“I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead
- I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.
The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else.
For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.
I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure.
Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.
Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief.
But then it is a kind we want.
I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.
But then Joy is never in Our Power and Pleasure often is.
I cannot be absolutely sure whether the things I have just been speaking of happened before or after the great loss which befell our family and to which I must now turn.
There came a night when I was ill and crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me.
That was because she was ill too; and what was odd was that there were several doctors in her room, and voices, and comings and goings all over the house and doors shutting and opening. It seemed to last for hours.
And then My Father, in tears, came into my room and began to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had never conceived before.
It was in fact cancer and followed the usual course; an operation (they operated in the patient’s house in those days), an apparent convalescence, a return of the disease, increasing pain, and death.
My Father never fully recovered from this loss.
Children suffer not (I think) less than their elders, but differently.
For us boys the real bereavement had happened before our mother died.
We lost her gradually as she was gradually withdrawn from our life into the hands of nurses and delirium and morphia, and as our whole existence changed into something alien and menacing, as the house became full of strange smells and midnight noises and sinister whispered conversations.
This had two further results, one very evil and one very good.
It divided us from our father as well as our mother. They say that a shared sorrow draws people closer together; I can hardly believe that it often has that effect when those who share it are of widely different ages.
If I may trust to my own experience, the sight of adult misery and adult terror has an effect on children which is merely paralysing and alienating. Perhaps it was our fault. Perhaps if we had been better children we might have lightened our father’s sufferings at this time.
We certainly did not.
His nerves had never been of the steadiest and his emotions had always been uncontrolled.
Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly.
Thus by a peculiar cruelty of fate, during those months the unfortunate man, had he but known it, was really losing his sons as well as his wife.
We were coming, my brother and I, to rely more and more exclusively on each other for all that made life bearable; to have confidence only in each other.
I expect that we (or at any rate I) were already learning to lie to him.
Everything that had made the house a home had failed us; everything except one another.
We drew daily closer together (that was the good result) - two frightened urchins huddled for warmth in a bleak world.
Grief in childhood is complicated with many other miseries.
I was taken into the bedroom where my mother lay dead; as they said, ‘to see her’, in reality, as I at once knew, ‘to see it’.
There was nothing that a grown-up would call disfigurement - except for that total disfigurement which is death itself.
Grief was overwhelmed in terror.
To this day I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful.
The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead.
Against all the subsequent paraphernalia of coffin, flowers, hearse, and funeral I reacted with horror.
I even lectured one of my aunts on the absurdity of mourning clothes in a style which would have seemed to most adults both heartless and precocious; but this was our dear Aunt Annie, my maternal uncle’s Canadian wife, a woman almost as sensible and sunny as my mother herself.
To my hatred for what I already felt to be all the fuss and flummery of the funeral I may perhaps trace something in me which I now recognise as a defect but which I have never fully overcome - a distaste for all that is public, all that belongs to The Collective; a boorish inaptitude for formality.
My mother’s death was the occasion of what some (but not I) might regard as my first religious experience.
When her case was pronounced hopeless I remembered what I had been taught; that prayers offered in faith would be granted. I accordingly set myself to produce by willpower a firm belief that my prayers for her recovery would be successful; and, as I thought, I achieved it.
When nevertheless she died I shifted my ground and worked myself into a belief that there was to be a miracle.
The interesting thing is that my disappointment produced no results beyond itself.
The thing hadn’t worked, but I was used to things not working, and I thought no more about it.
I think the truth is that the belief into which I had hypnotised myself was itself too irreligious for its failure to cause any religious revolution.
I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear.
He was, in my mental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as Saviour nor as Judge, but merely as a magician; and when He had done what was required of Him I supposed He would simply - well, go away.
It never crossed my mind that the tremendous contact which I solicited should have any consequences beyond restoring the status quo. I imagine that a ‘faith’ of this kind is often generated in children and that its disappointment is of no religious importance; just as the things believed in, if they could happen and be only as the child pictures them, would be of no religious importance either. With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.
