Christ gave love as the sole solution for man’s justified hatred of man, and we try, and we have improved, but we don’t make it work. Christ asked us to choose God, not life, and now many choose life without God. If God is the central meaning of life, and it feels so, we do not know how to live that way. We have tried so many ways and have let them become bigotry, or tyranny, or dreary pretence. We crave for that which lies behind the terrible play of the opposites. We pray to have the conflict resolved, but life would end if it were resolved. To endure it must be our creative role, nothing else seems true. If it is only at the centre of our being that suffering is resolved, is it not there that we are nearest to God? Is it even the road to him if we knew how to travel it?
My presumption in thinking badly of life mortifies me. What do I know? How dare I judge? I don’t. I feel shame, and yet—life is cruel; and exquisitively kind. Put the sound of softly lapping waves and a clear green sky in the scales, and how many woes would it take to strike a balance? If I regret none of the bad things that have happened to me, knowing that I needed them all to reach any ripeness, then is all hardship justified if someone learns by it? No, there is much too much. So I do judge? Yes, every second of the day. I say to life: “You are very hard”, and I also say: “We are blind, we prefer to be blind. It is easier. We are mean and small, we choose to be small. It has a bite to it”. Life has to be hard to have any effect on us; even now we hardly notice it. Beyond that can one go? I must. I add, “We are also blind to the miracles of good that come to us. We hardly heed them, we even protest against them”. Then I am left where I was, appalled by the hardness of life, knowing we are forced to be unwilling heroes. Suddenly I wonder—is all hardness justified because we are so slow in realizing that life was meant to be heroic? Greatness is required of us. That is life’s aim and justification, and we poor fools have for centuries been trying to make it convenient, manageable, pliant to our will. It is also peaceful and tender and funny and dull. Yes, all that.
Good things have gone, some good things will always go when new things come, and we mourn. We may mourn rightly, for the outlook is uncertain, perhaps very dark. Destruction is part of creativity, that is the terrible truth we shrink from, knowing it may be misused. This truth is everywhere, almost too obvious to be felt. It is leaden in the old who are being destroyed by time, and I admit that it takes more courage than I had known to drink the lees of life.
My note book shows me how much I mourn. Perhaps the forms of life that are passing should be mourned, and this may be the right role of age. Perhaps our wail should be part of the paean of life that is being lived. I do not mourn for lost happiness, I do not mourn for myself. I mourn that life is so incomprehensible, and I mourn for this confused age. We old are the wailers. I hear us everywhere.
Within the last month I have had two odd encounters. After waiting for some moments while heavy traffic passed I crossed the road with a comely woman of seventy or so. As we arrived safely on the other side she bowed and said, “It was such a beautiful world they destroyed”. I bowed and we parted. Then a week later, waiting in a small railway station, I heard a woman with clear, brave eyes, well over sixty, saying that she had lived for the past thirty years on the edge of a desert, and she commented to all of us, “I think you lead a dreadful life here”. The woman next to her spoke and gave what was almost a cry, “Life could be glorious if we would let it be”. I felt she was perhaps a little mad, but what made her so?
I wonder if old people want truth more than anything else, and they cannot find it. Perhaps truth is diversity so each seeks his own. Is truth a thing in itself, a state of consciousness to which we are opaque or clear?
I admire a contented mind. I revere enjoyment of simple things. I can imagine that contentment has a high degree of truth. But the human tendency is to take good as normal, and one’s natural right, and so no cause for satisfaction or pleasure. This is accompanied by the habit of regarding bad as abnormal and a personal outrage.
The woman who has a gift for old age is the woman who delights in comfort. If warmth is known as the blessing it is, if your bed, your bath, your best-liked food and drink are regarded as fresh delights, then you know how to thrive when old. If you get the things you like on the simplest possible terms, serve yourself lightly, efficiently and calmly, all is almost well. If you are truly calm you stand a chance of surviving much, but calmness is intermittent with me. Sensuous pleasure seems necessary to old age as intellectual pleasure palls a little. At times music justifies living, but mere volume of sound can overwhelm, and I find silence exquisite. I have spent my whole life reading, only to find that most of it is lost, so books no longer have their former command. I live by rectitude or reverence, or courtesy, by being ready in case life calls, all lightly peppered with despair. This makes me rest on comfort. I could use the beauty and dignity of a cat but, denied that, I try for her quiet.
April 3rd
I am home, I am home, I am home. I have been home for a week so that it is now natural to be here, but my joy is more than natural. I have life before me, better health, and less pain, less pain; the biggest pain gone for good, only bits of chronic pain left, sharp discomfort say, left to bother me. Not to have pain, even my degree of pain, which was always bearable, is a constant elation which will always be part of me.
When the surgeon looked at me with honest eyes and said I must have an operation, that my age was not against it, that I could not be out of pain with so bad a gall bladder, and that without it I had every chance of normal health, everything became simple and settled. I was given medicine that dulled the pain while I waited for a room in the Nursing Home. My spirits danced. I was gay, gay that I was to lose pain. Everyone was full of concern but I laughed inside. All that time when I had been in pain, when I was a burden to myself, a problem to doctors, and unconvincing to my family and friends, was over. I basked in the respect paid to an operation. People said I was brave. I wasn’t brave, I was happy.
Of course I might die, I had heard of the heart giving out under an operation, it was possible, but then I would meet the great mystery. It almost seemed my chance. A mean way of slipping out though, not fair to the surgeon, and I want to be conscious that I am dying. I did not want to die, but I have lived my life—or so I used to feel. Now each extra day is a gift. An extra day in which I may gain some new understanding, see a beauty, feel love, or know the richness of watching my youngest grandson express his every like and dislike with force and sweetness. But all this is the sentience by which I survive, and who knows, it may matter deeply how we end so mysterious a thing as living.
I had one fear. What if something went wrong, and I became an invalid? What if I became a burden, ceased to be a person and became a problem, a patient, someone who could not die? That was my one fear, but my chances were reasonably good, so all was simple and settled and out of my hands. Being ill in a nursing home became my next task, a sombre dance in which I knew some of the steps. I must conform. I must be correct. I must be meek, obedient and grateful, on no account must I be surprising. If I deviated by the breadth of a toothbrush I would be in the wrong.
A book of poems I had ordered weeks before arrived as I left for the Nursing Home, and they occupied me during that long evening when I lay waiting for time to pass. Finally the night began when my body belonged to brisk strangers. The ugliness of my age was exposed to trim, fresh women. I was at last sent to have a bath at five in the morning, and then more drugs, and the strangeness of knowing less and less until knowing ceased.
Next day I was told that all was over and all had gone well. I was lost in pain and drugs and that was the only truly bad day. I thought I was screaming with pain, I could feel the screams in my throat, but days later I asked Sister and she said I had not made a sound, that few did. So it was part of the fog I was in. By the third day a sense of achievement came for I was doing my task well, no mistakes so far, and already there was that sense that came six years before when I had a fractured f
emur. Then I had felt so frail and weary of life that it seemed as though I had met defeat. To learn to walk again seemed beyond me. Then strength arrived and forced me to recognize that just because this accident had happened I was stronger. Where the strength and the will to use it had come from I could not imagine, but who understands the ebb and flow of energy? At first I did not believe in this new strength, but it was there, vital, mine. Now after the operation some new life was near. I must use it carefully, rest on it, test it. There was not enough yet to feel anything but hope, yet it was in the offing, I recognised it, I must do my work of being a patient with care. This was work that one did by lying still, remembering, judging. Deciding when your discomfort justified asking for help, and when it was the youness of you. I made some mistakes and then I was contrite and very reasonable. Patients must like and dislike as little as possible.
On the fourth, or was it the fifth day I saw the great wound healed for most of its length. If my body could do that then surely I could do all my body wanted of me. Then I began to feel so well that I knew I was in danger of breaking rules. I must not. I must remember that this new vitality was partly the strength that comes to me when needed, and partly sheer exhilaration, always my undoing. I must be quiet. I would woo each nurse so that rules would slacken a little, and then I would know them as woman to woman. The goodness of most of the nurses was real; some radiated goodness, one had beauty, two used professional virtue to cover bitterness, but bit by bit we blent civility with humanity and liked each other.
Then the rage I knew so well rose in me and threatened all. I heard the animal growl in me when they did all the things it is my precious privacy and independence to do for myself. I hated them while I breathed, “Thank you, nurse”. At last I was allowed a bath in a tub, though with a nurse to direct my every move, and in a burst of naturalness I told her that being ill made me bad tempered, and while they were being kind and caring for me I wanted to say, “Let me alone, I’ll do it myself”, and oh my relief when the dear woman laughed and said, “You’re the kind that get well quickly. Some want everything done for them, just won’t take themselves on at all”.
More and more I belonged to myself. I hopped from my bed and watered my flowers, careful not to leave a petal where it should not be: On perhaps the seventh or eighth morning I could see that the sun was shining, even the black silk bandage I wore over my eyes showed that, and before anyone had come in, at what seemed an early hour—though I had accepted that time in a Nursing Home was different from other time—I got up, threw back the curtains, opened all four windows—they would not open very wide—and expanded into the blue sky. Or so my whole heart longed to do. I wanted to be out of my body, without limit, I was rejuvenated, young, I wanted a future. I was still eighty-two, they had done nothing about that, and I wanted to scale the sky.
I remembered that yesterday four aircraft had flown in repeating circles, crossing and re-crossing, and I knew that would satisfy me. A moment more of joy, and I drew the curtains, resumed my black bandage, and sleepily greeted nurse when she entered with the crisp cheer of someone who has been on night duty. Later I noticed the little window in the door through which nurses assure themselves that all is well.
I was strong enough on the twelfth day to go to a non-surgical Nursing Home, and there I could look at the sea, the coast, the cliffs, and take two short walks a day. I felt so well that I thought it was the air that was curing me, for now I did everything for myself, even making my bed. Then it seemed the quiet of the scene that steadied me—the cliffs, the sea; I spent hours with a book in my hand but watching gulls and clouds. I was told that the immutable land was always moving, sliding, falling, even the caves rich in fossils almost lost now; so the land was movement, the water was movement, and the wind, mist, sunshine, rain were change, nothing was still.
I took a day or two to realize that most of the patients were too old to leave their rooms. One still strong enough to tidy her room daily was a hundred and two. She longed to die, had given up eating as the one permissible way, but became so hungry that she had to begin eating again. I was among people who could not die. How many longed to? Who should? Who can say? We cannot know what dying is. Is there a right moment for each of us? If we have hardly lived at all, it may be much harder to die. We may have to learn that we failed to live our lives. Looking at the old from outside I think—“Let them go, there is no one there. They have already gone, and left their bodies behind. Make a law that is impossible to abuse, and allow release”. But inside the old, who makes the final decision? They are mysteries like everything else.
The nursing was good, homely and warm, natural compassion from country girls and kindly women. One sister was simple virtue, complete as a pearl. I asked, I had to know, was nursing the old depressing; could nurses do it only for short periods as no cure was possible? They seemed surprised and said that old people were dears, and needed help so much that everyone liked nursing them. I had seen with what grace and gentleness the nurses behaved, so here was a good that life would be poorer without, and my rational reaction was an ugly thing beside it.
Good Friday
I do not know why the day on which man denied God should be called good. If Christ, who was both man and God, had to experience man’s refusal of the spirit, man still seems undisturbed by what he did and does. Christ as man knew God. His very being said, “I am man and God, and so it is with each of you”. We struggle to hear that, and understand it and live it, but it slips from us as though it hardly mattered, also as though it can be taken for granted. We do not know what we mean by “God” or “Man” or “Life” and the drama of its contradiction and resolution is everything. It is also the actual, terrible inclusion of evil, for good would have no meaning without evil, and if man had not crucified Christ, saying by his act, “We do not want the spirit, relieve us of it, we choose our blindness”, we would have lacked this lesson in what evil man can do. We cannot seem to learn evil by living its depths again and again, so how can we learn good? What a blessing that much of the time we live both with no thought of either.
I am rereading after fifty years Henry Adams’s Mont-St.-Michel. One of the pleasures of age is reading books long forgotten, with only the enlargement they once brought remembered. As Henry Adams tells of that great flowering of trust in the Virgin, of glorious building in her honour, of the consummate artistry and rich humanity that burgeoned on every hand, I was so moved by the abundant beauty that I was almost healed of a wound that has ached in me all my life; the inferiority of women. It lamed me as a child. I still do not see why men feel such a need to stress it. Their behaviour seems unworthy, as though their superiority was not safe unless our inferiority was proven again and again. We are galled by it, even distorted by it, mortified for them, and forever puzzled. They have gifts and strengths we lack, achievement has been theirs, almost all concrete accomplishment is theirs, so why do they need to give us this flick of pain at our very being, we who are their mates and their mothers?
I was entranced by the Virgin whom Henry Adams deduced. She was loved, loved for her mercy, for her love of beauty and gift of inspiring its creation in others; loved above all for her generosity and power. She both gave and forgave. Then to honour the feminine enhances life. That is an arresting fact, often forgotten. But this great feminine symbol is a pattern that women do not follow, and could we? It is man’s concept, and it is above all an appeal for mercy, and an appeal for bounty.
As long as men had this vision they could project on to her the creative heights in their own natures. They could represent their aspirations and the profound depths of their being in buildings that achieved miracles in stone, solving mathematical problems of weight and balance with the beauty of complete mastery.
It intoxicates, heals and shames me, and very humbly I ask myself what relation can ordinary women have to this divine feminine figure? Can we, should we, even attempt to serve this vision? We try to live her a little, we are expected to, and that i
s a great honour. We would try to live her more if we could, but the truth is we also execrate, desecrate, and rail at her while we do our chores. There is a smallness in us, a justified resentment perhaps, that makes us tend to reduce life to chores as though to refute this great ideal. It may be the contrast between the ideal and the real that makes so many women hate being women. Here we are caught, and here we struggle.
The selfless, tireless one, the rich giver and the meek receiver, with life-giving energy flowing like milk from the breast, costing her nothing, is too, too much. Looked at in the grey light of daily living the concept is the demand of the ravening child, and we cannot respond to such a claim in man or child. Our protest at the human enactment of the ideal may be why we are not worshipped, but belittled. Or is man’s scorn a cry for help, and one to be met? Does he need us to be wiser than we are? He well might. Perhaps life needs it too.
We do not often live with the superior side of the man—that is generally expressed in his work—but more habitually with his weak, tired, shadow side. We indulge him, restore him, and though we exploit him (that is a mutual game) it often seems to us our role and fate to deal with his inferiority, and conceal it from him. We may do it with wisdom and grace, but usually we project our faults onto each other, all can be beneath comment, and there are times when only mutual forgiveness makes us fit to face each other once more.
Here is inferiority indeed, but it belongs to both and needs both to deal with it. It demands honesty and mercy, and these are not easy to summon; they may be beyond us, but when they answer our mutual cries of what can be despair, they are good enough to call divine. There can seem no connection between the great impersonal concepts and the problem of living our personal lives. Yet when men and women truly love each other they project their greatest possibilities onto the loved one. When love vanishes for a while the woman does not see the god in the man, he seldom lives it, and if he never sees the goddess in the woman it is never there.
Measure of My Days Page 5