TEXT: C.S, Lewis, A Grief Observed

A GRIEF OBSERVED 

by C. S. Lewis



                                   I


No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but
the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach,
the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is
a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to
take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is
so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the
moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another
and not to me.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to
assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all.
Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H.
I've plenty of what are called 'resources'. People get over these
things. Come, I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this
voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes
a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like
an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost
prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But
the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure
of indulging it--that disgusts me. And even while I'm doing it I know it
leads me to misrepresent H. herself. Give that mood its head and in a
few minutes I shall have substituted for the real woman a mere doll to
be blubbered over. Thank God the memory of her is still too strong (will
it always be too strong?) to let me get away with it.

For H. wasn't like that at all. Her mind was lithe and quick and
muscular as a leopard. Passion, tenderness and pain were all equally
unable to disarm it. It scented the first whiff of cant or slush; then
sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening. How
many bubbles of mine she pricked! I soon learned not to talk rot to her
unless I did it for the sheer pleasure--and there's another red-hot
jab--of being exposed and laughed at. I was never less silly than as H's
lover.

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my
job--where the machine seems to run on much as usual--I loathe the
slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too
much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or
smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions--something to take him
out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold
night; he'd rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It's
easy to see why the lonely become untidy; finally, dirty and disgusting.

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms.
When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so
happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an
interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude
and praise, you will be--or so it feels--welcomed with open arms. But go
to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and
what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting
and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well
turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will
become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house.
Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong
as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our
time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

I tried to put some of these thoughts to C. this afternoon. He reminded
me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: 'Why hast thou
forsaken me?' I know. Does that make it easier to understand?

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The
real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The
conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is
what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'

Our elders submitted and said 'Thy will be done.' How often had bitter
resentment been stifled through sheer terror and an act of love--yes, in
every sense, an act--put on to hide the operation?

Of course it's easy enough to say that God seems absent at our greatest
need because He _is_ absent--non-existent. But then why does He seem so
present when, to put it quite frankly, we don't ask for Him?

One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe
that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires
and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on
love; every mode of it--solemn and merry, romantic and realistic,
sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and
unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body
remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have
lost all interest in Him. Who'd bother about substitutes when he has the
thing itself? But that isn't what happens. We both knew we wanted
something besides one another--quite a different kind of something, a
quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers
have one another they will never want to read, or eat--or breathe.

After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid
feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I
have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance
about H. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the
vacuum, absolute zero. 'Them as asks don't get.' I was a fool to ask.
For now, even if that assurance came I should distrust it. I should
think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers.

At any rate I must keep clear of the spiritualists. I promised H. I
would. She knew something of those circles.

Keeping promises to the dead, or to anyone else, is very well. But I
begin to see that 'respect for the wishes of the dead' is a trap.
Yesterday I stopped myself only in time from saying about some trifle
'H. wouldn't have liked that.' This is unfair to the others. I should
soon be using 'what H. would have liked' as an instrument of domestic
tyranny; with her supposed likings becoming a thinner and thinner
disguise for my own.

I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears
on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most
fatal of all non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were
committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just
the same after my own mother's death when my father mentioned her. I
can't blame them. It's the way boys are.

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as
much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any
of our vices can do. And not only in boyhood.

Or are the boys right? What would H. herself think of this terrible
little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings
morbid? I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache,
thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life.
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection:
the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about
the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but
live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes
merely aggravate that side of it? Merely confirm the monotonous,
tread-mill march of the mind round one subject? But what am I to do? I
must have some drug, and reading isn't a strong enough drug now. By
writing it all down (all?--no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get
a little outside it. That's how I'd defend it to H. But ten to one she'd
see a hole in the defence.

It isn't only the boys either. An odd by-product of my loss is that I'm
aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the
club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make
up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate
it if they do, and if they don't. Some funk it altogether. R. has been
avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men,
almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red,
get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently
can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements
like lepers.

To some I'm worse than an embarrassment. I am a death's head. Whenever I
meet a happily married pair I can feel them both thinking. 'One or other
of us must some day be as he is now.'

At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been
happy--our favourite pub, our favourite wood. But I decided to do it at
once--like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he's had a
crash. Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more
emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I
suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much
more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be
different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living
is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over
everything.

But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence
comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own
body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H's
lover. Now it's like an empty house. But don't let me deceive myself.
This body would become important to me again, and pretty quickly, if I
thought there was anything wrong with it.

Cancer, and cancer, and cancer. My mother, my father, my wife. I wonder
who is next in the queue.

Yet H. herself, dying of it, and well knowing the fact, said that she
had lost a great deal of her old horror at it. When the reality came,
the name and the idea were in some degree disarmed. And up to a point I
very nearly understood. This is important. One never meets just Cancer,
or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or
moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our
best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact
of what we call 'the thing itself'. But we call it wrongly. The thing
itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.

It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes
had together after all hope was gone. How long, how tranquilly, how
nourishingly, we talked together that last night!

And yet, not quite together. There's a limit to the 'one flesh'. You
can't really share someone else's weakness, or fear or pain. What you
feel may be bad. It might conceivably be as bad as what the other felt,
though I should distrust anyone who claimed that it was. But it would
still be quite different. When I speak of fear, I mean the merely animal
fear, the recoil of the organism from its destruction; the smothery
feeling; the sense of being a rat in a trap. It can't be transferred.
The mind can sympathize; the body, less. In one way the bodies of lovers
can do it least. All their love passages have trained them to have, not
identical, but complementary, correlative, even opposite, feelings about
one another.

We both knew this. I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine.
The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine. We were setting out
on different roads. This cold truth, this terrible traffic-regulation
('You, Madam, to the right--you, Sir, to the left') is just the beginning
of the separation which is death itself.

And this separation, I suppose, waits for all. I have been thinking of
H. and myself as peculiarly unfortunate in being torn apart. But
presumably all lovers are. She once said to me, 'Even if we both died at
exactly the same moment, as we lie here side by side, it would be just
as much a separation as the one you're so afraid of.' Of course she
didn't _know_, any more than _I_ do. But she was near death; near enough
to make a good shot. She used to quote 'lone into the Alone.' She said
it felt like that. And how immensely improbable that it should be
otherwise! Time and space and body were the very things that brought us
together; the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or
cut both off simultaneously. Either way, mustn't the conversation stop?

Unless you assume that some other means of communication--utterly
different, yet doing the same work, would be immediately substituted.
But then, what conceivable point could there be in severing the old
ones? Is God a clown who whips away your bowl of soup one moment in
order, next moment, to replace it with another bowl of the same soup?
Even nature isn't such a clown as that. She never plays exactly the same
tune twice.

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or
'Death doesn't matter'. There is death. And whatever is matters. And
whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and
irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter. I look up
at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast
times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere
find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word
so difficult to learn?

I have no photograph of her that's any good. I cannot even see her face
distinctly in my imagination. Yet the odd face of some stranger seen in
a crowd this morning may come before me in vivid perfection the moment I
close my eyes tonight. No doubt, the explanation is simple enough. We
have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many
angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions--waking, sleeping,
laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking--that all the impressions
crowd into our memory together and cancel out into a mere blur. But her
voice is still vivid. The remembered voice--that can turn me at any
moment to a whimpering child.




                                   II


For the first time I have looked back and read these notes. They appal
me. From the way I've been talking anyone would think that H's death
mattered chiefly for its effect on myself. Her point of view seems to
have dropped out of sight. Have I forgotten the moment of bitterness
when she cried out 'And there was so much to live for'? Happiness had
not come to her early in life. A thousand years of it would not have
made her _blasée_. Her palate for all the joys of sense and intellect
and spirit was fresh and unspoiled. Nothing would have been wasted on
her. She liked more things and liked them more than anyone I have known.
A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food, and
almost instantly the food was snatched away. Fate (or whatever it is)
delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it. Beethoven
went deaf. By our standards a mean joke; the monkey trick of a spiteful
imbecile.

I must think more about H. and less about myself.

Yes, that sounds very well. But there's a snag. I am thinking about her
nearly always. Thinking of the H. facts--real words, looks, laughs, and
actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them.
Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow,
insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a
more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. I shall put in
nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan't). But won't the composition
inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there
to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so
unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of
something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other,
resistant--in a word, real. Is all that work to be undone? Is what I
shall still call H. to sink back horribly into being not much more than
one of my old bachelor pipe-dreams? Oh my dear, my dear, come back for
one moment and drive that miserable phantom away. Oh God, God, why did
you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is
now doomed to crawl back--to be sucked back--into it?

Today I had to meet a man I haven't seen for ten years. And all that
time I had thought I was remembering him well--how he looked and spoke
and the sort of things he said. The first five minutes of the real man
shattered the image completely. Not that he had changed. On the
contrary. I kept on thinking, 'Yes, of course, of course. I'd forgotten
that he thought that--or disliked this, or knew so-and-so--or jerked his
head back that way.' I had known all these things once and I recognized
them the moment I met them again. But they had all faded out of my
mental picture of him, and when they were all replaced by his actual
presence the total effect was quite astonishingly different from the
image I had carried about with me for those ten years. How can I hope
that this will not happen to my memory of H? That it is not happening
already? Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes--like the small flakes that
come when it is going to snow all night--little flakes of me, my
impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The
real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes--ten seconds--of
the real H. would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds
were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall
again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.

What pitiable cant to say 'She will live forever in my memory!' _Live?_
That is exactly what she won't do. You might as well think like the old
Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing
persuade us that they are gone? What's left? A corpse, a memory, and (in
some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of
spelling the word _dead_. It was H. I loved. As if I wanted to fall in
love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort
of incest.

I remember being rather horrified one summer morning long ago when a
burly, cheerful labouring man, carrying a hoe and a watering pot came
into our churchyard and, as he pulled the gate behind him, shouted over
his shoulder to two friends, 'See you later, I'm just going to visit
Mum.' He meant he was going to weed and water and generally tidy up her
grave. It horrified me because this mode of sentiment, all this
churchyard stuff, was and is simply hateful, even inconceivable, to me.
But in the light of my recent thoughts I am beginning to wonder whether,
if one could take that man's line (I can't), there isn't a good deal to
be said for it. A six-by-three foot flower-bed had become Mum. That was
his symbol for her, his link with her. Caring for it was visiting her.
May this not be in one way better than preserving and caressing an image
in one's own memory? The grave and the image are equally links with the
irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable. But the image has the
added disadvantage that it will do whatever you want. It will smile or
frown, be tender, gay, ribald, or argumentative just as your mood
demands. It is a puppet of which you hold the strings. Not yet of
course. The reality is still too fresh; genuine and wholly involuntary
memories can still, thank God, at any moment rush in and tear the
strings out of my hands. But the fatal obedience of the image, its
insipid dependence on me, is bound to increase. The flower-bed on the
other hand is an obstinate, resistant, often intractable bit of reality,
just as Mum in her lifetime doubtless was. As H. was.

Or as H. is. Can I honestly say that I believe she now is anything? The
vast majority of the people I meet, say, at work, would certainly think
she is not. Though naturally they wouldn't press the point on me. Not
just now anyway. What do I really think? I have always been able to pray
for the other dead, and I still do, with some confidence. But when I try
to pray for H., I halt. Bewilderment and amazement come over me. I have
a ghastly sense of unreality, of speaking into a vacuum about a
nonentity.

The reason for the difference is only too plain. You never know how much
you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a
matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to
be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box.
But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you
then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with
people. For years I would have said that I had perfect confidence in
B.R. Then came the moment when I had to decide whether I would or would
not trust him with a really important secret. That threw quite a new
light on what I called my 'confidence' in him. I discovered that there
was no such thing. Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.
Apparently the faith--I thought it faith--which enables me to pray for the
other dead has seemed strong only because I have never really cared, not
desperately, whether they existed or not. Yet I thought I did.

But there are other difficulties. 'Where is she now?' That is, _in what
place_ is she _at the present time_. But if H. is not a body--and the
body I loved is certainly no longer she--she is in no place at all. And
'the present time' is a date or point in our time series. It is as if
she were on a journey without me and I said, looking at my watch, 'I
wonder is she at Euston now.' But unless she is proceeding at sixty
seconds a minute along this same time-line that all we living people
travel by, what does _now_ mean? If the dead are not in time, or not in
our sort of time, is there any clear difference, when we speak of them,
between _was_ and _is_ and _will be_?

Kind people have said to me 'She is with God.' In one sense that is most
certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable.

But I find that this question, however important it may be in itself, is
not after all very important in relation to grief. Suppose that the
earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the
basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable,
super-cosmic, eternal somethings. Those somethings could be pictured as
spheres or globes. Where the plane of Nature cuts through them--that is,
in earthly life--they appear as two circles (circles are slices of
spheres). Two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the
point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for,
homesick for, famished for. You tell me 'she goes on'. But my heart and
body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my
circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know
that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old
life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the love-making, the tiny,
heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say 'H. is dead', is
to say 'All that is gone'. It is a part of the past. And the past is the
past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for
death, and Heaven itself is a state where 'the former things have passed
away'.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to
me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't
come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect
that you don't understand.

Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family
reunions 'on the further shore', pictured in entirely earthly terms. But
that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There's
not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We _know_ it couldn't
be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken
away and given back. How well the Spiritualists bait their hook! 'Things
on this side are not so different after all.' There are cigars in
Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored.

And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight
endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air.

And poor C. quotes to me 'Do not mourn like those that have no hope'. It
astonishes me, the way we are invited to apply to ourselves words so
obviously addressed to our betters. What St. Paul says can comfort only
those who love God better than the dead, and the dead better than
themselves. If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for
what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child
has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to
believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness,
has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to 'glorify God
and enjoy Him forever'. A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit
within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal
happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she
have her son on her knees, or bath him, or tell him a story, or plan for
his future, or see her grandchild.

They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes
them so sure of this? I don't mean that I fear the worst of all. Nearly
her last words were 'I am at peace with God'. She had not always been.
And she never lied. And she wasn't easily deceived; least of all, in her
own favour. I don't mean that. But why are they so sure that all anguish
ends with death? More than half the Christian world, and millions in the
East, believe otherwise. How do they know she is 'at rest'. Why should
the separation (if nothing else) which so agonizes the lover who is left
behind be painless to the lover who departs?

'Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all
the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly
become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why?
If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is
not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us
beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is
consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as
unendurably as before it.

Sometimes it is hard not to say 'God forgive God'. Sometimes it is hard
to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.

Come, what do we gain by evasions? We are under the harrow and can't
escape. Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. And how or why did
such a reality blossom (or fester) here and there into the terrible
phenomenon called consciousness? Why did it produce things like us who
can see it and, seeing it, recoil in loathing? Who (stranger still) want
to see it and take pains to find it out, even when no need compels them
and even though the sight of it makes an incurable ulcer in their
hearts? People like H. herself, who would have truth at any price.

If H. 'is not', then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a
person. There aren't, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the
vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those
who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet
declared.

But this must be nonsense; vacuity revealed to whom? bankruptcy declared
to whom? To other boxes of fireworks or clouds of atoms. I will never
believe--more strictly I can't believe--that one set of physical events
could be, or make, a mistake about other sets.

No, my real fear is not of materialism. If it were true, we--or what we
mistake for 'we'--could get out, get from under the harrow. An overdose
of sleeping pills would do it. I am more afraid that we are really rats
in a trap. Or, worse still, rats in a laboratory. Someone said, I
believe, 'God always geometrizes'. Supposing the truth were 'God always
vivisects?'

Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What reason
have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any
standard we can conceive, 'good'? Doesn't all the _prima facie_ evidence
suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it?

We set Christ against it. But how if He were mistaken? Almost His last
words may have a perfectly clear meaning. He had found that the Being He
called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had
supposed. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited,
was at last sprung, on the cross. The vile practical joke had succeeded.

What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers
H. and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely
by our own wishful thinking; hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by
false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one
temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we
were 'led up the garden path'. Time after time, when He seemed most
gracious He was really preparing the next torture.

I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought. Let me try
it over again. Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God
so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile?

I think it is, if nothing else, too anthropomorphic. When you come to
think of it, it is far more anthropomorphic than picturing Him as a
grave old king with a long beard. That image is a Jungian archetype. It
links God with all the wise old kings in the fairy-tales, with prophets,
sages, magicians. Though it is (formally) the picture of a man, it
suggests something more than humanity. At the very least it gets in the
idea of something older than yourself, something that knows more,
something you can't fathom. It preserves mystery. Therefore room for
hope. Therefore room for a dread or awe that needn't be mere fear of
mischief from a spiteful potentate. But the picture I was building up
last night is simply the picture of a man like S.C.--who used to sit next
to me at dinner and tell me what he'd been doing to the cats that
afternoon. Now a being like S.C., however magnified, couldn't invent or
create or govern anything. He would set traps and try to bait them. But
he'd never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils,
or a frosty sunset. _He_ make a universe? He couldn't make a joke, or a
bow, or an apology, or a friend.

Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by
the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are
fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count
for nothing; or worse than nothing--the very fact that we think something
good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in
fact--our worst fears are true--all the characteristics we regard as bad:
unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all
these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It's only our
depravity makes them look black to us.

And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative) purposes sponges
God off the slate. The word _good_, applied to Him, becomes meaningless:
like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying Him. Not even fear. It
is true we have His threats and promises. But why should we believe
them? If cruelty is from His point of view 'good', telling lies may be
'good' too. Even if they are true, what then? If His ideas of good are
so very different from ours, what He calls 'Heaven' might well be what
we should call Hell, and vice-versa. Finally, if reality at its very
root is so meaningless to us--or, putting it the other way round, if we
are such total imbeciles--what is the point of trying to think either
about God or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to
pull it tight.

Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope
that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren't
all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won't accept the
fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?
Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which
will make pain not to be pain. It doesn't really matter whether you grip
the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The
drill drills on.

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense.
Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It
gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth
starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too
much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing
but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

One flesh. Or, if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone.
I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or
rather, till the journey ends. How can I assume a harbour? A lee shore,
more likely, a black night, a deafening gale, breakers ahead--and any
lights shown from the land probably being waved by wreckers. Such was
H's landfall. Such was my mother's. I say their landfalls; not their
arrivals.




                                  III


It's not true that I'm always thinking of H. Work and conversation make
that impossible. But the times when I'm not are perhaps my worst. For
then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over
everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those
dreams where nothing terrible occurs--nothing that would sound even
remarkable if you told it at breakfast-time--but the atmosphere, the
taste, of the whole thing is deadly. So with this. I see the rowan
berries reddening and don't know for a moment why they, of all things,
should be depressing. I hear a clock strike and some quality it always
had before has gone out of the sound. What's wrong with the world to
make it so flat, shabby, worn-out looking? Then I remember.

This is one of the things I'm afraid of. The agonies, the mad midnight
moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow?
Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no
longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the
squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by
faint nausea?

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From
the rational point of view, what new factor has H's death introduced
into the problem of the universe? What grounds has it given me for
doubting all that I believe? I knew already that these things, and
worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into
account. I had been warned--I had warned myself--not to reckon on worldly
happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the
programme. We were even told 'Blessed are they that mourn' and I
accepted it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it
is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in
reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make
quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn't for a man whose
faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people's sorrows
had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed
at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which
'took these things into account' was not faith but imagination. The
taking them into account was not real sympathy. If I had really cared,
as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have
been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came. It has been an imaginary
faith playing with innocuous counters labelled 'Illness', 'Pain',
'Death' and 'Loneliness'. I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered
to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn't.

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or
else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your
bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal
life or nonentity--will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it.
And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are
raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for
counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.
Nothing less will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his
merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be
knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out
the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

And I must surely admit--H. would have forced me to admit in a few
passes--that, if my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked
down the better. And only suffering could do it. But then the Cosmic
Sadist and Eternal Vivisector becomes an unnecessary hypothesis.

Is this last note a sign that I'm incurable, that when reality smashes
my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then
patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always?
However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it?
Is that what I'm doing now?

Indeed it's likely enough that what I shall call, if it happens, a
'restoration of faith' will turn out to be only one more house of cards.
And I shan't know whether it is or not until the next blow comes--when,
say, fatal disease is diagnosed in my body too, or war breaks out, or I
have ruined myself by some ghastly mistake in my work. But there are two
questions here. In which sense may it be a house of cards? Because the
things I am believing are only a dream, or because I only dream that I
believe them?

As for the things themselves, why should the thoughts I had a week ago
be any more trustworthy than the better thoughts I have now? I am
surely, in general, a saner man than I was then. Why should the
desperate imaginings of a man dazed--I said it was like being
concussed--be especially reliable?

Because there was no wishful thinking in them? Because, being so
horrible, they were therefore all the more likely to be true? But there
are fear-fulfilment as well as wish-fulfilment dreams. And were they
wholly distasteful? No. In a way I liked them. I am even aware of a
slight reluctance to accept the opposite thoughts. All that stuff about
the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of
hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can
get; the pleasure of hitting back. It was really just Billingsgate--mere
abuse; 'telling God what I thought of Him'. And of course, as in all
abusive language, 'what I thought' didn't mean what I thought true. Only
what I thought would offend Him (and His worshippers) most. That sort of
thing is never said without some pleasure. Gets it 'off your chest'. You
feel better for a moment.

But the mood is no evidence. Of course the cat will growl and spit at
the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether
he is a vet or a vivisector. Her bad language throws no light on it one
way or the other.

And I can believe He is a vet when I think of my own suffering. It is
harder when I think of hers. What is grief compared with physical pain?
Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the
mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the
unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can
be absolutely continuous. Grief is like a bomber circling round and
dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical
pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours of
it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static; pain often is.

What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so
much less about hers? Even the insane call, 'Come back', is all for my
own sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, if it
were possible, would be good for her. I want her back as an ingredient
in the restoration of _my_ past. Could I have wished her anything worse?
Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later
date, have all her dying to do over again? They call Stephen the first
martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?

I begin to see. My love for H. was of much the same quality as my faith
in God. I won't exaggerate, though. Whether there was anything but
imagination in the faith, or anything but egoism in the love, God knows.
I don't. There may have been a little more; especially in my love for H.
But neither was the thing I thought it was. A good deal of the
card-castle about both.

What does it matter how this grief of mine evolves or what I do with it?
What does it matter how I remember her or whether I remember her at all?
None of these alternatives will either ease or aggravate her past
anguish.

Her past anguish. How do I know that all her anguish is past? I never
believed before--I thought it immensely improbable--that the faithfulest
soul could leap straight into perfection and peace the moment death has
rattled in the throat. It would be wishful thinking with a vengeance to
take up that belief now. H. was a splendid thing; a soul straight,
bright, and tempered like a sword. But not a perfected saint. A sinful
woman married to a sinful man; two of God's patients, not yet cured. I
know there are not only tears to be dried but stains to be scoured. The
sword will be made even brighter.

But oh God, tenderly, tenderly. Already, month by month and week by week
you broke her body on the wheel whilst she still wore it. Is it not yet
enough?

The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly
less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts
only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging
for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed--might grow tired of his vile
sport--might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of
sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose
intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the
more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties,
if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that
point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities
of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The
tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad
one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no
even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they
weren't.

Either way, we're for it.

What do people mean when they say 'I am not afraid of God because I know
He is good?' Have they never even been to a dentist?

Yet this is unendurable. And then one babbles--'If only I could bear it,
or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.' But one can't tell
how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly
became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover
how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed?

It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again,
that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our
babble, 'You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared.'

Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For
various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was
lighter than it had been for many weeks. For one thing, I suppose I am
recovering physically from a good deal of mere exhaustion. And I'd had a
very tiring but very healthy twelve hours the day before, and a sounder
night's sleep; and after ten days of low-hung grey skies and motionless
warm dampness, the sun was shining and there was a light breeze. And
suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I
remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than
memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a
meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts
one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a
barrier.

Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged
another man in the same situation? I might have said, 'He's got over it.
He's forgotten his wife,' when the truth was, 'He remembers her better
_because_ he has partly got over it.'

Such was the fact. And I believe I can make sense out of it. You can't
see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can't,
in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately:
anyway, you can't get the best out of it. 'Now! Let's have a real good
talk' reduces everyone to silence, 'I _must_ get a good sleep tonight'
ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really
ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that
draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum
when we think about our dead? 'Them as asks' (at any rate 'as asks too
importunately') don't get. Perhaps can't.

And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the
door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that
slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your
soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can't give it:
you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches
and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you
hoped to hear.

On the other hand, 'Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking
mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac? And there's also 'To
him that hath shall be given.' After all, you must have a capacity to
receive, or even omnipotence can't give. Perhaps your own passion
temporarily destroys the capacity.

For all sorts of mistakes are possible when you are dealing with Him.
Long ago, before we were married, H. was haunted all one morning as she
went about her work with the obscure sense of God (so to speak) 'at her
elbow', demanding her attention. And of course, not being a perfected
saint, she had the feeling that it would be a question, as it usually
is, of some unrepented sin or tedious duty. At last she gave in--I know
how one puts it off--and faced Him. But the message was, 'I want to
_give_ you something' and instantly she entered into joy.

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It
comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual.
Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had
H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit
fitting an arrow to the string; then I remember and have to lay the bow
down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now
there's an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once; now
so many _culs de sac_.

For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to
me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my
subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my
trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at
the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever
been to me. Perhaps more. If we had never fallen in love we should have
none the less been always together, and created a scandal. That's what I
meant when I once praised her for her 'masculine virtues'. But she soon
put a stop to that by asking how I'd like to be praised for my feminine
ones. It was a good _riposte_, dear. Yet there was something of the
Amazon, something of Penthesileia and Camilla. And you, as well as I,
were glad it should be there. You were glad I should recognize it.

Solomon calls his bride Sister. Could a woman be a complete wife unless,
for a moment, in one particular mood, a man felt almost inclined to call
her Brother?

'It was too perfect to last,' so I am tempted to say of our marriage.
But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic--as if God
no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it ('None of
that here!'). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who
separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a
real conversation. But it could also mean 'This had reached its proper
perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course
it would not be prolonged.' As if God said, 'Good; you have mastered
that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on
to the next.' When you have learned to do quadratics and enjoy doing
them you will not be set them much longer. The teacher moves you on.

For we did learn and achieve something. There is, hidden or flaunted, a
sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them. It is
arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry 'masculine'
when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a
man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as 'feminine'. But also what
poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be
to make the implications of that arrogance plausible. Marriage heals
this. Jointly the two become fully human. 'In the image of God created
He _them_.' Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out
beyond our sexes.

And then one or other dies. And we think of this as love cut short; like
a dance stopped in mid career or a flower with its head unluckily
snapped off--something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I
wonder. If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of
separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then
for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception,
bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as
autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of
its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. We
are 'taken out of ourselves' by the loved one while she is here. Then
comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still
taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love
the very Her, and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or
our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.

Looking back, I see that only a very little time ago I was greatly
concerned about my memory of H. and how false it might become. For some
reason--the merciful good sense of God is the only one I can think of--I
have stopped bothering about that. And the remarkable thing is that
since I stopped bothering about it, she seems to meet me everywhere.
_Meet_ is far too strong a word. I don't mean anything remotely like an
apparition or a voice. I don't mean even any strikingly emotional
experience at any particular moment. Rather, a sort of unobtrusive but
massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into
account.

'To be taken into account' is perhaps an unfortunate way of putting it.
It sounds as if she were rather a battle-axe. How can I put it better?
Would 'momentously real' or 'obstinately real' do? It is as if the
experience said to me 'You are, as it happens, extremely glad that H. is
still a fact. But remember she would be equally a fact whether you liked
it or not. Your preferences have not been considered.'

How far have I got? Just as far, I think, as a widower of another sort
who would stop, leaning on his spade, and say in answer to our inquiry,
'Thank 'ee. Mustn't grumble. I do miss her something dreadful. But they
say these things are sent to try us.' We have come to the same point; he
with his spade, and I, who am not now much good at digging, with my own
instrument. But of course one must take 'sent to try us' the right way.
God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to
find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this
trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at
once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way
of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient
is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing;
after he's had his leg off it is quite another. After that operation
either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce,
continuous pain will stop. Presently he'll get back his strength and be
able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has 'got over it'. But he will
probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps
pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be
hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down
and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His
whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities
that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties
too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall
presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.

Still, there's no denying that in some sense I 'feel better', and with
that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a
sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one's unhappiness.
I've read about that in books, but I never dreamed I should feel it
myself. I am sure H. wouldn't approve of it. She'd tell me not to be a
fool. So I'm pretty certain, would God. What is behind it?

Partly, no doubt, vanity. We want to prove to ourselves that we are
lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in
the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a
bad job. But that's not the whole of the explanation.

I think there is also a confusion. We don't really want grief, in its
first agonies, to be prolonged: nobody could. But we want something else
of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom
with the thing itself. I wrote the other night that bereavement is not
the truncation of married love but one of its regular phases--like the
honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully
through that phase too. If it hurts (and it certainly will) we accept
the pains as a necessary part of this phase. We don't want to escape
them at the price of desertion or divorce. Killing the dead a second
time. We were one flesh. Now that it has been cut in two, we don't want
to pretend that it is whole and complete. We will be still married,
still in love. Therefore we shall still ache. But we are not at all--if
we understand ourselves--seeking the aches for their own sake. The less
of them the better, so long as the marriage is preserved. And the more
joy there can be in the marriage between dead and living, the better.

The better in every way. For, as I have discovered, passionate grief
does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This become
clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least
sorrow--getting into my morning bath is usually one of them--that H.
rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my
worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my
miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.

I seem to remember--though I couldn't quote one at the moment--all sorts
of ballads and folk-tales in which the dead tell us that our mourning
does them some kind of wrong. They beg us to stop it. There may be far
more depth in this than I thought. If so, our grandfather's generation
went very far astray. All that (sometimes lifelong) ritual of
sorrow--visiting graves, keeping anniversaries, leaving the empty bedroom
exactly as 'the departed' used to keep it, mentioning the dead either
not at all or always in a special voice, or even (like Queen Victoria)
having the dead man's clothes put out for dinner every evening--this was
like mummification. It made the dead far more dead.

Or was that (unconsciously) its purpose? Something very primitive may be
at work here. To keep the dead thoroughly dead, to make sure that they
won't come sidling back among the living, is a main pre-occupation of
the savage mind. At all costs make them 'stay put'. Certainly these
rituals do in fact emphasize their deadness. Perhaps this result was not
really so unwelcome, not always, as the ritualists believed.

But I've no business to judge them. All guess-work; I'd better keep my
breath to cool my own porridge. For me at any rate the programme is
plain. I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness. I will even
salute her with a laugh. The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her.

An admirable programme. Unfortunately it can't be carried out. Tonight
all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the
bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare
unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing 'stays put'. One
keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round.
Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a
spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

How often--will it be for always?--how often will the vast emptiness
astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, 'I never realized
my loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time. The
first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again.

They say 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the
eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?




                                   IV


This is the fourth--and the last--empty MS. book I can find in the house;
at least nearly empty, for there are some pages of very ancient
arithmetic at the end by J. I resolve to let this limit my jottings. I
_will not_ start buying books for the purpose. In so far as this record
was a defence against total collapse, a safety-valve, it has done some
good. The other end I had in view turns out to have been based on a
misunderstanding. I thought I could describe a _state_; make a map of
sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It
needs not a map but a history, and if I don't stop writing that history
at some quite arbitrary point, there's no reason why I should ever stop.
There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long
valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new
landscape. As I've already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the
surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same
sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when
you wonder whether the valley isn't a circular trench. But it isn't.
There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn't repeat.

Here, for instance, is a new phase, a new loss. I do all the walking I
can, for I'd be a fool to go to bed not tired. Today I have been
revisiting old haunts, taking one of the long rambles that made me so
happy in my bachelor days. And this time the face of nature was not
emptied of its beauty and the world didn't look (as I complained some
days ago) like a mean street. On the contrary, every horizon, every
stile or clump of trees, summoned me into a past kind of happiness, my
pre-H. happiness. But the invitation seemed to me horrible. The
happiness into which it invited me was insipid. I find that I don't want
to go back again and be happy in _that_ way. It frightens me to think
that a mere going back should even be possible. For this fate would seem
to me the worst of all; to reach a state in which my years of love and
marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode--like a
holiday--that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned
me to normal, unchanged. And then it would come to seem unreal--something
so foreign to the usual texture of my history that I could almost
believe it had happened to someone else. Thus H. would die to me a
second time; a worse bereavement than the first. Anything but that.

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left?
You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never
shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the
amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I
discover them only one by one.

Still, there are the two enormous gains--I know myself too well now to
call them 'lasting'. Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked
door; turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum--nor all that fuss
about my mental image of her. My jottings show something of the process,
but not so much as I'd hoped. Perhaps both changes were really not
observable. There was no sudden, striking, and emotional transition.
Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight. When you first
notice them they have already been going on for some time.

The notes have been about myself, and about H., and about God. In that
order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not to have
been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that mode of thinking
about either which we call praising them. Yet that would have been best
for me. Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy
in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift.
Don't we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from
it? I must do more of this. I have lost the fruition I once had of H.
And I am far, far away in the valley of my unlikeness, from the fruition
which, if His mercies are infinite, I may some time have of God. But by
praising I can still, in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some
degree, enjoy Him. Better than nothing.

But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I've described H. as being like a
sword. That's true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself,
and misleading. I ought to have balanced it. I ought to have said 'But
also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge
within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the
further you entered.'

And then, of her, and of every created thing I praise, I should say 'In
some way, in its unique way, like Him who made it'.

Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. To
the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.

'She is in God's hand.' That gains a new energy when I think of her as a
sword. Perhaps the earthly life I shared with her was only part of the
tempering. Now perhaps He grasps the hilt; weighs the new weapon; makes
lightnings with it in the air. 'A right Jerusalem blade.'

One moment last night can be described in similes; otherwise it won't go
into language at all. Imagine a man in total darkness. He thinks he is
in a cellar or dungeon. Then there comes a sound. He thinks it might be
a sound from far off--waves or wind-blown trees or cattle half a mile
away. And if so, it proves he's not in a cellar, but free, in the open
air. Or it may be a much smaller sound close at hand--a chuckle of
laughter. And if so, there is a friend just beside him in the dark.
Either way, a good, good sound. I'm not mad enough to take such an
experience as evidence for anything. It is simply the leaping into
imaginative activity of an idea which I would always have theoretically
admitted--the idea that I, or any mortal at any time, may be utterly
mistaken as to the situation he is really in.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective
memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can
never examine more than a minority of them--never become even conscious
of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let
through?

I will not, if I can help it, shin up either the feathery or the prickly
tree. Two widely different convictions press more and more on my mind.
One is that the Eternal Vet is even more inexorable and the possible
operations even more painful than our severest imaginings can forbode.
But the other, that 'all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all
manner of thing shall be well'.

It doesn't matter that all the photographs of H. are bad. It doesn't
matter--not much--if my memory of her is imperfect. Images, whether on
paper or in the mind, are not important for themselves. Merely links.
Take a parallel from an infinitely higher sphere. Tomorrow morning a
priest will give me a little round, thin, cold, tasteless wafer. Is it a
disadvantage--is it not in some ways an advantage--that it can't pretend
the least _resemblance_ to that with which it unites me?

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him. I want H., not
something that is like her. A really good photograph might become in the
end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.

Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so
popular. (It makes little difference whether they are pictures and
statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.) To me,
however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become
holy images--sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to
be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great
iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the
marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves
all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are 'offended' by
the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not. But the same thing
happens in our private prayers.

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life,
incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to;
you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her
unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And
this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she
is dead.

But 'this' is not now imaginable. In that respect H. and all the dead
are like God. In that respect loving her has become, in its measure,
like loving Him. In both cases I must stretch out the arms and hands of
love--its eyes cannot here be used--to the reality, through--across--all the
changeful phantasmagoria of my thoughts, passions, and imaginings. I
mustn't sit down content with the phantasmagoria itself and worship that
for Him, or love that for her.

Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not
my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don't we often make this
mistake as regards people who are still alive--who are with us in the
same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the
picture--almost the _précis_--we've made of Him in our own minds? And he
has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. In
real life--that's one way it differs from novels--his words and acts are,
if we observe closely, hardly ever quite 'in character', that is, in
what we call his character. There's always a card in his hand we didn't
know about.

My reason for assuming that I do this to other people is the fact that
so often I find them obviously doing it to me. We all think we've got
one another taped.

And all this time I may, once more, be building with cards. And if I am
He will once more knock the building flat. He will knock it down as
often as proves necessary. Unless I have to be finally given up as
hopeless, and left building pasteboard palaces in Hell forever; 'free
among the dead'.

Am I, for instance, just sidling back to God because I know that if
there's any road to H., it runs through Him? But then of course I know
perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching
Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're
not really approaching Him at all. That's what was really wrong with all
those popular pictures of happy re-unions 'on the further shore'; not
the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make
an End of what we can get only as a bye-product of the true End.

Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to
love you so much that I don't care whether I meet her or not? Consider,
Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the
boys, 'No toffee now. But when you've grown up and don't really want
toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose?'

If I knew that to be eternally divided from H. and eternally forgotten
by her would add a greater joy and splendour to her being, of course I'd
say 'Fire ahead'. Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her cancer by
never seeing her again, I'd have arranged never to see her again. I'd
have had to. Any decent person would. But that's quite different. That's
not the situation I'm in.

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather
special sort of 'No answer'. It is not the locked door. It is more like
a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His
head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you
don't understand.'

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I
should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours
are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the
questions we ask--half our great theological and metaphysical
problems--are like that.

And now that I come to think of it, there's no practical problem before
me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I'd better get on with
them. Indeed, H's death has ended the practical problem. While she was
alive I could, in practice, have put her before God; that is, could have
done what she wanted instead of what He wanted; if there'd been a
conflict. What's left is not a problem about anything I could _do_. It's
all about weights of feelings and motives and that sort of thing. It's a
problem I'm setting myself. I don't believe God set it me at all.

The fruition of God. Re-union with the dead. These can't figure in my
thinking except as counters. Blank cheques. My idea--if you can call it
an idea--of the first is a huge, risky extrapolation from a very few and
short experiences here on earth. Probably not such valuable experiences
as I think. Perhaps even of less value than others that I take no
account of. My idea of the second is also an extrapolation. The reality
of either--the cashing of either cheque--would probably blow all one's
ideas about both (how much more one's ideas about their relations to
each other) into smithereens.

The mystical union on the one hand. The resurrection of the body, on the
other. I can't reach the ghost of an image, a formula, or even a
feeling, that combines them. But the reality, we are given to
understand, does. Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve
our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations
between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all
be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any
problem.

And, more than once, that impression which I can't describe except by
saying that it's like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense
that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.

It is often thought that the dead see us. And we assume, whether
reasonably or not, that if they see us at all they see us more clearly
than before. Does H. now see exactly how much froth or tinsel there was
in what she called, and I call, my love? So be it. Look your hardest,
dear. I wouldn't hide if I could. We didn't idealize each other. We
tried to keep no secrets. You knew most of the rotten places in me
already. If you now see anything worse, I can take it. So can you.
Rebuke, explain, mock, forgive. For this is one of the miracles of love;
it gives--to both, but perhaps especially to the woman--a power of seeing
through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not
distinct from one another, nor from Him. We could almost say He sees
because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees.

Sometimes, Lord, one is tempted to say that if you wanted us to behave
like the lilies of the field you might have given us an organization
more like theirs. But that, I suppose, is just your grand experiment. Or
no; not an experiment, for you have no need to find things out. Rather
your grand enterprise. To make an organism which is also a spirit; to
make that terrible oxymoron, a 'spiritual animal'. To take a poor
primate, a beast with nerve-endings all over it, a creature with a
stomach that wants to be filled, a breeding animal that wants its mate,
and say, 'Now get on with it. Become a god.'

I said, several notebooks ago, that even if I got what seemed like an
assurance of H's presence, I wouldn't believe it. Easier said than done.
Even now, though, I won't treat anything of that sort as evidence. It's
the _quality_ of last night's experience--not what it proves but what it
was--that makes it worth putting down. It was quite incredibly
unemotional. Just the impression of her _mind_ momentarily facing my
own. Mind, not 'soul' as we tend to think of soul. Certainly the reverse
of what is called 'soulful'. Not at all like a rapturous re-union of
lovers. Much more like getting a telephone call or a wire from her about
some practical arrangement. Not that there was any 'message'--just
intelligence and attention. No sense of joy or sorrow. No love even, in
our ordinary sense. No un-love. I had never in any mood imagined the
dead as being so--well, so business-like. Yet there was an extreme and
cheerful intimacy. An intimacy that had not passed through the senses or
the emotions at all.

If this was a throw-up from my unconscious, then my unconscious must be
a far more interesting region than the depth psychologists have led me
to expect. For one thing, it is apparently much less primitive than my
consciousness.

Wherever it came from, it has made a sort of spring cleaning in my mind.
The dead could be like that; sheer intellects. A Greek philosopher
wouldn't have been surprised at an experience like mine. He would have
expected that if anything of us remained after death it would be just
that. Up to now this always seemed to me a most arid and chilling idea.
The absence of emotion repelled me. But in this contact (whether real or
apparent) it didn't do anything of the sort. One didn't need emotion.
The intimacy was complete--sharply bracing and restorative too--without
it. Can that intimacy be love itself--always in this life attended with
emotion, not because it is itself an emotion, or needs an attendant
emotion, but because our animal souls, our nervous systems, our
imaginations, have to respond to it in that way? If so, how many
preconceptions I must scrap! A society, a communion, of pure
intelligences would not be cold, drab and comfortless. On the other hand
it wouldn't be very like what people usually mean when they use such
words as 'spiritual', or 'mystical', or 'holy'. It would, if I have had
a glimpse, be--well, I'm almost scared at the adjectives I'd have to use.
Brisk? cheerful? keen? alert? intense? wide-awake? Above all, solid.
Utterly reliable. Firm. There is no nonsense about the dead.

When I say 'intellect' I include will. Attention is an act of will.
Intelligence in action is will _par excellence_. What seemed to meet me
was full of resolution.

Once very near the end I said, 'If you can--if it is allowed--come to me
when I too am on my death bed.' 'Allowed!' she said. 'Heaven would have
a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I'd break it into bits.' She knew she
was speaking a kind of mythological language, with even an element of
comedy in it. There was a twinkle as well as a tear in her eye. But
there was no myth and no joke about the will, deeper than any feeling,
that flashed through her.

But I mustn't, because I have come to misunderstand a little less
completely what a pure intelligence might be, lean over too far. There
is also, whatever it means, the resurrection of the body. We cannot
understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

Didn't people dispute once whether the final vision of God was more an
act of intelligence or of love? That is probably another of the nonsense
questions.

How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not
to me but to the chaplain, 'I am at peace with God.' She smiled, but not
at me. _Poi si tornò all' eterna fontana._