Leaving Alexandria
Page 32
108 Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 1987–90 (Golgonooza Press, Ipswich, 1992), p. 13.
109 Sheila Brock (unpublished).
EPILOGUE
110 The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (University of California Press, 1996), p. 34.
111 Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems (Courage Books/Running Press, Philadelphia, 1991), p. 276.
112 John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick (Penguin Modern Classics, London, 2007), p. 134.
113 Karen Bek-Pedersen, Fate and Weaving – Justification of a Metaphor (unpublished).
114 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (Penguin Classics, London, 1988), II.10, p. 68.
Endnotes
1. The lamps had a particular significance for Laurie. One of his friends in the Great War was another famous army chaplain, Philip Clayton, affectionately known as Tubby because of his Toby Jug build. In Poperinge in Belgium, behind the lines at Ypres, Clayton ran a club where soldiers could meet and relax regardless of rank. A notice was hung by the door: ‘All rank abandon, ye who enter here.’ Called Talbot House after a young lieutenant who had died at Ypres in 1915, but nicknamed Toc H by the soldiers, one of the features of the chapel in the loft or Upper Room of the house was an Aladdin oil lamp that burned perpetually as a symbol of hope and reconciliation. It was replicas of these bronze Toc H lamps Canon Laurie hung before the names of his remembered dead when the chapel was opened in 1926.
2. It was this tantalising quality that impelled a young Scottish artist to the creation of a great work of art. Alison Watt, like many others before her, found that little side door in Carrubber’s Close, stepped inside and was moved by what she found. She sat in the Warriors’ Chapel for some time, absorbed by its sadness. In response, she was moved to paint an enormous twelve-foot canvas in four separate squares that now hang above the altar. Called Still, the white folds of the mysterious painting suggest ‘a presence at once given and denied’. It suggests the presence of a huge absence, the brimming over of a vast emptiness. It glimmers against the grey sorrow of the stone, but does not attempt to subdue it. And the Warriors’ Chapel looks as if it has been waiting for it from the beginning.
3. Anglican bishops used to wear gaiters, but not any longer.
4. In the summer of my departure from the Episcopate, precipitated by the hostile reaction to my book Godless Morality, I got a hand-written letter from Robert Runcie, thanking me for the book and regretting not speaking out in its favour when it was under attack. For some reason the letter took a while to reach me. I received it on a warm July afternoon. I was moved when I read it. A few minutes later my secretary came in to tell me she’d just heard the news: Archbishop Runcie had died earlier that day.