Skip to main content

The Well at the World's End

A professor of Ancient History, whilst walking in the Highlands, encounters, with his wife, Fand, a well whose water is so clear that they are momentarily led to believe that it is dry. Where does the water end and the air begin for there appears to be no boundary?

This triggers in Peter Munro, the professor, a quixotic desire to go a wandering in search of a particular kind of adventure and to find 'the well at the world's end'. The adventure is to allow himself to meet all kind of folk and by paying them a certain kind of attention to tease from them stories when, like the well, they found that their ordinary boundary between self and world had disappeared and they had peeked into another world, though one wholly enfolded in this one.

This is then not an 'ordinary' novel - and one that quite baffled its readership. For its author was an accomplished writer of social realism - of the complex history and life of the Highlands - not notably regarded as a metaphysician (or indeed a mystic). But Neil M Gunn, the novel's author, was, in fact, all three and as his life and writing progressed, he attempted to ever more deeply intertwine the three, looking for the signals of transcendence amidst the everyday. Indeed in 'The Well at the World's End' he actually makes use of both his own experience and those related to him by friends of, for want of a better name, 'mystical experience'.

The novel has no especial guiding narrative - episode follows episode, loosely connected by the sense of a quest - and in the different ways, people step beyond the threshold - when close to death by drowning, at rest after an arduous day wrapped in twilight, by the simple grace of a Spanish garden drenched in the stillness of the midday sun, when encountering a storm at sea or in speculation over a shared myth. Many are the possibilities of being surprised by delight and of becoming made whole in the delight's grace, if only for a moment but then how long is that?

What Gunn gives one, through the text, are continuous opportunities to pause, ponder over life's meaning, taste it, without ever suggesting explanations. Indeed thought, whilst valuable, is often the hindrance to true seeing, revolving as it does so closely around 'my' purposes, the ego's self-referential dance, rather than being opened out and made vulnerable by the presence of what is, momentarily unnamed, unnameable.

It is, also, a meditation on those famed lines of T.S. Eliot's in Little Gidding where the explorer arrives where he started yet knowing the place for the first time or in Munro's case, where he beholds his wife, after a nearly deadly adventure saving a sheep, and wholly refreshes his knowing of her, made pristine again out of his renewing experience.

But never does Gunn stray too far from the wholly ordinary, otherwise he would defeat his purpose. His 'mysticism' is woven tight to his characters and their everyday lives - their hopes, loves, humours and struggles -  such that the 'well at the world's end' is everywhere, for the world's ending is placed in every particular being, every person, as their birthright.

The novel was written, in the post World War II world, at a time when 'realism' appeared to demand 'pessimism' and a shedding of the possibilities of transcendence for a secular making do (preferably gathered around the kitchen sink or assembled in a bar) and where the predominant emotion might be 'anger'. This may account for its poor reception but takes nothing away from its quality as a heart felt rejoinder and reminder of a better world.

Comments

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...

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...

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...