Time and Eternity

by Malcom Muggeridge

  ***

  Walking through the streets of London, individual restlessness comprehended in a collective restlessness - traffic, passers-by, all caught up in the same essential rhythm, like dead leaves caught up in the autumnal wind. No destination or purpose, except just to move as others are moving; the bright green grass of Regent’s Park, varying shops towards whose windows lingering glances, faint desires, are cast, evening papers mechanically offered and taken. Then down Baker Street, through Portman Square, on to Hyde Park Corner in the Spring sunshine, houses in Park Lane newly painted, green shutters bright as the green grass. At Hyde Park Corner itself the orators declaiming, words cast into the air and falling they know not where; faces distorted as with passion, angrily persuasive, clamorous and insistent -venerable figure, little heeded, sternly beseeching: ‘Prepare to meet thy God!’, placard to this effect displayed; heavily bearded exponent of some ancient lost cause, and another with studied oratory, a crucifix beside him, recommending the Catholic faith.

  Vast conglomeration of people, in groups, pairs or solitary - what has drawn us together, up and down, to and fro, lingering or hurrying? ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’, in each passing face; desire on the benches or under the trees; arm threaded through arm or hand contained in hand - together yet strangers, world so familiar and yet so strange, so friendly and so hostile, so dear and so terrible. These my brothers and sisters in mortality, each one entering so strangely into the kingdom of time, so strangely departing thence; comforting himself as best he may, languid or purposeful, eager or passive. I suddenly thought with great thankfulness: ‘I have no grievances against anyone, no sense of having been wronged by anyone, no scores to work off or anything whatsoever to avenge. Human beings only wrong one another in so far as the person wronged agrees to be wronged. The wrong is in the recipient not the doer. I wish no ill to any living soul; if anyone were delivered into my hands for judgement I should have at once to acquit him.

  A spring morning in the country - sunshine, birds singing, the grass dewy, the air fragrant, all the earth born again with the same ecstasy year by year, undaunted by the inevitability of the coming of autumn and then winter; eager only to reach the summer, that prospect sufficing. This is the pattern of the will in operation, of all earthly desires. Useless to reason -How can it go on with a ruinous end so certain? By the same token -How can spring ceaselessly repeat an exuberance which only exhausts itself in cold and desolation? Yet onto this mystery of spring, the earth’s rebirth, has been grafted (or rather harmonised with it) another of vastly deeper significance - the spring or rebirth of the soul. Thus time’s rhythms portray those of eternity as a smile portrays amusement. From the one the other may be deduced. One is an image of the other. If there had been no spring it would not have been possible to understand the soul’s ecstasy.

  A religious procession making its way along Hatton Gardens on an April Sunday seen from the top of a bus - before them a crucifix held up, and as they moved along, chanting some hymn or other. For a moment it was deeply moving, to the point of evoking tears - human souls in the deserted and ruined City, so varied in their habiliments - old and young, decrepit and vigorous, some hobbling, some striding, right at the end an aged grey lady in a bath chair, but all pressing forward after the Cross, singing as they went. This is the vision, I thought, of the saved entering the gates of the Celestial City, all singing, all confident, hobbling, shuffling, running towards the light.

  Walking over Hampstead Heath, Hesketh Pearson quoted Gloucester’s remark in ‘King Lear’ when, after he had been blinded, he said to the Old Man: ‘I stumbled when I saw.’ I marvelled that so brief a phrase could be so greatly moving. The whole mystery of expression in words came upon me - that a mere five should overwhelmingly convey a vast tragedy in all its implications. At the prospect of the death of someone dear thoughts on an afterlife are called in question. That face, so familiar, is to be drained of life; that voice, so often heard with delight, is never to speak again; that laughter will boom forth no more through evenings of dear companionship. These are facts before which no mere hypothesis, no mental affectation can stand up. The deep tenderness of one earth dweller for another imposes the need for an authentic solace or none at all. No platitudes or theoretical hopes will serve. Insistence in argument - To me, as to Blake, the death of the body is no more than going from one room into another -confronted with the reality of death makes a poor showing.

  ‘Do not go,’ one wants to say -as I so often have said to Hugh Kingsmill late at night trying to detain him a little longer, on seeing him home - one more turn up and down to defer parting. ’Stay a little longer.’ That is the feeling now - let immortality, however sublime, be postponed in favour of some continuance of mortality, however inadequate. As a lover will barter for a caress - just one, even contemptuously bestowed - all the pretensions of a spiritual love with its pride and integrity, enduring any abasement, taking the caress as assassins take their fee. It is like seeing someone off on a train, and the train begins to move, and you run foolishly along the platform, keeping pace with the train, faster and faster, until the platform ends.

  ***

  Church services are very empty, and yet at their worst they have a kind of sweetness. Faces humbly downcast are more tolerable than when they are clamorous. The most terrible sight of a human being is when he is orating, face inflamed, swollen, with words; mouth gaping open like a vast, vile chasm, hands clenched. Demagogues, as Lenin and Hitler, are usually presented in this hateful posture. Even mock humility is preferable -a congregation chanting: ‘We have erred and strayed in thy ways like lost sheep . .’The church service is designed to still rather than inflame the will; at least to settle the dust of living for a little while. Boys’ voices convey innocence; the candles shine like truth, and the wonderful phrases of the psalms and hymns and prayers and scripture tranquillize. ’The dayspring from on High hath visited us’ - I kept saying it over and over in my mind, finding it infinitely satisfying. I used to consider that the trouble about church services was that one didn’t believe, so that the words of the Creed died on one’s lips or were hypocritically spoken. Now, I feel differently, since I have seen that faith is more than merely believing as wisdom is more than merely knowledge.

  Quite apart from any belief, whatsoever, faith, for me, maintains the following propositions:

  That life is more than its phenomena, and is directed towards some end which both comprehends and transcends them.

  That this end is benevolent, not malevolent, so that living, in any and all conceivable circumstances, is good, not bad.

  That the noblest pursuit of life is to attune oneself to this end, to keep one’s gaze on it as a sailor does across the empty expanse of ocean for the first sight of land.

  That this can be done through the imagination, in contradistinction to the will; through love, in contradistinction to self-assertion; through, in the words of the New Testament, dying in the flesh to be reborn in the spirit.

  That desire is not the enemy of love; but its imperfect expression, as earth is the imperfect expression of heaven, and time of eternity.

  That the Christian religion, with all its dross, is the best expression of this everlasting truth so far available to Man, and that the civilisation based upon Christianity is the highest mode of life which has so far existed on this earth.

  ***

  From the point of view of eugenics, a parent should care most for those of his children who are healthiest and most intelligent, and least for the weakest and most incompetent. In fact, it is often the other way round. I remember in Algiers, a woman with an idiot son on whom she expended all her energies and tenderness. This seemed to me more profound in its significance than any principle of eugenics.

  It was a small white house where she lived, and when one opened the garden gate a bell tinkled, to warn her to come out and protect her son, interpose herself
between him and strangers. He normally sat in the sun among flowers she had planted muttering to himself and sometimes trembling. If, to a visitor, he managed to ejaculate a word coherently she was as smiling and proud as if he had achieved some brilliant distinction. She tenderly translated his incoherence to visitors as a mother proudly interprets a child’s first efforts to speak.

  I sometimes hear that bell now; it evokes the blue sky, the flowers, the whole fragrance of love. Eugenically considered, the idiot is a useless mouth and the mother engaged in a futile pursuit; but then if the idiot had been destroyed I should have been deprived of the bell, which I can say in all sincerity is more precious to me than all the literature of eugenics with the Fabian Society thrown in. Again, biologically considered, when a woman is old and withered and barren she should legitimately be cast aside; and yet these marks of age, that withered frame, are the very pattern of love, as a sunset is the glory of a summer’s day, or as the exquisite colours of autumn recall in tranquillity the ecstasy of spring.

  ***

  The will is insatiable in all its appetites, haunted by fear, spurred on by desire which grows by what it feeds on, its only conceivable outcome the Gadarene swine blindly, inevitably hurling themselves to destruction. There is no release from the will through the will. Release is possible only by the destruction of the will followed by re-birth in the spirit. Whatever might happen to the world, to the Christian Church, to me and mine, this will always be true; in the realisation of its truth may I be delivered from fear. The destruction of the will cannot be willed, but is achievable only through God’s grace. Every indulgence in desire feeds and strengthens the will - as alcohol, fornication in thought and deed. How I long sometimes to be delivered from desire, envying the dead because their appetites have died with their flesh; saying over to myself those last words of Cromwell - ‘It is not my desire to eat or to sleep, but to make what haste I may to begone.’

  Yet the wonder of life is that it is possible to die in the flesh and be reborn in the spirit without waiting for death. There is escape from the prison before the sentence is served. How I wish I could keep this always before me, reading what embodies it, eschewing anger and lust and hatred, all the will’s brood, fixing my eyes beyond the horizon of time and my spirit beyond the confines of flesh. There is no doubt now, and never has been any doubt, that therein lies all joy, all blessedness, all true achievement. Everything else is vanity, and at last anguish and madness. There is nothing worth thinking about except eternity, and nothing worth feeling except love, which is the soul’s delight. Beyond the tallest spire, beyond the furthest view, beyond all thought and aspiration and excellence - [there] I would be, and abide ever.

  There is no imagery adequate to the purpose. Mortal love is sweet, but compared with this other, only bitter. When it reigns, material things are shadows, and men and women tread the streets silently, as though pavements were covered with deep snow. ’Be not afeard, be not afeard, ’I say to myself. Fear has no meaning when perfect love casts it out. What should I fear for? - this mortal life of mine? It soon must end in any case. This mortal society to which I belong? It, too, infallibly, will perish tomorrow or the day after, and, like enough, as others have, leave little or nothing behind to show that it ever was. These small possessions, these dear ones, this corner of my own? They, likewise, are mortal, and cannot be defended against the ravages of time, which washes over them, and all else, like huge breakers on a sandy coast. I have no stake in the world, or would not have any, and cannot lose what I do not have. I would arrive in eternity like a happy traveller, unencumbered with baggage, or regrets, or letters-of-credit. When the world has truly no power to hold me, then am I free indeed; then only truly delivered from all evil.

  It is easy for weeks on end to be wholly submerged in the world of time -like a watchmender who, with magnifying glass screwed in his eye, sees nothing but the minute machinery he is repairing. How strange this will seem looked back on across eternity - my soul among the billions and billions which have existed, now exist, and will exist hereafter, with a vast desert of time stretching into the past and another reaching into the future, living for a few decades on a speck of dust riding through the universe; mysteriously born, and then, shortly after, as mysteriously dying; and yet, absorbed in these circumstances, as a moth is in the brightness round which it flutters; as a worm is in the dark earth through which it bur-rows. How terrible for man is this absorption! How miserable, wretched and lost when the waves of time close over one’s head, and its salt is in one’s mouth. To look beyond mortality! To see the glimmer of light where the dawn will break, and to hear sweet sounds in the distance growing imperceptibly nearer!

  How am I to lose the world, break the bonds of time, breathe not the stale air of mortality but the fresh breezes of eternity, live in terms of everlasting reality instead of the delusions of sense, keep my gaze fixed on God, from whom alone comes peace. Like as the hart panteth after the water brook, tongue parched, eyes wild with longing, so do I yearn for eternity, and cannot find satisfaction in anything else; not in eating or drinking or in the indulgence of any appetite; not in the wonders of the world or human companionship or love or lust, in life or in death, in work or in idleness, in contemplation or in restless movement, in riches or in poverty, in fame or in obscurity, in understanding or in folly. No other food will do, no other joy will substitute.

  ‘And there were the dishes in which they brought to me, being hungry, the Sun and Moon instead of Thee, ’St. Augustine cried regarding his secular studies. I, too, have a hunger which the Sun and Moon will not satisfy. Its satisfaction is the only pursuit I care for; that it exists, provides the certainty that the wherewithal to satisfy it also exists - as the fact of physical hunger presupposes the existence of bread. There is no name for this hunger except love, and only in the self’s obliteration can it be satisfied. It has existed since the beginning of time, and will exist till the end of time. For me, a Western European. I find its most perfect formulation in the New Testament, and, especially, in the First Epistle of St. John.

  How extraordinary is this longing, every day more intense

  -for what? I scarcely know - for perfection, for eternity, for that peace which the world cannot give; a longing to begone, and yet not a desire for death such as one feels in moments of despair; a consciousness of having some part in a purpose transcending time and space, of hearing distant music, of being in love, but not with another human being - rather with life itself, and death, and all creation; pain, disappointment and other ills only like blemishes on a loved face which make it the more lovable. I often say over Caliban’s words - ‘This Isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs . . .’, and think of his dreams, so wonderful that when he waked he cried to sleep again. Yet the ecstasy cannot be conveyed.

  ***

  A watery, wintry dawn seen across London roofs is exceedingly lovely. It is as though the old Thames were once more flowing through deserted, desolate marshes. In the stillness, London seems only a dream, a shadow, with no corporeal existence. Seeing it thus, I reflected that the greatness of Christian civilization, of which London is a manifestation, derives from the religion out of which it was born. Throughout all its cruel history, the idea has been kept alive that men belong to one family, with one father in Heaven, and so must be brothers one with another. However imperfectly, this concept finds expression in law, in art, in all institutions, in the whole apparatus of society. Materialism, whether in the American or the Russian version, is the exact antithesis of such a concept. It claims for the ego all rights because there is nothing but the ego, and therefore leads back to barbarism, to the condition before civilization existed. This is absolutely and irretrievably the consequence of setting up Man as his own God. Thither we are now moving, with what accompaniment of horrors cannot be imagined. I feel this deluge upon me, and ask only that I may be vouchsafed the strength to live out what remains of my own days, in the light of truth as I
have seen it - that Man lives in so far as the ego dies, that self-abnegation is greater than self-assertion, that to bow the head before the wonder and mystery of creation is more fitting than to raise it in defiance, and that the imagination alone can light a path through the forests of the night - Paul, Blake, Beethoven, Constable and many, many others contributing to that sublime radiance.

  Goodness has an aroma of sweetness, evil a stench. This is not fanciful, but a fact. Between the powers of darkness operating through the will, and those of light operating through the imagination or soul, there is ceaseless war - a conflict which takes place collectively, as well as inside each individual. This recalls an image in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ - Christian, climbing up a mountain in the shade keeps seeing round each bend the sunshine in which he longs to be but never reaches. Like all Bunyan’s images, it is perfect because it recalls an exact experience. How excluded one feels in the chill shade when one sees the earth bathed in sunshine, seemingly near, yet out of reach. So it is possible to be excluded from goodness. ’Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee,’ is, perhaps, the most poignant of all prayers. It is also true that goodness exists by virtue of itself and not by virtue of the acts it induces. Goodness in itself spreads light; the halo is an authentic phenomenon. The mere presence of goodness destroys its opposite as light destroys darkness. Nothing needs to be said, or even done. In the presence of goodness anger is consumed, arrogance expires, lustfulness flickers out - a fire without fuel.