The Garden of Survival

by Algernon Blackwood

  XI

  ALL this I have told to you because we have known together the closestintimacy possible to human beings--we have shared beauty.

  They said, these many days ago, that you had gone away, that you weredead. The wind on the Downs, your favourite Downs, your favouritesouthwest wind, received your dust, scattering it like pollen intospace. No sign has come to me, no other sign than this I tell you nowin my long letter. It is enough. I know.

  There were thus two loves, one unrecognized till afterwards, the otherrealized at the time.... In the body there was promise. There is nowaccomplishment.

  It is very strange, and yet so simple. Beauty, I suppose, opens theheart, extends the consciousness. It is a platitude, of course. Youwill laugh when I tell you that afterwards I tried to reason it allout. I am not apparently intellectual. The books I read would fillyour empty room--on aesthetics, art, and what not. I got no resultfrom any of them, but rather a state of muddle that was, no doubt,congestion. None of the theories and explanations touched the root ofthe matter. I am evidently not "an artist"--that at any rate Igathered, and yet these learned people seemed to write aboutsomething they had never "lived." I could almost believe that thewriters of these subtle analyses have never themselves feltbeauty--the burn, the rapture, the regenerating fire. They haveknown, perhaps, a reaction of the physical nerves, but never thislight within the soul that lifts the horizons of the consciousness andmakes one know that God exists, that death is not even separation,and that eternity is now.

  Metaphysics I studied too. I fooled myself, thirty years after theproper time for doing so, over the old problem whether beauty lies inthe object seen or in the mind that sees the object. And in the end Icame back hungrily to my simple starting-point--that beauty moved me.It opened my heart to one of its many aspects--truth, wisdom, joy,and love--and what else, in the name of heaven, mattered!

  I sold the books at miserable prices that made Mother question myjudgment: coloured plates, costly bindings, rare editions, and all.Aesthetics, Art, rules and principles might go hang for all I caredor any good they did me. It was intellect that had devised all these.The truth was simpler far. I cared nothing for these scholarlyexplanations of beauty's genesis and laws of working, because I feltit. Hunger needs no analysis, does it? Nor does Love. Could anythingbe more stultifying? Give to the first craving a lump of bread, andto the second a tangible man or woman--and let those who have thetime analyse both cravings at their leisure.

  For the thrill I mean is never physical, and has nothing in commonwith that acute sensation experienced when the acrobat is seen tomiss the rope in mid-air as he swings from bar to bar. There is noshock in it, for shock is of the nerves, arresting life; the thrill Ispeak of intensifies and sets it rising in a wave that flows. It is ofthe spirit. It wounds, yet marvellously. It is unearthly. Therein, Ithink, lies its essential quality; by chance, as it were, in writingthis intimate confession, I have hit upon the very word: it isunearthly, it contains surprise. Yes, Beauty wounds marvellously,then follows the new birth, regeneration. There is a ravishment ofthe entire being into light and knowledge.

  The element of surprise is certainly characteristic. The thrill comesunheralded--a sudden uprush of convincing joy loosed from some storethat is inexhaustible. Unlike the effect of a nervous shock which canbe lived over and reconstituted, it knows no repetition; its climaxis instantaneous, there is neither increase nor declension; it isunrecoverable; it strikes and is gone. Breaking across thephantasmagoria of appearances, it comes as a flash of reality, alightning recognition of something that cannot be travestied. It isnot in time. It is eternity.

  I suspect you know it now with me; in fact I am certain that youdo....

  I remember how, many years ago--in that delightful period betweenboyhood and manhood when we felt our wings and argued about theuniverse--we discovered this unearthly quality in three differentthings: the song of a bird, the eyes of a child, and a wild-flowercome upon unexpectedly in a scene of desolation. For in all three, weagreed, shines that wonder which holds adoration, that joy which isspontaneous and uncalculated, and that surprise which pertains toEternity looking out triumphantly upon ephemeral things.

  So, at least, in our youthful eagerness, we agreed; and to this dayone in particular of the three--a bird's song--always makes me thinkof God. That divine, ecstatic, simple sound is to me ever bothsurprising and unearthly. Each time it takes me by surprise--thatpeople do not hush their talk to kneel and listen.... And of the eyesof little children--if there is any clearer revelation granted to usof what is unearthly in the sense of divinity brought close, I do notknow it. Each time my spirit is arrested by surprise, then filledwith wondering joy as I meet that strange open look, so stainless,accepting the universe as its rightful toy, and, as with the bird andflower, saying Yes to life as though there could not possibly exist aNo.

  The wildflower too: you recall once--it was above Igls when theTyrolean snows were melting--how we found a sudden gentian on thedead, pale grass? The sliding snows had left the coarse tufts strokedall one way, white and ugly, thickly streaked with mud, no singleblade with any sign of life or greenness yet, when we came upon thatstar of concentrated beauty, more blue than the blue sky overhead, thewhole passion of the earth in each pointed petal. A distantavalanche, as though the hills were settling, the bustle of thetorrent, the wind in the pines and larches, only marked by contrastthe incredible stillness of the heights--then, suddenly, this star ofblue blazing among the desolation. I recall your cry and myown--wonder, joy, as of something unearthly--that took us bysurprise.

  In these three, certainly, lay the authentic thrill I speak of; whileit lasts, the actual moment seems but a pedestal from which the eyesof the heart look into Heaven, a pedestal from which the soul leapsout into the surrounding garden of limitless possibilities which areits birthright, and immediately accessible. And that, indeed, is theessential meaning of the thrill--that Heaven is here and now. Thegates of ivory are very tiny; Beauty sounds the elfin horns thatopens them; smaller than the eye of a needle is that opening--uponthe diamond point of the thrill you flash within, and the Garden ofEternity is yours for ever--now.

  I am writing this to you, because I know you listen with your heart,not with your nerves; and the garden that I write about you know nowbetter than I do myself. I have but tasted it, you dwell therein,unaged, unageing. And so we share the flowers; we know the light, thefragrance and the birds we know together.... They tell me--even ourmother says it sometimes with a sigh--that you are far away, notunderstanding that we have but recovered the garden of our earlychildhood, you permanently, I whenever the thrill opens the happygates. You are as near to me as that. Our love was forged insidethose ivory gates that guard that childhood state, facing four ways,and if I wandered outside a-while, puzzled and lonely, the thrill ofbeauty has led me back again, and I, have found your love unchanged,unaged, still growing in the garden of our earliest memories. I didbut lose my way for a time....

  That childhood state must be amazingly close to God, I suppose, forthough no child is consciously aware of beauty, its whole being criesYes to the universe and life as naturally and instinctively as aflower turns to the sun. The universe lies in its overall pocket ofalpaca, and beauty only becomes a thing apart when the growingconsciousness, hearing the world cry No, steps through the gates toenquire and cannot find the entrance any more. Beauty then becomes asignpost showing the way home again. Baudelaire, of course, meant Godand Heaven, instead of "genius" when he said, "Le genie n'est quel'enfance retrouvee a volonte...."

  And so when I write to you, I find myself again within the garden ofour childhood, that English garden where our love shared all thelight and fragrance and flowers of the world together. "Time's but agolden wind that shakes the grass," and since my thought is with you,you are with me now... and now means always or it means nothing.

  So these relationships are real still among a thousand shadows. Yourbeauty was truth, hers was unselfish love. The important thing is tokn
ow you still live, not with regret and selfish grief, but with thatjoy and sure conviction which makes the so-called separation atemporary test, perhaps, but never a final blow. What are the fewyears of separation compared to this certainty of co-operation ineternity? We live but a few years together in the flesh, yet if thosefew are lived with beauty and beautifully, the tie is unalterablyforged which fastens us lovingly together for ever. Where, how,under what precise conditions it were idle to enquire andunnecessary--the wrong way too. Our only knowledge (in the scientificsense) comes to us through our earthly senses. To forecast our futurelife, constructing it of necessity upon this earthly sensoryexperience, is an occupation for those who have neither faith norimagination. All such "heavens" are but clumsy idealizations of thepresent--"Happy Hunting Grounds" in various forms: whereas we knowthat if we lived beauty together, we shall live it always--"afterwards,"as our poor time-ridden language phrases it. For Beauty, once known,cannot exclude us. We cooperated with the Power that makes the universealive.

  And, knowing this, I do not ask for your "return," or for anyso-called evidence that you survive. In beauty you both live now withless hampered hands, less troubled breath, and I am glad.

  Why should you come, indeed, through the gutter of my worn, familiar,personal desires, when the open channel of beauty lies ever at theflood for you to use? Coming in this way, you come, besides, formany, not for me alone, since behind every thrill of beauty stand thecountless brave souls who lived it in their lives. They have enteredthe mighty rhythm that floats the spiral nebulae in space, as it turnsthe little aspiring Nautilus in the depths of the sea. Having oncefelt this impersonal worship which is love of beauty, they are linkedto the power that drives the universe towards perfection, the powerthat knocks in a million un-advertised forms at every human heart:and that is God.

  With that beneficent power you cooperate. I ask no other test. I craveno evidence that you selfishly remember me. In the body we did notknow so closely. To see into your physical eyes, and touch your hand,and hear your voice--these were but intermediary methods, symbols, atthe best. For you I never saw nor touched nor heard. I felt you--inmy heart. The closest intimacy we knew was when together we sharedone moment of the same beauty; no other intimacy approaches thereality of that; it is now strengthened to a degree unrealizedbefore. For me that is enough. I have that faith, that certainty,that knowledge. Should you come to me otherwise I must disown you.Should you stammer through another's earthly lips that you now enjoya mere idealized repetition of your physical limitations, I shouldknow my love, my memory, my hope degraded, nay, my very faithdestroyed.

  To summon you in that way makes me shudder. It would be to limit yourlarger uses, your wider mission, merely to numb a selfish grief bornof a faithless misunderstanding.

  Come to me instead--or, rather, stay, since you have never left--bewith me still in the wonder of dawn and twilight, in the yearningdesire of inarticulate black night, in the wind, the sunshine, andthe rain. It is then that I am nearest to you and to your beneficentactivity, for the same elemental rhythm of Beauty includes us both.The best and highest of you are there; I want no lesser assurance, nobroken personal revelation. Eternal beauty brings you with anintimacy unknown, impossible, indeed, to partial disclosure. I shouldabhor a halting masquerade, a stammering message less intelligibleeven than our intercourse of the body.

  Come, then! Be with me, your truth and Marion's tenderness linkedtogether with what is noblest in myself. Be with me in the simpleloveliness of an English garden where you and I, as boys together,first heard that voice of wonder, and knew the Presence walking withus among the growing leaves.

  THE END