Thoreau, and their extended group were the focus of my reading.

This was mainly a personal project, involving collecting books, and a pilgrimage to Concord in 1998. But I did complete a publishing project related to this:

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/preface-bettina.html

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Looking back on the New England Transcendentalists (NETs), I now perceive that they were the glorious beginnings of the slippery slope down to disintegration and nihilism. In other words, Emerson was exactly what his most vehement critics said he was.

Emerson, though, was a prime example of a familiar phenomenon among creative geniuses - he was brought-up as a very devout Christian, strongly influenced by a strictly puritan aunt - then he became a Unitarian minister which was strictly not a Christian, and finally he became a transcendentalist (although seldom using the name).

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What is, or was, a transcendentalist?

My understanding is that a transcendentalist believes in the reality of transcendent Good (or, at least, some aspects of transcendent Good) despite not believing in God - or, at least, not a personal god, not believing in salvation.

So Emerson believed in the reality of transcendent beauty, and chose to devote his life to this - but the choice was based on the fact that this made him happy, rather than that the choice was 'right'.

As for morality, although - like all humans - Emerson had much to say about moral issues - this seems to have been, ultimately, a personal matter - perhaps aesthetic above all.

As for truth - Emerson told the truth as he saw it, for the length of time it took to write the sentence; and then another, then another. There was no conception that these truths corresponded to a stable reality - the only 'reality' was the intense moment. (Which is itself an incoherent belief.)

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Yet Emerson was a man of great sweetness of nature: he had no reason to be Good, by his philosophy, yet he was Good - although his philosophy was, it turned out, pernicious.

So perhaps Emerson was a Good man who, by his lectures and writings (his 'job' was that of a travelling lecturer) probably did net Evil.

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As for Thoreau - compared with Emerson he was an even greater writer, but a much simpler thinker.

I have come to regard Thoreau's philosophy as an exercise in self-justification, especially a justification of self will - of selfishness - of getting the maximum pleasure with the minimum of work.

Thoreau saw life as a battle between the self and society - society wants the individual to expend huimself in socieatal goals - it was the hjob of the individual to do the minimum of these imposed duties compatible with his health and survival.

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Thoreau took hedonism to the level of an art form - his own hedonism took the form of contemplation of nature including scientific study, and writing.

For much of my life Thoreau was a hero, and I would not concede that his philosophy was one of near-solipsistic selfishness, yet it was.

Thoreau took Emersonian transcendentalism, and - less constrained by personality and less grounded in tough puritanism - and ran with it. In doing so he created a body of prose writings of the first rank - yet almost poisonous to modern man.

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So I am now exceedingly ambivalent about the NETs. The allure of Emerson and Thoreau, as transitional-figures of genius remains powerful; their overall tendency and effect, I now regard as pernicious.

So I take the NETs much more selectively than in the past. I used to try and go deep into Transcendentalism, my approach was immersive (I can recall many immersive moments!) - convinced that it was the highest path if only I could understand and attain it.

Nowadays I see transcendentalism as incoherent, and unstable yet tending towards nihilism. It tries to believe in the reality of the transcendent - yet without belief in the reality of God (or gods) or divine revelation there is no reason to believe in the transcendent.

Emerson tried to argue that the transcendent could either be intuited, or become the subject of 'scientific' knowledge (e.g. his lectures on the 'natural history' of the intellect) - but this was not true, and disagreement cannot be resolved.

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Without God the transcendent becomes merely a subjective assertion - backed up only by rhetoric or propaganda, temporary alliances - hence, in the face of the trend of modernity, transcendentalism is weak, unstable, pointing down a slope towards materialism and nihilism, and self-indulgent yet self-justifying hedonism.

...Held back for a few decades by Emerson's natural goodness and Thoreau's literary genius, but then descending unimpeded.

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I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. 

He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. 

In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. 

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

 From the Conclusion to Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

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I can recall the excitement, and optimism for my life ahead, with which I read the above passage in my middle teenage years. It seemed like I was being offered a key to open the locked door of life - a life that, since adolescence, had become more sinister and oppressive in term of how most people lived it. 

I have since read many similar passages and extended arguments. The point may be summarized as asserting that if only we would adopt the right perspective, the right attitude to living, then the fundamental problems of life are soluble. 

Such statements remain common - although less culturally influential than they were up to the 1970s.  A more recent example is the work of Joseph Campbell - whose slogan of "follow your bliss" was saying very much the same as Thoreau.

 

Although there is no mention of deity - such statements do assume a purposive and benign universe; because built-in are such beliefs as that "more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him".

In other words, there is an implicit assumption that the proper attitude in ourselves will elicit from reality an appropriate response - we will "make our own luck". 

This is strictly nonsense on the basis of modern mainstream scientistic materialism; where the universe and Men's minds are alike the accidental and undirected products of random and determined processes. 

Yet something deeper and unreasoned continues to evoke a response and expectation that, indeed - despite "rationality" - we might perhaps make our own luck. 

 

Looking back, I would say that Thoreau's statement is false ultimately and overall - and that his advice does not solve the fundamental problems of life: it did not for Thoreau himself, nor has it done so for anybody else of whom I have knowledge. 

This is because the fundamental problems are life are consequent upon the inevitability, and ineradicable nature, of evil and "entropy" (by entropy I mean the innate tendency, operating through time, towards disease, degeneration, and death). 

And false because we are not only surrounded by evil and entropy in our environment; but these are both also operative within us - so that, even if we lived in an earthly paradise, we would carry evil and entropy into that paradise. 

 

On the other hand; although fundamentally untrue; Thoreau's advice is helpful! 

It is an attitude that can lead to a more fulfilling life - especially if (as was not the case with Thoreau) it comes to be underpinned and explained by faith in a creator God, who is our loving Father.

And Thoreau's vision may become literally true and eternal on the other side of death; if we choose to accept the gifts of Jesus Christ. 

Not many books have affected me more than Walden by Henry David Thoreau - for me, it is one of the great essayistic prose works to which I return recurrently.  

But it is also a book that helped create and reinforce a delusion in my life - and it seems to be a common delusion in many Western lives for more than a century: the idea that each of us can and should be able to live a life that is both continually-rewarding and objectively-satisfactory. Each of us ought to be able to find and make an earthly paradise...

In Walden, Thoreau uses his personal experience and writerly gifts to create a masterly and evocative account of one year in what seems to be an almost wholly-satisfying life - a life well-lived. And, what is more, this account went on to become a highly-respected and frequently read classic (albeit, Thoreau died before this happened). 

As a young, romantic and alienated atheist, this was what I wanted to hear and needed to believe; that this mortal life could be made self-justifying - both on a moment-by-moment basis and overall. It seemed that Thoreau had 'proved' this. The next question was how to do this for myself, in my own life. 

Such was the expectation - and I embarked on a simultaneous exploration of my own 'inner' needs and abilities on the one hand; and the 'outward' side and exploration of the world of music, literature and the arts for further ideas and possibilities. 

When I discovered Colin Wilson's The Outsider just a few years later, I realized that here was another man on this same quest - since this book surveyed many lives in the same spirit of looking for examples of a life-well-lived; and Wilson announced himself as trying to complete in his own life what these had attempted in theirs. 

But after the first flush of excitement; I gradually realized that Wilson's verdict on the lives and works of his exemplars was negative. And I gradually realized, from my own studies in biography - including Thoreau - that this was always the case. 

A genius like Thoreau could create an artistic expression of the life-well-lived in this earthly paradise of Walden Pond; but he could not and did not himself actually lead such a life. 

The paradise was an artistic artefact - not a human possibility; an illusion which led to a delusion.

And all this is very obvious to most people - I am unusual in that it took me much longer to come to such a conclusion (perhaps due to my unusual capacity for absorption in art, and my personal need); and I only reached it after extensive exploration and years of increasingly-failed attempting.  

As is usual, the problem was my faulty metaphysical assumptions. I did not believe in God or a created world, I did not believe in Heaven. Hence I was engaged in the attempt to discover meaning, purpose, coherence and permanent value in a world that I had already decided could have none of these.

The ideal of a life-well-lived could only be a delusion because it could only, at best, last for the period while I was absorbed in a world where the artist was (in effect) God. So long as I dwelt imaginatively inside Walden; for so long I inhabited a purposive and meaning-laden world that the creator (Thoreau) had made - with relevance for my condition and addressing my needs. 

But whenever I left this world, I would return to a 'real life' in which I had decided there was no real point or purpose. So the attempt at paradise became an attempt to fool-myself, to make myself feel as if my life was self-justifying; even though I knew (i.e. had decided) it could not be.  

This is why I think it is so vitally important for us to recognize that this mortal life is not an end in itself but an education; mortal life is experiences of relevance to life eternal in Heaven, if we learn rightly from them. 

As such a life-well-lived is a matter of learning from experience, we can and should set-aside the ideal of constructing for our-selves an earthly paradise. 

That such is impossible was, indeed, the wisdom of the most ancient philosophers and theologians who have left records. They knew that this world was intrinsically one of disease, decay and death - a world of evanescence, imperfection and un-satisfactoriness; and that therefore its reason must be sought in its relation to some external world where 'entropy' (as we would call it) does not rule.

For Christians; this external world has been revealed as resurrected eternal life in Heaven; and it is this which gives real and permanent value to this transitory mortal life. 

Thus we can recognize our imaginations of living an ideal life in an earthly paradise as delusional; yet we shall not despair! 

But instead see life as experience and learning and therefore always be full of hope... and indeed eager anticipation. 

Unlike the earthly paradise; such is a wholly realistic and attainable ideal. 

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For most of my life I was an atheist; and therefore my life strategy was to be happy in this life.

(Sometimes I self-denied that I was trying to be happy - but all this amounted to was seeking long-term happiness within this life rather than immediate happiness; for example by studying for exams (not enjoyable), or reading dull philosophical discourses - in order to have a better chance of a happier life later.)

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Looking back I can perceive that there were periods of my life - particular periods of up to several months together, up to about a year - when I was exceptionally happy: when I was happy in the here and now and looked forward to even greater happiness unfolding, almost inevitably.

For certain periods, therefore, happiness was easy, came easily, lacked the usual conflict between the short- and long-term. 

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And I can also see (I noticed this years ago, but couldn't explain it) that these periods of extended easy happiness were followed by dark times, miserable times, times when life seemed meaningless and irritating, and when I could not recapture the happiness of just a few months earlier. These times typically lasted severalfold longer than the easy happiness times which preceded them.

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A factor which explains this patterns was that the times of easy happiness resulted from successful hedonism; successfully organizing my life around pleasure seeking. And this strategy paid-off - for a while - with greater happiness; but the result of this was to entrench and make habitual, systematic hedonism, as my major life plan and expectation.

Then sometimes luck turned, as it will; but mostly it was a matter of coming-up-against the basic biological principle of habituation: repeating the same stimulus leads to the diminution or disappearance of the response to that stimulus.

(Or more generally, the fact that strict repetition is an impossibility; doing something/ anything for the second, tenth, hundredth, thousandth time cannot ever be the same as doing it the first time; it will always differ significantly.)

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The response is typically that of the addict: escalating doses of the stimulus.

The outcome is also like that of an addict: to become addicted to pleasure seeking despite the lack of pleasure; to become wretched and miserable at the repeated self-administering of an ineffective pleasure-stimulus; yet trapped in the pattern because ceasing to self-administer the stimulus causes immediate and even greater suffering.

Thus the once-successful hedonist is trapped in a chronic situation of low-grade alienation, purposelessness, meaninglessness and misery - a state that is selfish and short-termist and exploitatively sinful in attitude and action - trapped in this state by and because they seek pleasure and (for a while) got exactly what they sought!

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In other words, the longish dark periods of alienation followed the briefer happy times precisely because they were caused by the happy times; caused by the bad habits that had been ingrained during the happy times.

This, then, is one of the ratchets of sin as it operates in someone leading what is, overall and in world historical terms, a fortunate and comfortable life; the ratchet by which happiness is turned to alienation; and an attitude where the world and everything in it, including the people in it, is seen as a potential source of pleasure and life strategy a matter of using knowledge, reason and experience to extract the maximum of pleasure at the minimum cost of pain (and effort).

It exemplifies how atheism is not just meaningless, in terms of rendering everything that might be of value either infinitely trivial or a delusion, but self-defeating - because it is thwarted by the intrinsic and unavoidable nature of biology as it applies even to the simplest of animals - even an amoeba is subject to habituation.

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The state is common, near universal in the modern West, as Thoreau perceived when he diagnosed that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Unfortunately, Thoreau's prescription, which I was indeed following and explicitly so, was to recommend a more thorough and individualist hedonism.

What Thoreau failed to perceive - due to his vague impersonal deism/ atheism, as did I, was that Thoreau's remedy was in fact the precise cause of the disease it purported to cure - or rather that quiet desperation was merely a less severe version of the gratification-addiction which would, inevitably, result from following Thoreau's recommended life strategy of paying the minimum in time and effort for the maximum of personal gratification (see the chapter 'Economy' in Walden where this is explicitly stated).

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The only escape from gratification addiction in a secular world view is to obliterate awareness - intoxication, a state of perpetual distraction, a state of animal-like unconsciousness - or suicide, with an expectation that death is the end and this will obliterate all consciousness.

Which all amount to the same thing: for the secular hedonist the prescribed cure for being human is to stop being human - either by becoming something else, or by ceasing to be (especially ceasing to be aware).

This is to cure the human condition by killing human-ness - rather like making a 'better world - a world without suffering - by destroying the world. 

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I take this experience in my life as a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of trying to live for gratification, as an atheist, with a timespan restricted to human life, without a personal God who has personal concern for me.

Any strategy primarily to seek earthly happiness is self-refuting, and leads (deviously, but certainly) to pleasure-addiction and earthly misery; except it be embedded in an infinite frame: which is the quest for eternal happiness

Earthly happiness is then seen as a secondary and contingent by-product of the true primary goal of human life. 

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Although a somewhat Eeyore-like and gloomy individual in many ways; I (thank Heavens) have been prone to outbreaks of unreasonable happiness through my life - those times various called, Peak Experiences (Maslow), Epiphanies (James Joyce), Joy or Sehnsucht (CS Lewis) and many other things - those feelings much loved by the Romantics such as Wordsworth and the New England Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau.

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The mainstream secular modern view is that such moments have no deep significance - being caused by physiological change, or drugs, or a brainstorm... or something like that. The attitude is to enjoy them while they last, and then forget about them - because there is no special significance, nothing to be learned from them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson regarded these moments as significant - but cautioned against regarding them as evidence for optimism about future life. For Emerson they were not harbingers of anything, but to be valued in and of themselves - they were on the one hand the most important things in life, on the other hand utterly self-sufficient and free of general implications.

In practice, however, this remained little more than a bare literary assertion: meanwhile such moments came and went, the complications of life continued and then ended. Was Mankind any further forward after Emerson's explanations and Thoreau's experiments - were Emerson and Thoreau themselves any further forward? Seemingly not.  

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Yet, as the secular, this-worldly, spirituality which Emerson pioneered began to gather strength, there emerged a view that such moments of unreasonable happiness were harbingers - of a possible 'evolutionary' future for Man: a future of Men developing a higher and much happier consciousness. Such was the theme of Colin Wilson, and his books from The Outsider onwards collected and analyzed many examples of this.

Indeed, some kind of fundamental change to the human mind, society, or some combination of the two (whether or not this change was called evolution) was necessary if unreasonable happiness was to be anything more than a glorious interlude.

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Yet, even this has been subverted by Transhumanism - which purports to engineer and make permanent such moments in a scientific project dedicated to transforming human physiology using drugs, genetics and anything else necessary.

Even supposing this were possible; the implicit conviction is that unreasonable happiness is a delusional epiphenomenon - the hope is to make it a permanent delusion (and without the shadow of death to cloud perfect bliss, because death would be abolished too).

A project genetically and pharmacologically to engineer a state of permanent happy delusion in Mankind is itself perhaps the bleakest and most despairing philosophy of life which humans have yet devised.  

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What of Christian views of such moments? There are many and diverse - from the pessimistic idea that moments of happiness are most likely to be demonic deceptions; to the optimistic and positive visionary theology of Thomas Traherne.

But my particular interest is the idea from CS Lewis, and less explicitly from Tolkien, that such moments of happiness are evidence for Christianity - the 'argument from desire'.

That such moments of happiness are actually a desire-for - and foretaste-of - something not-of-this-world (since nothing imaginable in this-world could be a fulfilment of this desire); and the fact that we have such other-worldly yearnings is evidence that that desired world is real (otherwise we would not have such feelings).

In a nutshell, we are unreasonably happy because of hope for Heaven - and that hope was implanted in us by God.

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I personally find this a compelling argument (while being aware that others do not) - but as expressed in Lewis and Tolkien, it is somewhat incomplete. The reason it is incomplete is that this feeling is not only forward-looking and hopeful but (and Lewis says this very clearly) is also very powerfully nostalgic and backward-looking. Our state of unreasonable happiness is a yearning for what was, as well as what may-be.

Tolkien expresses this as a yearning for Eden - a real state of Paradise in which Man dwelt and from which he now is exiled. Tolkien seemingly regards this as a kind of inherited race-memory (indeed, the concept of hereditary memory is central for Tolkien's world view).

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But I find the complete explanation for the unreasonable happiness of Joy, Sehnsucht, Peak Experiences in the doctrine of a pre-mortal spiritual and Heavenly existence.

This was also the implicit explanation of Wordsworth in his famous phrase: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: the soul that rises with us, our life's star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.

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This I find to be a full and satisfying explanation for the phenomenology and function of these significant-seeming happy experiences: that the special quality of both backward nostalgic yearning and forward hopeful yearning, combine to locate my mortal life in-the-middle - between partial memories of a pre-mortal spirit-existence in Heaven before my birth and optimistic anticipations of a resurrected Heavenly life after my death.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882 - Born in Boston and lived in Concord Massachusetts.

Joseph Smith 1805-1844 - Born in Vermont, raised in upstate New York.

I haven't blogged much about him, but I am - or was - something of an expert on Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle, especially Thoreau - having read... some hundreds of books? on the subject.

By contrast, I have only recently read about Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism); and it took me quite a while before I suddenly realized that they were almost exactly the same age and lived in the same region of Greater New England.

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Despite this, in most senses the two men were about as different as could be, and inhabited extremely different worlds.

Emerson was upper class, highly educated and widely read, literate and an extraordinarily powerful preacher/ lecturer; while JS was none of these.

Emerson's world was intensely cultivated and inhabited by famous intellectuals and artists; JS's world was raw, violent, in near turmoil - I was particularly struck by the continual, daily - almost hourly - possibility and actuality of unrestrained 'vigilante' mob violence.

(e.g. Shortly after he founded the Mormon Church, JS was severely beaten, tarred and feathered by a mob; and his castration was planned, he was stripped and tied to a board but at the last moment the doctor brought along for the purpose could not bring himself to do it. Emerson only encountered any such things in the pre-Civil War heights of anti-abolitionism.)

*

Even in economic terms there was a stark contrast - Emerson's world was one of considerable security (by world historical standards) and for his early decades there was near zero poverty in Concord (Emerson was astonished by the poverty and depravity he saw in the much richer and more powerful cities of England); while Smith was himself poor, often hungry and lacking basic necessities; surrounded by poverty - families were continually uprooting and seeking subsistence, 'borrowing, begging etc.

*

So much for the differences. Yet the similarities in terms of magnitude of international spiritual/ religious influence are striking.

*

Emerson came from a Ministerial Calvinist (Puritan) background which moves through Unitarianism into Deist transcendentalism, and then a non-supernaturalist spiritualism focused on subjective sensations.

Thus Emerson, and his 'disciple' Thoreau, are spiritual and indeed lineal fathers of that vast modern phenomenon of Liberal New Age spirituality which dominate modern 'religious' seeking and expression

Emerson's spiritual influence was extremely large in scale, but diffuse in effect and tailing-off into mere entertainment and distraction.

*

Joseph Smith has been hardly less successful in terms of influence, leaving the only Western form of Christianity that has retained its devoutness, grown rapidly in size by winning converts and above replacement fertility, and has thriven among the educated and successful.

However the nature of influence was very different in each instance.

Smith's influence was numerically much less than Emerson's; but was spiritually much more concentrated and powerful - objectively transforming the lives of his followers. 

*

(As a side point, both Emerson and Smith had famous disciples: Henry David Thoreau and Brigham Young - who both provided a form of influence that was clearer and simpler and therefore more easily transmitted than the master's original doctrines.)

*

The US has been, since the early 1800s, the creative centre for new movements in Western religion - and Emerson and Joseph Smith were perhaps the most important of enduring influences. The very difference between their legacies is remarkable: Emerson having been assimilated into the mainstream mass media expressions of 'mind, body and spirit', self-help and esteem boosting; while JS's remains focused, hard-edged, tough and private.

*

So, what would each think of the other, and who would me most pleased with how things had turned-out?

I think Joseph Smith would have been satisfied, probably delighted, with his legacy church; while Emerson would have been utterly appalled at how transcendentalism had turned-out.

Transcendentalism turned-out exactly the way that Emerson's most vehement critics at Harvard and among the Calvinists and stricter Unitarians said that it would turn-out - except even worse: a chaos of irrationalist emotional subjectivity which justifies anything, or nothing.

*

Emerson's legacy includes not just the shallow, selfish and self-indulgent spiritual seekers of today, but Nietzsche and his various spawn.

I suspect that if Emerson could have forseen how things would have turned-out; he would have recognized and repented his error, and returned to some orthodox form of Christianity (perhaps Roman Catholicism).

And what a difference that might have made - to have America's first and most influential literary-philosophical genius on the side of tradition instead of progressivism...

*

*

Among my children’s perennial favourite picture books from earlier years are the series about Henry the Bear by DB Johnson.

Henry the Bear is actually the early 19th century writer Henry David Thoreau - and while the first four books of the series are all good, probably the first of these - Henry Hikes to Fitchburg - is the best because the 'plot' is so original and satisfying.

*

The plot idea was inspired by a famous passage from Walden - which defines Thoreau’s idea of economics: 

One says to me,“I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country.”

But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.

I say to my friend, “Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents... Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night;...You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrived there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season.

Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day.”

*

What happens in the children's book is that Henry and his friend make a wager about who will get to Fitchburg first: will it be Henry who spends all his day walking (approximately thirty miles), or the friend who takes various odd jobs to raise the money for the train fare?

We see, in parallel pictures, the friend working (mostly chores for other famous Concord luminaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott) and then running to catch the train to Fitchburg; compared with the way-stages on Henry's journey - crossing streams, taking honey and being attacked by bees, botanising etc.

The moral is that Henry enjoys and is fulfilled-by the activities of his day - every step of the way - and is enriched by the experiences; while Henry's friend's day is simply a 'means to the end' of purchasing the ticket. Even the eventual rail journey is itself cramped and contorted.

*

It is a nice, realistic, touch that 'the friend' actually gets there first, and wins the bet (the picture above is the final two-page splash of them meeting) - but only because Henry stopped to gather blackberries into a pail; which the two of them can now sit and eat in the moonlight.

*

There are a lot of people in the world whose life is primarily, and consistently, dedicated to their own self-justification; to explain to themselves and to others, that everything they are and have done, all their choices and experiences, were justified. 

Secretly, they assume (more than 'believe' - they assume) that they never made a mistake, that everything which went wrong was somebody else's fault (or sheer bad luck). 

Sometimes they are boastful, sometimes self-obsessed, sometimes (and this is especially common) they have mastered passive-aggressive rhetoric, so that their continual self-aggrandizement is disguised by a fake humility. 

The passive aggressive self-justifiers regard and promote themselves as humanitarians, altruistic, charitable, activists on behalf of others, 'passionately' 'concerned' with 'justice'... or some such abstraction.   

Often enough, self-justification is self-justified as a necessary response to the attempts of The System and of powerful people within it - to dictate our attitudes and behaviours. 

That was the trap I personally fell into - continually justifying myself on the excuse that otherwise I would be subordinated to someone else's justification. A better known example would be Thoreau in Walden; which book is impaired by Thoreau's frequent self-justifications; his boastful but insecure assertions, his denigrations of others - to make more space for himself.

I call self-justification a secret art, because - although it is extremely common - it is secret from the practitioners, and seldom explicitly identified by those around them. 

Perhaps because so secret and so seldom identified; it can have a terrible effect on a person; feeding upon itself. It is, indeed, a species of the sin of resentment (which I find a better description than the more usual 'pride'); a particularly insatiable and destructive sin. 

Self-justification can and does lead to hell. I can easily imagine that even when all other sins were repented; someone would cling to their own self-justification - as a thing so precious to their self-regard that they would give-up Heaven itself in order to keep hold upon it. 

*

I think I perceive the roots of political correctness in the dreams of pastoral idyll - which happens to be one of my favourite dreams; a genre to which I am intensely susceptible.

The pastoral idyll... It is in Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost and As You Like It - or before that in Robin Hood in the Greenwood; it is in the Romantics such as Wordsworth in the Lake District; it is in Emerson and Thoreau beside the slow Concord River or in a hut by Walden Pond; it is in (to name a contemporary favourite) John Hansen Mitchell's Scratch Flat - it is in real life too, especially between jobs and duties and on the best kind of holidays - time out of life.

*

What is pastoral? And what (for Heavens sake!) could it have to do with the crushing totalitarian bureaucracy of political correctness?

The short answer is: dreaming of a life free from care, a life where nothing really bad can happen, but where we are harmlessly diverted by diversity.

*

Eden on earth.

A life where we sink back into a kind of animal consciousness of the present - which (so far as we perceive) is a perpetual presence: such that although we may be mortal creatures, we are not aware of our mortality.

A wish to stop being self-conscious: to stop being human, indeed - to become part of the environment (and not an observer and manipulator of the environment).

And perhaps this is indeed how life actually was - much of the time - among simple hunter-gatherers. It is possible that this really was so.

*

Both pastoral and PC imagine a life where our environment is benign.

There are no serious harms, nothing to disturb us.

An equality of difference (like Robin Hood and his Merry Men).

Yet not boring, not static: the pastoral idyll is diverse in the diversity of nature. Seasons, the multitude of plants and animals, the changing weather, contrasts of day and night (see Thoreau's Journals).

But all is good, all is for our potential benefit (if we could but perceive them properly, as we are supposed to). All things hold lessons for us, if we can rightly perceive them.

In the pastoral idyll we are each of us gods - we create ourselves and our own world, by the spirit in which we approach it.

*

To live in an eternal present, with no past and no future, and eternity conceived as just more of the same; and death as unconscious - not something actually experienced because not part of life.

It is a trance-like, indeed dream-like state, aspired to.

*

The shared features of pastoral and PC are therefore a benign environment including a diversity of stimuli (all of which are edifying).

The difference - and it is such a huge difference as to obscure these similarities - is that pastoral is a natural environment; while for PC the environment is wholly designed.

But both aspire to a universal acceptance that avoids any need for coercion of individuals: both pastoral and PC assume that in a benign environment, conflict will be dissolved.

*

The gulf between pastoral and PC is the disillusionment which stands between the romantic era and moderns. The romantics believed that reality was good if properly approached; moderns are nihilists for whom there is no reality, and for whom good must be made not found.

Animists believe that the environment is benign, like a loving parent; but for PC the environment must be controlled to make it benign. Or rather, the perception of the environment must be controlled so that it will seem good.

At one time, for a while, nihilistic moderns believed that they could - as individual gods - self-create their own universe (the creative genius as cultural exemplar); but moderns lack this faith in their own capacities. They have found that (for whatever reason) it simply doesn't work.

And to be utterly dependent on oneself to provide meaning and purpose led to solipsistic despair.

*

(To know that one created one's own reality, and that failure meant nothingness, no form, no meaning (nausea)... this is too overwhelmingly insecure a state to be ignored. It pressed continually upon life, interfering with living. This was existentialism, and it was too horrible to contemplate.) 

*

So, since the individual seemed unable to create reality, this must be done by society.

Everyone must cooperate with everyone else in this task upon which everything depends; everyone must combine to create and maintain the illusion of purpose and meaning up to the singularity when we forget that it was a created illusion and it becomes inescapably perceived reality: as real as anything can be and with no perceived alternative.

And, to be secure and dependable, this cooperation must be managed, it must be controlled, formal, systematic, and human-proof.

*

Political correctness aspires to an idyllic state that is fully immersive and lifelong; a virtual reality which is (according to modern metaphysics) subjectively indistinguishable from real-reality - real-reality which, anyway, is assumed to be a childish illusion, like the pastoral idyll.

PC regards itself as a mature illusion, not a childish one. The idyll of political correctness is not, therefore, an adventure playground of forests and rivers; but instead a wholly-managed, totalitarian bureaucratic state that guarantees benign diversity, among which we are free to move un-self-consciously - careless of past, future and eternity.

*

I have been interested in consciousness, and unusual conscious states, for my whole adult life and continuing - but in various ways and with different focuses.

c1974: I discovered the work of Robert Graves; first the Claudius novels, then the essays and criticism. I became fascinated by his remarks concerning the poetic trance, and the possibilities of non-logical leaps of inference and types of knowledge. Bernard Shaw's writings on Creative Evolution (Man and Superman, Back to Methuselah) pointed at higher consciousness as the (impersonal) aim of Life - this amplified by a mystical nature writer called John Stewart Collis. HD Thoreau's Walden and Journals described moments of connection with nature, which I sometimes experienced.

1978: I discovered Colin Wilson's work, with its primary focus on attaining higher forms of consciousness - since then I carefully read through most of his books, many several times. About this same time I encountered CG Jung, and the idea of archetypes that lent depth, universality and significance to life and art. A book of essays by composer Michael Tippett (Moving into Aquarius) talked of the importance of this kind of thing in artistic creation.

1994: I began an active scientific study of consciousness from the perspective of the theory of evolution by natural selection. I began to publish on the subject. To Thoreau I added an engagement with RW Emerson and other 'related' authors like Walt Whitman, William James, Robert Frost.

1998: Shamanism was of increasing interest - I read anthropological texts, and also - from about 2001 - Neo-Jungian writers such as Joseph Campbell and James Hillman.

2010: Having become a Christian, I investigated Eastern Orthodoxy (and the analogous 'Celtic'/ Anglo Saxon British tradition) - i.e. the practices of constantly-praying/ meditating ascetic monks and hermits, wonder-working Saints etc.

c2013: Having committed to Mormon theology and metaphysics; this was the beginning of my current phase of great interest in William Arkle, Owen Barfield and Rudolf Steiner, supplemented by William Blake and ST Coleridge.

So, for me, consciousness has been (in different, sometimes contrasting, ways) the single major intellectual and personal interest over a span of more than four decades - and continuing.

My understanding is that we began (pre-mortal) life as spirits, each of whom can trace their origin eternally; at some point we became sons and daughters of God (that is, of Heavenly Parents); and at some later point we were incarnated when these spirits took-on bodies.

Thus, (with a few exceptions, probably) I believe that this is our one-and-only incarnate mortal life. 

(To complete the sketch: when we die the spirit is severed from the body; and then we are resurrected with immortal bodies.)

I explain the typical experiences and memories that are usually taken as pointing towards reincarnation with previous earthly lives; as being actual occurrences of our pre-mortal spiritual existence - when we were a type of 'angel', each of us engaged in some distinctive way with work in God's creation.

So, when we have a sense that we really were present at some time and place in earth's history (for example) it is possible that we really were there, as pre-mortal spirits. We were not a specific historical person, but may have been present and intimately-involved with the divine destiny related to some people, some era, some location...

This may well explain my own very solid and long-term fascination and empathy for a few very specific places, times and persons; for which I seem to have memories of a spiritual, aspirational 'atmospheric' nature - but no solid, specific physical details.

Three examples are the English Lake District (specifically around Keswick) at the time of the Lake Poets such as Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth; Concord, Massachusetts at the time of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott; and Oxford at the time of The Inklings (especially Tolkien and the Lewis brothers).

Just to clarify, I do not feel any special identification with any of these individuals; but I do feel a strong identification with their core spiritual-intellectual aspirations and efforts.

Taken together, all of these make an obvious theme of romanticism, of escaping 'modern' alienation and breaking from materialism into a (mythic) spiritual awareness.

Despite the fact that this theme goes back to my middle teenage years, long before I was a Christian, and long before I could articulate this theme (which has, indeed, happened only with the past few years) - this is, and always has been, my most deeply-cherished theme and hope. And becoming aware of it - explicitly, and in a coherent fashion - is extremely encouraging, energising and orientating.

Of course, it is possible to write-off this notion as a wish-fulfilment fantasy, because it is based upon subjective conviction. About this I have nothing to say: I merely state my own understanding. The value is personal - my understanding of my situation is not necessarily or any interest or relevance to other people, especially strangers.

But you may yourself have a different set of fascinations, which may yield a different impression of pre-mortal concerns; and this may lead-onto a clarity about your business here-and-now, in this mortal life - the essence of what you, personally, are 'here-for'.

*

It is interesting how imagination works differently for different people, and for the same person at different times or stages in their life.

I am thinking of what comes to mind when one thinks of a place, person, book, event, or even an historical situation - the last one is the most fascinating, since it is such a large and complex things to 'imagine' (say) the life of a Roman on Hadrian's Wall, or the University of Paris at the time of Thomas Aquinas, or  Concord Massachusetts when Emerson and Thoreau were neighbours. 

*

I personally find that for some things the memory is usually based on a static image, like a photograph; or perhaps more exactly, something rather more like a short segment of video, lasting a few seconds.

So, for the last example of Concord, I have a picture of Emerson's study with its Aeolian Harp; a picture of sitting in the doorway of Thoreau's hut looking out at gentle rain; and a scene of lounging beside a very slow flowing river, in a meadow, on a summer afternoon.

*

But for Constantinople at the height of the Eastern Roman Empire I have something more like a feeling, an emotion experienced here-and-now induced by the imagination of being there.

The actual imagined place is neither a picture, nor a video, but includes a vista of the city in its setting, the impression of light reflected from sea, marble, through windows and from rich colours and gold - set below a solidly blue sky; choral singing and processions with crosses and icons aloft - all bound-up in that kind of entranced yearning which C.S Lewis called joy and the German Romantic called Sehnsucht - but knowingly directed at Heaven.

The specific details of what is imagined are vague, perhaps because they seem more like an inferred explanation of what might serve to induce the emotion, rather than being a causal stimulus of the emotion.  

*

It seems, therefore, that the reason that I have such an affinity for Byzantium is precisely due to the strength and quality of this imagination of the time and place.

What I get from it is a sense of what it would, could or might be like to live in a place which I and those around me considered to be a representation of Heaven-on-Earth - yet which always pointed above and beyond itself to the eternal reality of Heaven itself.

*

To be able to imagine this has (it seems to me) done more to sustain and direct my Christian faith than has a great deal of cold reason.

This is, for me, the reality of Byzantium and a pinnacle of earthly Christian life - and the facts concerning abstractions such as political and religious structures, publications and biographies... these seem arbitrary, uncertain and irrelevant by comparison.


*

In the preface to Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, the 'romantic' was given a definition in terms of Wordsworth focusing on the numinous qualities of Nature, and Coleridge upon the Supernatural. So the Fantasy aspect of Romanticism - such as we see in The Inklings - was present from the start.

Shakespeare had a role in Romanticism, in that his renewed popularity came from a German reappraisal (probably originating with Herder, who worked from translated excerpts of Shakespeare - and greatly amplified in England by the Shakespeare lectures of Coleridge) that saw Shakespeare in such terms; as a 'wild', spontaneous, natural genius.

Shakespeare was often linked with the then extremely high valuation of the strange, semi-faked 'poems' of 'Ossian' - which were a 'translation', plus very extensive reworking and expansion, of Gaelic songs and stories collected in the highlands and islands of Scotland by James Macpherson and published in the middle 1700s. So that Homer, Ossian and Shakespeare were found linked in a 'bardic' lineage - for instance, this is later referenced by Emerson and Thoreau.

Shakespeare came from a 'recusant' Catholic, and therefore pre-Reformation, sensibility on his mother's side. She was Mary Arden, and members of the Arden family were part of a concentration of families trying to practice the Old religion; Ardens even involved in, and some executed for, spying, rebellion, and assassination plots.

So, Shakespeare had an interest in magic, fairies, ghosts, witches and the like; that can be seen from A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest (the only plays whose plots were essentially original) and others of his greatest work such as Macbeth and Hamlet. And, in general, many of the plays have a strong 'premodern' element of fate or providence governing the affairs of Men. However, as Tolkien noted with disappointment, such elements are seldom given full value or treated with full seriousness - it is mostly a matter of hints and epiphanies.

With the dawning of the Romantic consciousness, Shakespeare was therefore ripe for revival and reinterpretation in this light - despite that in other respects, his work was often very 'artificial', ironic, fashionable, or simply derivative (in terms of basic plots and subject matter).

Shakespeare can therefore be seen as spanning from the Medieval consciousness, which simply took magic and the supernatural for granted as a real and objective part of the external environment; the early modern consciousness, which treated such matters ironically and satirically - as being unreal and delusional - purely a part of subjective consciousness; and the Romantic consciousness which (in its highest development; e.g. Coleridge, Novalis, Blake) returns to the pre-modern in conscious thought, with a realism that includes as necessary, both the subjective and the objective.

In other words, the Romantic concept of the magical-supernatural is that these things are real; and/but - like all real things - their reality is neither wholly in the external environment nor the internal consciousness, but in the necessary apprehension of the environment by consciousness. They (both the supernatural and all real phenomena) are indeed out-there, and/but they require the subjective consciousness to be known; and only the known is real. (Only the known is part of Creation - all else is unknowable chaos.)

The magical is real, but reality has a new location, in the realm of thinking. Neither purely out-there nor in-here, but in a new conception of the potential of the world of thinking to know directly and perhaps participate in divine creation. This is the thinking of the 'creative genius', who is seen by Romantics as (potentially) the proper mode of all Men.

So the ghost in Hamlet is 'really there' but requires someone to see and hear it; if there was no consciousness present, there would be no ghost.

*

*

It narrows it, of course!

Or more exactly, travel amplifies existing tendencies to shallowness, distractability and alienation.

*

I have always had something of an aversion to travel - except by foot; but this was, for the years of youth, overcome by the craving for novelty and the wish to visit people.

But the ill effects of travel were obvious in myself, and in others who did a lot more of it.

*

Travel powerfully provides that distraction which the modern mind craves, perhaps above all else. And it brings intrinsic status - one is allowed, indeed encouraged, to boast about the conspicuous consumption of travel in a way not permitted for other luxuries.

*

The problem is often worst for the best holidays - a good holiday in a good place can be an intoxication, a glimpse of how life ought to be, a time when an animistic spell descends and all manner of synchronicities occur.

Yet, somehow, this happens at the expense of ordinary working life, reciprocally with real life.

Too often, life becomes polarised between magical holidays and mundane reality - people live in daydreams of elsewhere, the be rescued by travel. Yet these daydreams are unrealistic, untrue; and the whole process is one of addiction - craving, tolerance, escalating doses...

***

Of my favourite authors, several were famous non-travellers.

The most notorious of non-travellers was Thoreau, and it is likely that reading Walden at a formative age was a factor in my ideas, or at least my ideals.

Fr Seraphim (Eugene) Rose seems never to have left California, except once to lecture.

*

But The Inklings were the most serious serious non-travellers.

Tolkien, C.S Lewis and Charles Williams stayed in the British Isles their whole lives, by choice.

To be precise, C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien did military service in France in their youth, and Lewis went to Greece for a holiday with his dying wife; while Charles Williams was unfit for the Army and stayed in Britain except when he spent a day lecturing in Paris.

Warnie Lewis, a leading expert on Versailles, never visited Versailles.

Indeed, the Inklings were generally pretty averse even to local travel, in some respects: Lewis thoroughly disliked visiting London (less than two hours from Oxford), Williams profoundly disliked leaving London.

*

Contrast this with the frequent, compulsive and wide-ranged globe-trotting of modern day equivalents among high flying academics and editors...

Contrast the quality and scope of the work...

Consider that 'travel writers' are, with no exceptions, shallow and glib poseurs. Yet if travel really did what it pretends to do, the best travel writers would be the best of men.

***

What we see with Tolkien, Lewis and Williams is a focused power of active and animistic imagination, a power which is to some extent spontaneous and natural - yet a power which is apparently diverted or dissipated by the distractions of modern life, among which travel is one of the most potent.

Travel is not real life; and travel the most unreal of fantasies.

*

For most people travel means holidays.

It is not so much that holidays literally vampirize life; but that the relation of holidays and life is itself a product of a characteristic modern mind-set, an activity whereby the admittedly-unreal (the holiday) is made experiential.

*

Travel is a literalized fantasy that - because literalized - sucks from real life.

Travel takes the actual world and makes a fantasy of it; the more convincing the operation, the greater its dangers.

But fantasy - such as Tolkien's and Lewis's - makes another real world.

*

Or, fantasy is not so much an escape from the real world as an escape into an un-real world.

*

The error is to suppose that the holiday world is real and the fantasy world un-real; the danger is the pretension of travel that we can actually experience another world by moving our bodies. 

*

The world is not enough: we know this as datum.

Travel - especially holiday - is a more or less successful denial of the fact that the world is not enough; successful fantasy is an acknowledgment that the world is not enough - a compensation and an en-courage-ment.

The wisest perhaps never travel; although they may sometimes need to move across the world, or visit, or go on pilgrimages.

*

My understanding of Romantic Christianity is that there were several periods since the Industrial Revolution began; where events were aligned (presumably under divine influences, because this was Man's destiny) such that issue became clearer in The West.

I mean times and places when there was a significant awareness of a choice between the path of continued modernisation (based on continual growth based on increased technology, specialisation, trade etc); and a very different kind of religion, spirituality, ideology, way-of-being - that was Christian and also Romantic.

In none of these eras was that choice made. There were a few individuals, a small following of Romantic Christians - but the powerful and influential people and a large majority of the Western 'masses' chose instead to follow the path of increasing atheism, secularism, materialism, scientism, positivism and bureaucracy.

A smaller proportion adhered (in dwindling numbers, with diminishing conviction) to some form of traditional - Church-driven and externally-orientated - Christianity; or else chose an anti-or un-Christian Romanticism of (either or both) utopian politics and the secular revolution.


The first such era was the beginning of Romanticism itself in the late 1700s and early 1800s, originating in Farnce, Germany and Britain. It dissipated into the characteristic combination of atheism, leftist politics and sexual license that we see in the circle of Byron and Shelley.

At this time, the world's population was at its agrarian/ medieval level about one billion - and from a materialist point-of-view there was no problem about switching to a different and more spiritual way of life. The extra productivity/ efficiency of the agrarian/ industrial could - in principle - have been directed to alleviating absolute poverty, then reducing the quantity of drudgery and labour; and freeing more time and energy for 'higher things'.

The next Romantic era came at the end of the 19th century; but this again was dissipated into sex and politics; and creativity went-into radical experiments in the arts. There was the establishment of a 'Bohemian' lifestyle for drop-outs from the aristocrats, upper and professional classes. World population was about one and a half billion - about a quart of which was of European descent.

The next significant Romantic revival was not until the middle 60s-70s; when world population had grown to about three and half billion; and had reached the point at which an adoption of the Romantic lifestyle would have caused a very significant reduction in the standard of living people had become used to.

Nonetheless; there was among some people a clearly articulated sense that that material production had reached the point of 'more than enough'; and that it would be valuable to scale back on industialisation, trade and labour in order to have a life that was more free and more spiritual.

But, instead there was an expansion of the Bohemian lifestyle - radical politics, sex, drugs, and rock & roll - beyond the young upper-crust and to include pretty much anyone who wanted it: at first the middle classes, later everybody. There was a brief burst of creativity in the populist arts (pop music, pop art, modern dance etc); but before long, all of these were channelled into varieties of consumerism and bureaucracy.

We got to the present situation where most people are some kind of manager working for a branch of the global bureaucracy, and deploying their leisure in doing, watching, day-dreaming about whatever hedonic activity is favoured.

Since the middle 1970s there has never been any serious or large-scale attempt to move towards the Romantic Christian idea; instead the genuine problem has been lost sight of in a world of increasing diversions, short-termism and dishonesty taken to a level of ingrained habit.

Thinking has never been at a lower ebb - with high status intellectuals unable to follow a couple of steps in reasoning and unable to recognise even simple explanatory patterns behind observations.


The above is (very approximately, painted with a very broad brush) how we in The West (or the developed world) now find ourselves where we currently are; at the end of that era which began in the 1700s with the agrarian then industrial revolutions; after a sequence of chances and failures and evasions.

This end was inevitable because the situation was unsustainable - for many, many reasons; but mainly because generation upon generation of spiritual evasion, dishonesty, and outright lying has reached a point where people have decided - en masse - that things must be brought to an end.

We are observing as vast act of rejection of Life, at all the levels in which Life is manifested in this world. By the revealed preferences of hundreds of millions of people; nothing (including radical politics, sex, and hedonism generally) is valued enough to risk anything for it - all has been unceremoniously dumped.

As Thoreau accurately commented more than 150 years ago, and the situation has increased several-fold since: The mass of Men lead lives of quiet desperation; and in the past few weeks desperation has (for most of the mass) turned to despair, and an end is sought.

And perhaps (as was prophesied by various people at various times) most of those who have apparently been among the most devout of self-identified Christians are - it turns-out - as bad as everybody else.


Naturally enough - in a Godless, Christ-rejecting and repentance-denying world - this colossal act of global suicide is being dishonestly self-denied. But that is what's afoot.

Yet, because God is the creator, our loving parents and we his children - for every person at every moment there is an 'instant' solution to this suicidal despair; and the promise of everlasting, Heavenly, resurrected life to come.

(Everybody is an unique individual, but) At some level, we all know (from our pre-mortal life as spirits) the nature of this promise and that this promise is real; but the mass of Men are now so deeply corrupted that such a basic act of acknowledgement is beyond them - or else they know, but choose otherwise - choose sin, or choose annihilation of The Self.

It is better to make such choices during this mortal life; because that is what this immortal life was designed-for; but even if the choice is evaded and denied there will come a point (maybe at the moment of death, manybe sometime after) when we will be confronted with this choice.

Best be prepared. 

Looking back over the past fifty years I have been reading Tolkien; I can perceive that my attitude to the books (especially The Lord of the Rings) falls into three broad phases. 

Socio-Political

When I began reading, in my middle teens, I regarded LotR as, pretty much, a blueprint for how we ought to live in a socio-political sense. My attitude was that the lesson of the book was that we ought to deindustrialize substantially, and return to an agrarian society, divided into mostly self-sufficient units (i.e. a kind of feudalism), based upon a much simpler level of technology. 

Thus, my interest in Tolkien led to an interest in pre-modern history - Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval. And also an interest in the 'self-sufficiency' and 'intermediate technology' movements, 'ecology', and the politics of William Cobbett, HD Thoreau, William Morris, RH Tawney, the 'distributism' of Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, and EF Schumacher of 'Small is Beautiful' fame.  

In essence; I saw the spirit of Tolkien located in a type of society; and I hoped to live by this spirit via living in what I understood to be a Tolkienian society. I therefore read the books almost as if they were a manual or blueprint for how we ought to live. 

Jungian

In younger adult life, I lost faith in both the power and goodness of politics - and realized that its direction was against the agrarian. I realized that Men were not passive products of social systems - and I developed the broadly-Jungian idea that 'the psyche' was the primary reality. 

I saw the psyche as a third realm in-between the subjectivity of the everyday and mundane mind on the one hand, and the objectivity of the material world (including society and politics) on the other hand. 

My broad conclusion was that the 'lessons' of Tolkien ought to be developed in terms of living in accordance with the collective unconscious - which I saw as an objective realm of archetypal and mythic realities that was shared by all Men. 

In sum; I saw Tolkien as the greatest modern exemplification of this mythic world; and reading him as a way of discovering and strengthening the mythic in my own life; with the goal of living an integrated life - feeling part of society and guided by the wisdom of myth. 

Romantic Christian

In middle age I became a Christian, and then more and more of a 'Romantic' Christian - under the influence of Mormon theology; and writers such as Blake, Coleridge, Steiner, Barfield and Arkle. 

Thus, from about 2009, I began increasingly to read and experience Tolkien in a different way. This new era began with my immersion in JRRT's posthumously-published and unfinished novel: The Notion Club Papers. The NCPs contains a good deal of Tolkien autobiography, and was intended as a framework and bridge between the modern world and the world of the 'legendarium' (ie. the Silmarillion annals, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings). 

The Notion Club Papers blog then began to record a new practice of reading Tolkien, and some of the other Inklings, as what used to be termed 'devotional literature' - in the same spirit that past generations might have read Milton's Paradise Lost or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. 

So, this is where I am now: in my third era of Tolkien.