Skip to main content

Foxes and Hedgehogs


The novelist, Linda Proud, was once told by the poet and Blake scholar, Kathleen Raine, that she was 'too old to read novels'. This struck me, reading it, akin to my favourite 'silly' remark of Kathleen's namely that the novelist, Patrick White, had 'written himself out'. This may have been true, as his last 'Three Uneasy Pieces' are aptly titled (and the whimsical notion of tracking a potato's feelings as it is peeled doubly so) but rather off the point. If you were one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth (or any) century, you can be forgiven for either running out of steam or falling into another direction. Whatever we think of Tolstoy's 'Resurrection' (or indeed his religious writings), it does not detract from the achievement of 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina'! It is like telling off Dostoyevsky for not having finished 'The Brothers Karamazov'!

I was thinking of this as I was finishing Theresa Whistler's biography of Walter de la Mare. Here was a man of insatiable curiosity and a wondering spirit that felt the presence of meaning and was touched by it yet he always remained reticent about shaping or defining a truth out of it. Let us see might be his motto and he went adventuring in life and beyond life. He was, to use Isaiah Berlin's nomenclature in his essay on Tolstoy's philosophy of history, a fox, one who knows many things but refuses to assume an over-arching truthful narrative. Kathleen, whom I knew and loved, was a hedgehog - one who articulates an abiding, securing vision of the truth of things.

When I was young, I was deeply drawn to the sensed and actual security of an abiding vision and I recall sitting in Kathleen's beautiful living room in Chelsea partaking of a way of measuring the truth of things, rooted in neo-Platonic vision, that was initiatory and haunting. I cannot imagine being the person I am without having 'been there'. However, as I grow cheerfully older, deeply as I respect the truth bearers, I found myself irresistibly drawn to foxiness, to a deep appreciation of our complex enterprises after knowing that are always provisional, that resonate with particularity and context and the messiness of being just so. It is a bit like inhabiting novels and stories rather than treatises or texts.

This is why I have an instinctive scepticism about imagining that novel reading might pass, after all the curiosity of story dwelling seems to be an intrinsic part of what it means to be human and that being human, uniquely this person rather than that, utterly, is finally the invitation of the Gospel.

You will not be 'saved' in the Christian tradition unless one is absolutely Nicholas and an education in what that might mean is the function of the continuous exploration of stories (of which the Gospels, and not only the canonised ones, are exemplars).




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more