A Severe Mercy

by Sheldon Vanauken

There were two main strands, one growing out of the other, in my Maytime thinking. One of them, the earlier of the two, was about time and eternity: its roots stretched back to Glenmerle and it had been pushed into the forefront of my thoughts by the Illumination of the Past. The other strand of my thinking, which was related to it, was concerned with God’s eternal mercy and was brought to a focus by a letter from C. S. Lewis in early May. But the thoughts on time and eternity should come first.

  In a golden summer when our love was young Davy and I had sat on a stone wall near Glenmerle and talked about unpressured time—time to sit on stone walls, time to see beauty, time to stare as long as sheep and cows. At my father’s club, sitting before the fire, we had spoken of ‘moments made eternity’, meaning what are called timeless moments, moments precisely without the pressure of time—moments that might be called, indeed, timeful moments. Or time-free moments. And we had clearly understood that the pressure of time was our nearly inescapable awareness of an approaching terminus—the bell about to ring, the holiday about to end, the going down from Oxford foreseen. We had dreamed of Grey Goose as a way to escape the pressure of time, though no one escapes entirely. Life itself is pressured by death, the final terminus. Socrates refused to delay his own death for a few more hours: perhaps he knew that those few hours under the pressure of time would be worth little. When we speak of Now, we seem to mean the timeless: there is no duration. Awareness of duration, of terminus, spoils Now.

  Immediately after Davy’s death I had experienced the amazing phenomenon, made complete by the Illumination of the Past, of the flowing back to me of all the Davys of all the years, the whole Davy, the eternal Davy, even as we hold all the David Copperfields when we have closed the book. We are in an eternity with reference to the book’s created time, but we live and have our being in time: God’s created time. If, indeed, that is so, if God is eternity and time is a created thing, then Davy must now be divorced from time and in eternity. But I was not: I was in time. The college bell still summoned me to eight o’clocks. And yet I was being given an eternal view of Davy. Therefore I was, in some sense, looking into eternity. What did that mean? That the barriers between time and eternity were not so impassable as one had supposed? Might one see still deeper into eternity? Or, at least, into the meaning of time and eternity?

  Reflecting upon my perception of the total or eternal Davy, so much more completely to be known and loved, I realised that without conscious awareness of it I had had—we all have had— other glimpses of the eternal. I could recall our Glenmerle dog, Laddie, as stubborn puppy and the gay powerful wolf later as one dog. Or England: the name summons up more than the England of Oxford days, especially to a reader of history: it is at once the England of Drake and the defiant lion that was Churchill. Or Athens: all it was and still is, though buried beneath the centuries. Perhaps, apart from our historical memory, there is an Athens in eternity, for Athens would be Athenians. And Davy and I had talked in hospital of meeting again in an eternal Glen-merle.

  If the recovery of all the Davys focused my attention upon eternity, the Illumination of the Past focused my mind upon time: the harrying of time. I saw with immense clarity that we had always been harried by time. All our dreams back there in Glenmerle had come true: the schooner Grey Goose under the wind, the far islands of Hawaii in the dark-blue rolling Pacific, the spires of Oxford. But all the fulfillments were somehow, it seemed to me, incomplete, temporary, hurried. We wished to know, to savour, to sink in — into the heart of the experience — to possess it wholly. But there was never enough time; something still eluded us.

  When we were in France with Edmund and Lore, we drove into Paris on a lovely spring day on our way to the Channel. We were not going to ‘do’ Paris this trip, we were just passing through. But as we drove, top down, the buildings were noble against the sky, the parks were full of merry lovers, the river sparkled and Notre Dame was mellow in the sun. In one of the letters to Davy — the only one that survives —in this time of my grief, I said: ‘We were in our beloved Oxford for three years and Paris for not that many hours; and yet I wonder if Paris were not more complete or eternal an experience than Oxford?’ We were not hurrying to ‘see’ Paris. It was for us like the Lady sweet and kind passing by: a timeless impression. Of course, in reality, there were timeless impressions, time-free moments, in Oxford, too. But there we did feel that despite all that became part of us — bells and spires, C. S. Lewis and a host of friends, the face of the Warden of All Souls and the River Cherwell on a sunny day — there was something more, something still deeper, that we hadn’t time enough —world and time enough —to reach. We didn’t at all feel that we were unable to reach it, only that there wasn’t time enough.

  We shall come back, we said, and find it. We shall go back to the Islands and grasp the essence. We shall have the ultimate Grey Goose on a blue and timeless ocean. But there wasn’t time enough to go back, way leading on to way. And if we had gone back, there wouldn’t have been time enough then, either, for ahead there would be a terminus. Always.

  Keats, I think, sensed man’s need for the timeless. His grecian urn is a ‘foster-child of Silence and slow Time,’ and it ‘tease[s] us out of thought/As doth eternity.’ He consoles the young lover on the vase with the words: ‘For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.’ It is, surely, the eternal that Keats aches for. And I see the same longing in Shelley and many another poet.

  I saw it so clearly that May: how we had been harried by time. Always we were transients. Except perhaps at Glenmerle. Glen-merle had always been, would always be. That’s why as a symbol it was so important to us. Of course it was not really immune to time: it passed and is, indeed, destroyed by our barbaric progress towards ever huger, sicker cities. All the same Glenmerle remains, ghostly and eternal.

  The timelessness that seems to reside in the future or the past is an illusion. We dreamt of Grey Goose by the pool at Glenmerle, dreaming of the schooner sailing into a quiet lagoon of some far island, and the dream was charming because the image was with-out time, or time-free. In reality, the log to write, the meal to get, the topsail to be mended. The holiday trip to England is full of timeless images —the moments in Wells or Coventry Cathedral, the long talks with Peter or Jane, the hours in the peaceful country-side. In reality, even without the fearfully time-pressured guided tour, there are trains to catch, shirts to wash, sleep to get, rooms to book before it’s too late. The future dream charms us because of its timelessness; and I think most of the charm we see in the ‘good old days’ is no less an illusion of timelessness.

  In the reality of Now the clock is always ticking. One might suppose, looking at the glossier advertisements of watches — ever more exact, ever more spectacular flashings of the passing second — that modern man considers time a lovesome thing or, possibly, has a watch fetish. We might be better advised to hurl the lot into already-polluted Lake Erie.

  And yet, after all, the clock is not always ticking. Sometimes it stops and then we are happiest. Sometimes — more precisely, some-not-times —we find ‘the still point of the turning world’. All our most lovely moments perhaps are timeless. Certainly it was so for Davy and me. That very day when we sat on the wall and talked of time. Slow summer days at Glenmerle. The yacht ghosting at half a knot over calm waters, no one caring whether she arrived anywhere. Dreaming along the Cherwell and the skylark singing. I think we sought the timeless by a kind of intuition. Timeless moments—that ‘still point’. Whether long or short makes no difference, for time is stopped. When I came aboard Gull and looked down the hatch at Davy’s head bent over her seashells in the light of the cabin lamp with all the vast, mysterious night around me, the moment of perceiving might have been ten seconds or ten minutes—to someone else. Time had stopped for me.

  In the Illumination of the Past I came in due course to the most purely timeless moment of all the years: the night in Grey Goose of the sea-fire. One’s response to the description of that night may suggest whether, as I b
elieve, the longing for eternity is built-in to us all. We had come up on deck some time in the night, wakened by the swing of the yacht at her anchor. A cool north breeze. A million brilliant stars above the dark slender masts. And every little wave crested with cold sea-fire. Without a word, Davy snuggled close and my arm about her, we had remained, the beauty pouring into us, remained for—what? An hour? Three hours? We never knew or cared. Finally, with wordless consent, we had gone below to sleep to the lift and stir of the yacht. A foretaste of eternity.

  If, indeed, we all have a kind of appetite for eternity, we have allowed ourselves to be caught up in a society that frustrates our longing at every turn. Half our inventions are advertised to save time—the washing machine, the fast car, the jet flight—but for what? Never were people more harried by time: by watches, by buzzers, by time clocks, by precise schedules, by the beginning of the programme. There is, in fact, some truth in ‘the good old days’: no other civilisation of the past was ever so harried by time.

  And yet, why not? Time is our natural environment. We live in time as we live in the air we breathe. And we love the air— who has not taken deep breaths of pure, fresh country air, just for the pleasure of it? How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours?

  C. S. Lewis, in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. ‘Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. not always be, purely aquatic creatures?’ Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest?

  It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed at it—how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren’t adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.

  So it appeared to me. It appeared to me that Davy and I had longed for timelessness—eternity—all our days; and the longing coupled with my post-mortem vision of the total Davy whetted my appetite for heaven. Golden streets and compulsory harp lessons may lack appeal—but timelessness? And total persons? Heaven is, indeed, home.

  I attempted that spring something impossible: a sort of picture of what heaven might be. I could only describe it, though, in temporal terms. We haven’t the words for eternity. It is perhaps worth noticing how many words—italicised —suggest time and are, therefore, quite inadequate. Still, this is what I wrote:

  It is a heavenly afternoon. Davy and I have just had a timeless luncheon (I am assuming that God will not waste so joyous an invention as taste). I then say to her that I shall wander down to sit beneath the beech tree and contemplate the valley for awhile, but I shall be back soon. I do so. I contemplate the valley for some hours or some years—the words are meaning-less here where foreverness is in the air. At all events, I contemplate it just as long as I feel like doing. Then I get up and start back, but I meet someone, C. S. Lewis, perhaps, and we sit on a bench and maybe have a pint of bitter and talk for an hour or several hours—until we have said all we have to say for now. And then I go gladly back to Davy. She, meanwhile, has played the celestial organ, an organ on which perhaps every note of a song can be heard at the same time: that is, the song not played in time with half of it gone and half yet to be heard. She has played the organ for a few minutes and is just turning to greet me when I come in. Whether I was away for an hour or a hundred years, whether she has played for ten minutes or thirty, neither of us has waited or could wait for the other. For there simply is no time, no hours, no minutes, no sense of time passing. The ticking has stopped. It is eternity.

  Of course it will not be like that. What it will be is quite beyond anything we can imagine. And yet it will be home. Of that we may be sure. I am as certain of timelessness to come as I am that time was the worst of the evils in Pandora’s box.

  Although I must live long years in time beyond Davy, somehow I felt certain that we should go on to the Eternal Majesty together, nor would she be conscious of delay. The idea is hinted at in this poem, looking ahead to another death:

  DOORWAY

  Now from my chains I flee,

  Fair is the way I see,

  Heather and wind and you.

  Dearling, O wait for me!

  Evermore light and free,

  Running uphill to you.

  Beauty shines down on me,

  Love and eternity,

  Heather and wind and you.

  Glory, O Christ, to Thee!

  Joy like a flame for me,

  Running uphill with you.

  With the eternal Davy in my consciousness, with the perception that our choicest moments had been the timeless ones, with the recognition of time as a hostile environment, I had looked as deeply into eternity as I could. Yet I also perceived that the past tends to appear to us as rather more timeless than it, in fact, was. If heaven and hell, are, indeed, retroactive—all our lives the one or the other—might not eternity be retroactive, too?

  In late May in my rather minuscule hand I wrote of my thinking to Lewis. I spoke also of the closeness of Davy and me and of that aspect of it that was an effort to develop feminine understanding in me, masculine in her. I had just had an important letter from Lewis, but I shall give his reply to my thoughts on time and eternity first:

  I have your letter of May 20. My own hand is now so bad that it ill becomes me to blame yours; but cd. you make it a bit larger I shall need a microscope else. What you say about time is what I’ve long thought. It is inadequate to, and partially transcended by, v. simple experiences. E.g. when do we hear a musical air? Until the last note is sounded it is incomplete; as soon as that sounds it’s already over. And I’m pretty sure eternal life doesn’t mean this width-less line of moments end-lessly prolonged (as if by prolongation it cd. ‘catch up with’that wh. it so obviously cd. never hold) but getting off that line onto its plane or even the solid. Read von Hiigel’s Eternal Life, Boethius Consolations (nice 16th. c. English version on the right hand page of the Loeb edn.) About the nature of the relation between spouses in eternity, I base my idea on S. Paul’s dictum that ‘he that is joined with a harlot is one flesh.’ If the lowest, most corrupt form of sexual union has some mystical ‘oneness’ involved in it (and by the way what an argument against ‘casual practice’!) a fortiori the married & lawful form must have it par excellence. That is, I think the union between the risen spouses will be as close as that between the soul and its own risen body. But (and this, as you see, is the snag) the risen body is the body that has died. (‘If we share this death, we shall also share this resurrection’). And so— as you say in one of your postscripts—your love for Jean must, in one sense, be ‘killed’ and ‘God must do it.’ You’d better read the Paradiso hadn’t you? Note the moment at wh. Beatrice turns her eyes away from Dante ‘to the eternal Fountain’, and D. is quite content. But of course it’s all in the text ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom . . . and all these other things shall be added unto you.’ Infinite comfort in the second part; inexorable demand in the first. Hopeless if it were to be done by your own endeavours at some particular moment. But ‘God must do it.’ Your part is what you are already doing: ‘Take me—no conditions.’ After that, through the daily duty, through the increasing effort after holiness—well, like the seed growing secretly . . . What you say about the she in you & the he in her certainly does not seem to me the plains of Gomorrah and is in some sense what I don’t well know) probably true. There might be an element of delusion i
n the form it took: I don’t know. But it did occur to me when reading it that my doctor friend once rebuked me for the v. exact attempts at precision I made in describing a pain to him. He said ‘All that about just how it felt, its unique quality, is generally useless & unreliable to us as doctors. Tell me where it is & how long you’ve had it. If I need anything more, I’ll ask.’ Possibly all those fine points wh. distinguish your loss from all the other losses suffered by other lovers are less important than they (v. naturally) seem to you. These sonnets, written about 10 years ago, are not in every way addressed to your condition, but they put some things perhaps a little better than I cd. put them here. I am in great trouble about my dear brother’s dipsomania: pray for him and me. God bless you.

  [P.S.] Let me have the sonnets back sometime: but no hurry.

  The ‘Five Sonnets’ he sent were later to appear under that heading in his Poems, They spoke to me very powerfully, indeed; and I should send them, in my turn, to any lover bereaved. In them Lewis warns the bereaved against anger at heaven, though ‘Anger’s the anaesthetic of the mind,’ and against despair, which contains a hint ‘Of something like revenge,’ and against any seeking from the beloved an earthly comfort. Instead, as Dante learned, seek God first: ‘Ask for the Morning Star and take (thrown in)/Your earthly love.’

  Lewis, as he has said in Surprised by Joy, was brought to the Incarnate God by his longing for joy, a joy that does not reside in any earthly object that seems to promise it. In Pilgrim’s Regress he describes this joy, the very longing for which is itself sweetness and joy: quite possibly, indeed, the purest joy that we can ever know on earth. At first the longing is for an ‘unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead . . .’ But, then, we fix that sweet and poignant longing for joy upon some earthly object. We shall, we believe, find that joy if only we can climb the blue mountains, find the Blue Flower, win the love of some particular lady in blue, or sail beyond the blue horizon in our schooner to our own new-found-land. Secretly we are all perhaps the Questing Knight. And yet, whatever the object of our quest, we learn when we find it that it does not ever contain the joy that broke our heart with longing. Thus, Lewis says, ‘if a man diligently followed this desire [for joy], pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.’ This, I think, is what C. S. Lewis’s life and writings are about; and mine, too. Davy and I, having each other, longed for unpressured time— time-free existence—for thus we should find joy. We dimly glimpsed eternity, but what we, like Lewis, longed for was joy. But, though we never quite forgot the timelessness that was originally the end to which the boat was to be the means, we sometimes in those early years saw the schooner-to-be as an end in itself, an object containing the joy.