Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  The clocks stopped for Geoff. They did not stop for Lilias, who died in her nineties, outliving the tower blocks that had evicted her from Gorbals. She died unremembered except by those who knew. Her memorial service at Saint Ninian’s – where I was a curate when she asked for my help a lifetime ago – was filled with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of her Gorbals family. Molly Harvey made gallons of Scotch broth for the party. I remembered Lilias’s big soup pot in the kitchen at 10 Abbotsford Place. NOTHING COUNTS BUT LIFETIMES!

  Then, as I continued to walk the hills, accompanied, or so it seemed, only by the dead, someone else was dying, a friend whose name I have written in this book. And I, a doubting priest, blessed and committed him to the care of the God I don’t believe in. I did it, believing and not believing what I was saying, but doing it for his sake, who also believed and did not believe. It is the pain of our humanity to know that we are nothing that lasts, like the haar that blows along Jeffrey Street; yet to feel the pity of that because of the dreams we have dreamed, dreams that sometimes seem to be higher and better than the universe that so indifferently spawns them. That is the conundrum of our humanity, the place of living and losing we occupy. It is what led Canon Laurie up the stairs of Old Saint Paul’s at midnight to mourn and remember, to doubt and to pity, knowing and not knowing, but calling out the names of his dead that they might not be forgotten for ever. And it is what takes me back to the hidden graveyard at Kelham to stand there and listen for the whisper.

  It was Yehuda Amichai who taught me to listen for the whisper. Yehuda Amichai was the greatest Israeli poet of the twentieth century. He was a tolerant atheist in a city maddened by religion; a humanist in a nation driven to acts of terrible cruelty; but he was too compassionate an artist to be surprised by anything in the human condition. I sat with him in his house in Jerusalem months before his death, talking poetry and religion. I wrote a book that was an attempt to transpose the topography of the mountains of my mind onto paper. I took the title from one of his poems. I called it Doubts and Loves, because that is all I am left with after my long journey from Alexandria.

  From the place where we are right

  flowers will never grow

  in the Spring.

  The place where we are right

  is hard and trampled

  like a yard.

  But doubts and loves

  dig up the world

  like a mole, a plough.

  And a whisper will be heard in the place

  where the ruined

  house once stood.110

  I am left in the ruined house listening for the whisper. ‘This world is not conclusion,’ said Emily Dickinson.111 I know that too. I am tugged still by the possibility of the transcendent. But only whispers and tugs; nothing louder or more violent. Religion’s insecurity makes it shout not whisper, strike with the fist in the face not tug gently with the fingers on the sleeve. Yet, beneath the shouting and the striking, the whisper can sometimes be heard. And from a great way off the tiny figure of Jesus can be seen on the seashore, kindling a fire.

  I don’t any longer believe in religion, but I want it around: weakened, bruised and bemused, less sure of itself and purged of everything except the miracle of pity. I know that the people who will keep it going will have to believe in it more than I do. Who could be persuaded by my whisper? Who could even hear it? Anyway, I no longer want to persuade anyone to believe anything – except that cruelty, especially theological cruelty, has to be opposed, if necessary to the death.

  And a whisper will be heard. What else? What else have I discovered on these compulsive walks? Something about myself. Regrets, as well as knowledge of their futility. I have been a disappointment to many – and to myself – but I am beginning to realise I could never have been anything else. Old Updike always comforts me.

  Easy on the guilt trip.

  We didn’t deal the deck down here, we just play the cards.112

  I was helped by an essay a friend sent me. A Norse scholar, she had been working on the metaphor of weaving in thinking about human destiny. She wrote, ‘Referring to fate or destiny as something that is spun or woven is a well-known metaphorical image in both classical and Old Norse mythology.’113 I had been taught that we build our character by our choices, and slowly create ourselves – and I had wanted to make myself a world-denying saint. There was never a hope of that. Norse mythology showed me again that the way we act does not so much make us as reveal us; our response to circumstance shows us not what we want to be but who we actually are. I was never constituted to be a saint. I had just fallen among saints by accident.

  I don’t want to exaggerate the impact of these different metaphors for the way life forms itself in us, but each of them can cast a shadow of regret over the past. The idea of the character that was slowly revealed by the choices we made can be distressing if we do not like the life that has been woven for us by fate. If we come at it from within the Christian tradition, the human story can also be heavy with regret, because it proved impossible to become what we set out to be. Looking back from either vantage point can bring sorrow, either because the character revealed to us through the choices we made, or the character that we ourselves slowly created by those same choices, may disappoint us. It is the idea that we were ever free to affect our own destiny that is the mistake here. I don’t believe that some agency hands out destinies to us that we perform like actors on a stage, maybe free to interpret or embroider the role to some extent, but unable to alter its fundamental trajectory; but nor do I think we get a clean sheet on starting out that we sketch our lives onto. It is hard not to believe that much of our life is decided for us by the weight of antecedent facts over which we had no control. I left Alexandria but Alexandria never left me. Great fiction explores this truth better than anything else, though a good biography can achieve the same feat of revealing the inevitability of the way a life was woven. However, it is one thing to accept the inevitability of another’s life and to see how, given its ingredients, it assumed the form it did; it is quite another to offer the same sympathy and acceptance to oneself. Nietzsche called the capacity for self-acceptance amor fati or love of fate.

  My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity, still less to dissemble it – all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity – but to love it114

  I can’t say I love what I made of myself or was revealed to be, but I have learned to accept it: losing Alexandria is something we all have to get used to.

  I don’t expect to meet my maker when I die, but if I do it won’t surprise me if he comes smiling towards me over green fields. ‘So that’s what you made of the hand I dealt you? I know you were strongly tempted by determinism when you were down there, but it is not strictly correct to say the Dealer bears all the responsibility for the hand. You played it, after all, and some things you could have done differently. But there is no point in feeling shame about any of it now. Want to see what I thought I was doing when I dreamt the whole thing up?’ As I say, I don’t expect that to happen, but if it does I’ll accept his invitation, because I am still curious about the mystery of it all.

  What’s left to say? Only this: when I die I hope my children will bring me back up here. I don’t want a stone or a sign left anywhere to mark the fact that I had a life on earth before I went down the stairs to join the unnumbered dead. My name will be written in ink, and ink is the best symbol for a life. Brief. Defiant. Fading. But I hope that Ann and Sara and Mark will bring my ashes up here one October day. They can take turns carrying what’s left of me in my old rucksack. Through Kitchen Moss up West Kip and East Kip to Scald Law. Because of the wind up here, they’ll have to watch where they stand when they open the box to let me out to blow away into the heather. I know now that the three of them are what I was for. It has been a great purpose being one of
the instruments of their becoming. I love them, and she who bore them.

  Then they can make their way back down the Kirk Road to the Green Cleuch and the beech-lined road below Bavelaw and home.

  And that’ll be that. Well, almost certainly . . .

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1 Mark Girouard, The Victorian Country House (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1979), p. 224.

  2 Girouard, The Victorian Country House, p. 235.

  3 Girouard, The Victorian Country House, p. 234.

  4 Dame Felicitas Corrigan, Helen Waddell (Gollancz, 1986), p. 357.

  5 Hymnal for Scotland (Oxford University Press, London, 1966), Hymn 744.

  6 Alistair Mason, History of the Society of the Sacred Mission (Canterbury Press, Norwich, 1993), p. 13.

  7 Mason, History of the Society of the Sacred Mission, p. 16.

  8 Father Kelly and the Idea of Theology (Society of the Sacred Mission, 1987), p. 1.

  9 Mason, History of the Society of the Sacred Mission, p. 28.

  10 An Idea Whose Time Has Come? (Society of the Sacred Mission in Australia, 2009), p. 10.

  CHAPTER 1

  11 Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair (Hutchinson, London, 1946), p. 130.

  12 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Penguin Books, London, 1995), p. 170.

  13 Edwin Muir, ‘Transfiguration’, in Collected Poems: Edwin Muir (Faber & Faber, London, 1963).

  CHAPTER 2

  14 Hymnal for Scotland, Hymn 20.

  15 Dennis O’Driscoll, ‘Missing God’, in Being Human (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), p. 97.

  16 Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers (Collins Fontana Library, London, 1962), p. 172.

  17 John Meade Falkner, ‘After Trinity’, in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, edited by Philip Larkin, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973), p. 40.

  18 V.S. Naipaul, in Patrick French, The World is What it Is (Picador, London, 2008), p. 210.

  19 2 Timothy, 4:10. (Demas was a companion of the Apostle Paul, who left him for the pleasures of the city of Thessalonica.)

  20 Mason, History of the Society of the Sacred Mission, p. 118.

  21 C.P. Cavafy, ‘The Great Yes’, in Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Chatto & Windus, London, 1998), p. 10.

  22 Walter de la Mare, The Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, London, 1979), p. 84.

  23 T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (Faber & Faber, London, 1936), p. 85.

  CHAPTER 3

  24 Philip Larkin, ‘Deceptions’, in Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, London, 2003), p. 67

  25 Nabokov, Lolita, p. 321.

  26 Larkin, ‘Annus Mirabilis’, in Collected Poems, p. 146.

  27 Peter Brown, The Body and Society (Faber & Faber, London, 1990), p. 424.

  28 Steve Jones, The Language of the Genes (Flamingo, London, 1993), p. 97.

  CHAPTER 4

  29 G.M. Hopkins, ‘Spring and Fall’, in Poems (Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 94.

  30 Paul’s Letter to the Romans 6:12–13.

  31 Paul’s Letter to the Romans 7:19–21.

  32 Hopkins, ‘My Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On’, in Poems, p. 110.

  33 Hopkins, ‘Heaven-Haven’, in Poems, p. 40.

  34 Isaiah 6:8.

  CHAPTER 5

  35 Edwin Morgan, ‘Glasgow Green’, in Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1990), p. 168.

  36 Luke 6:21.

  37 www­.­glasgowwestend­.­co­.­uk­/­out­/­outdoors­/­thegorbals­.­html

  CHAPTER 6

  38 Hopkins, ‘My Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On’, in Poems, p. 110.

  39 Albert Schweitzer, Out of my Life and Thought: An Autobiography (Holt, New York, 1933), p. 114.

  40 The Essential Tillich (University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 200–1.

  41 Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘The Two Parents’, in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, p. 256.

  42 James 1:17.

  CHAPTER 7

  43 R.S. Thomas, ‘Introduction’ to Selected Poems of R.S. Thomas (Faber & Faber, London, 1964).

  44 Mason, History of the Society of the Sacred Mission, p. 16.

  45 Mark 2:27.

  46 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Human, All-too Human’, in The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin, New York, 1976), section 224, p. 54.

  CHAPTER 8

  47 Adam Phillips, On Balance (Hamish Hamilton, London, 2010), p. 57.

  48 W.H. Auden, ‘Leap Before You Look’, in Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957 (Faber & Faber, London, 1975), p. 200.

  49 Larkin, ‘Days’, in Collected Poems, p. 98.

  50 Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 181.

  51 Terry Eagleton, On Evil (Yale University Press, 2010), p. 84.

  52 R.S. Thomas, ‘Kneeling’, in Collected Poems (J.M. Dent, London, 1993), p. 199.

  53 The Epistle of James 1:13–17.

  54 Hopkins, ‘I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark’, in Poems, p. 109.

  55 Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (Dover Publications, New York, 1954), p. 43.

  56 The First Epistle to the Corinthians 14:8.

  CHAPTER 9

  57 Ian Frazier, Great Plains (Granta Books, London, 2006), p. 41.

  58 Jorge Luis Borges, Los Conjurados, translated by Nicomede Suarez Arauz in 24 Conversations with Borges (Emecce Editores S.A., Buenos Aires, 1989).

  59 Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (Vintage, London, 2001).

  60 Hopkins, ‘My Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On’, in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 110.

  61 Adam Phillips, On Balance (Hamish Hamilton, London, 2010), p. 47.

  62 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003), p. 137.

  CHAPTER 10

  63 Hopkins, ‘I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark’, in Poems, p. 109.

  64 1 Corinthians 13:1.

  65 Quoted in Sojourners magazine, September 2001.

  66 D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’, in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, p. 187.

  67 Matthew 11:3.

  68 Matthew 11:6.

  69 André Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just (Penguin Books, London, 1977), p. 373.

  70 Elie Wiesel, Night, translated by Marion Wiesel (Hill & Wang, 2006), p. 65.

  CHAPTER 11

  71 James 1:8.

  72 Kathleen Raine, ‘If I Could Turn’, in On a Deserted Shore (Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1973), Poem 95.

  73 John Betjeman, ‘Anglo-Catholic Congresses’, in Collected Poems (John Murray, London, 2006), p. 265.

  74 Henry Scott Holland, A Bundle of Memories (Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., London, 1915), p. 95.

  75 Luke 5:39.

  76 Louis MacNeice, ‘Mutations’ in Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, London, 1979), p. 195.

  77 Richard Holloway, The Stranger in the Wings (SPCK, London, 1994), p. 147.

  CHAPTER 12

  78 Hidden Gardens of Beacon Hill (Beacon Hill Garden Club, 1987), p. 3.

  79 Betty Hughes Morris, A History of the Church of the Advent (Boston, 1995), p. 135.

  80 Morris, A History of the Church of the Advent, p. 135.

  81 I have taken several phrases here from Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘Church Going’, in his Collected Poems, p. 58.

  82 Hopkins, ‘No Worse There Is None’, in Poems, p. 107.

  83 Timothy O’Grady, Divine Magnetic Lands (Vintage, 2009), p. 10.

  84 John Cornwell, Newman’s Unquiet Grave (Continuum, London, 2010), p. 19.

  85 Albert Camus, The Plague (Penguin, London, 1989), chapters 2, 3 and 4.

  CHAPTER 13

  86 Robert Browning, ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’.

  87 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Journal, July 8 1916’, in Wittgenstein: The Notebooks 1914–16 (Blackwell, London).

  88 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Tractatus, 6.52’, in The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Routledge & Kegan Paul).

  89
A.S.J Tessimond, ‘Heaven’, in The Collected Poems, Hubert Nicholson, ed. (University of Reading Press, Reading, 1985).

  90 John Betjeman, ‘Anglo-Catholic Congresses’, in Collected Poems, p. 463.

  91 John Meade Falkner, ‘After Trinity’, in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, p. 41.

  92 Richard Holloway, How to Read the Bible (Granta, London, 2006), p. 90ff.

  93 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas (Penguin Books, London, 1993), p. 133ff.

  CHAPTER 14

  94 Jane Millard, ‘Fragments of the Watch’ (unpublished).

  95 Albert Camus, The Plague (Penguin, London, 1960), p. 297.

  96 Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, in The New Oxford Book of English Verse, chosen and edited by Helen Gardner (Clarenden Press, Oxford, 1972), p. 703.

  97 Richard Holloway, Dancing on the Edge: Faith in a Post-Christian Society (Fount, London, 1997).

  98 Richard Holloway, Seven to Flee, Seven to Follow (Mowbrays, Oxford, 1986).

  99 Hebrews 2:1 (in the Revised Standard Version).

  CHAPTER 15

  100 Anthony Hirsh, ‘Post-coital Sperm Retrieval’, in Human Reproduction, vol. 11, no. 2, p. 245.

  101 Galatians 3:27–8.

  102 Ephesians 5:22–4.

  103 John Cornwell, Newman’s Unquiet Grave (Continuum, London, 2010), p. 196.

  104 Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (Arrow Books, London, 1988), p. 189.

  105 Thomas Merton, The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers (Farrer, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 1993), p. 79.

  106 John Harris, Wonderwoman and Superman (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 42.

  107 Cavafy, ‘The God Forsakes Antony’, in Collected Poems, p. 10.