Transcription

Engravers, Lithographers

Stationers & Printers

H & W Brown

20 Fulham Road

London S.W.

Feb 20. Continued

« They »_ have never hit so near as this_ I calculate rather VI suppose 250-275 yardsV further than to the reeds at the top of my podere, but not ValasV as far as the Cypresses are from my house _ and of course one wonders « why not nearer, much nearer » _ in fact here, as well as those few hundred yards off ? »

But there In the To me, this natural reflexion dismissed

as it deserves, there remains something dis-concerting not merely in the nearness of this barbarous tragedy, but in its having broke broken in upon what has, for the last two years, been a place secretly set aside in my thoughts as an invi as an asylum of peace. For there i For like the rusty old guns on its green lawns, there is nothing somehow more peaceful

than a broken down human relic of former wars, his beard, long lively red coat, blue friendly eyes & xx or halting gate VgaitV being so much to prove how long, long long ago those wars must have been when he was an alert fighter _ And escap He fits in with the nursemaids & the playing children, a thing almost of fairy stories

& for nursery rhymes, & like them, like the peacocks on the pavillion roofs (ajout) and the wood pigeons building in the black quinconxed limes, the warrant of peace & safety, of the kindly sunshine of weakness helplessness lying on the renovated green of the grass & the broad gravel at whose edge the bulls are beginning to sprout.

To me these buildings, their ill kept

grounds have been an odd haven of quiet & healing thoughts ; perhaps because of there their suggestion of something Continental Invalides, & heaven knows what vague German Residenzs, with their attached roofs, & lanterned central part, & flanking partition & gales where the rain=worn bales shine oddly marble white against the diaphanous

lilac & russet which the of which the buildings seem made in the fine winter afternoon, when the Thames is scaled with sunset, & the black barges us go seem making for a rosy celestial Jerusalem beyond made of Vwhich is reallyV power stations & ruin wharves, the gulls pattering the pale pure

blue of the higher sky above the bare Battersea trees & the great spans of the bridges. Even when tired I have rarely passed a day without crossing those grounds, or going out to them after returning elsewhere. For that has been to me an enclosure, a majestic if shabby hortus inclusus of the past. Which someti at

at present means peace & hope & escape.

And now the whole place is locked ; and even after hire days horrid crowds choke the road close by. And accross the square of Burton Court _ for I have not been any nearer _ there is the broken=off stout pediment

of that low flanking house under which people lie overwhelmed, buried. Or perhaps now in the big Chapel _ one would hide, in the little pensioner’s cemetery with the benches & strong tombstones_ But that would merely mean more sightseers more ghouls. So the R. Hospital grounds are closed « until

further notice » _ That piece of past & peacefulness, invaded outraged, profaned, removed.

Chelsea Feb 20

All this air raid business, especially the crowds of sightseers, not merely that Sunday but for some days a dreadful bicker

of bedizined women in furcoats, & of s draggle tailed other women, sodden, weary, with children & prams, snatching a half hour from work to enjoy the horror _ all this has brought home to me the need of certain changes in our moral education. We

must not put so exclusive a weight upon the idea of responsibility for evil, making leaving evil for which we are not responsible in a kind of platonic, contemplated relation from which the next step is using it for whatever pleasurable

excitement or interest it may afford our dullness.

Prologue

We need to get rid of the old judicial & religious view of evil as sin, as will or intention, & get to recognise that evil is something in itself quite irrespective of willing or intention, that evil is not

a matter of origin but of effects, in fact that evil is only another word for suffering and for the waste and destruction which mean diminution of happiness.

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In fact we have to get to hate suffering as the type of evil, the abutment of all

evil ; and to recognise pollution not in the will towards it only (of wh. there is perhaps much less than we think) but in the suffering itself. For this we must rid ourselves of the religious judicial view that suffering is a means to good, a purification used by the deity

or by man, either as atonement or ordeal or (even method of purgating the soul à la Hannah More) or as an ed a civil education of possible evil doers _ pour encourager les autres.

We must learn & teach that evil has no meaning ex apart from the suffering it

sooner or later implies; a in fact that evil is the potential, & often the actual form of suffering. Hence that our only business with it must be preventive, alleviative & reparative : the physician’s, the (including him of the laboratory as well as of the bedside) and the nurse’s

and that any contact with suffering which is not of this is not such as seeks to abolish, diminish or compensate, is a pollution of ourselves.

We must reinstall, but transform by reason, the primaeval instinct that « horror »

is defiling & must be avoided under penality of profanity.

Indeed we require to use up & transform the valuable notions of profanity & sacrilege. All suffering, when approa unless approached in he active helpfulness

profanes the mind wh. dwells upon it, making it, even when some hideous pleasure possibly does not arise, the prey of such accidia (Fisti fumino all’aer lieto) as Tolstoy’s which kills the possibility of such

grateful happiness as life may allow us, wasting its sacred ch

Life is set round with waste, destruction, & suffering, it is a perpetual struggle against loss of opportunities. How few things, people, moments can be safe, strong,

fertile of good, perfect, consumate !

Hence all such as are or approve thereinto, all that is innocent, soluce healthy (ajout), fertile, unspoilt, whether a plant, a work of art or the a halfhour in of a man or woman’s inner life, are

rare, precious, honourable, glorious and to be approached with appreciative and reverent hands & thoughts _ « favete linguis »_ They are, or ought to be sacred. They are divine.

Chelsea Feb 22

To I.C.W, ((Irene Cooper Willis))_ (about Cambridge) But is any place more than a décor ? Certainly not Florence. What one wants is a décor, and to add the reality one needs _ to be that reality (say of studiousness if possible oneself. I am discovering much too late in life that we are all beset by the delusion of the more, the

Copied but not used

whole, the enough, in short the delusion that where we get a few grains of the heart’s desire we are not satisfied unless the streets are paved with it. After all the beauty & expression of places like Cambridge & Oxford are themselves the reality ; like the

Cambridge

Art et artiste

NB: écriture de Berthe Noufflard

the work of a poet or artist, they are genuine since they exist & impress us; we have no right to imagine that whatever besides his work comes out of that poet or artist should be of that sort; there is every reason why it

should on the contrary be the refuse, the scoriae. The people who build a place like that & VorV keep it up harmoniously, or who build a church & institute a ritual, have given us their valuable part; why should the rest not be pedantic,

feeble, what you call a sham ? It is a sham only if you believe in it. We must accept our shrines with thankfulness & reverence, whether they be places, works of art or people wefeeble, what you call a sham ? It is a sham only if you believe in it. We must accept our shrines with thankfulness & reverence, whether they be places, works of art or people we

care for; & see to it that our own thoughts, our own desires should furnish the little flickering shadows of Gods they call for … at the bottom of my creed is the recognition of a kind of profanity in asking

for reality (and more, enough etc mean reality) where we are dealing with more aspects.

Feb 23

The Logique des Sentiments is not completely intelligible without a study of Einshling. Labouring experiment has turned made us recognized that our intellectual processes _ from say perception, re to the most synthetic to every kind of « thought » are a in some manner

dominated & shaped, given their orientation and trend, by a something we can only call attitude reference, an or if we choose, intention. There seems to be in all our life of thought & feeling a kind of nucleus acti which in which

resides the active, the n attracting & repelling forces determining the nature of the synthesis or complexes occupying our consciousness, a nucleus into partly if not wholly composed of feeling and preparation for action, which by its chemistry accepts &

rejects & groups the data received from without n at the moment and, what is equally important, groups them determines their the p evocation by this new data of some rather than other, parts of our stored up previous experience.

It is

this mysterious nuclear activity which gives our thoughts their drift, which unites them into constellations and it is this also which prevents in great measure the new ?expired data from uniting with the old ones into a fairly faithful

exclude all questions of by whom ? What style ? What value ? And concentrate only on your greater or lesser enjoyment; or else again to concentrate on the images & associations to the exclusion of other

questions ; or else to con exclude these suggestions & associations & listen to a piece of music purely criticaly etc etc.

In fact you put as yourself in the attitude of one who is looking for one particular order

of things or indications of things & closing off rejec closing off all response to other ones : thus an archeologist or geologist sees a cutting exclusively from the archeological or geological point of view

and a detective does not p no does not take any interest in, say, the aesthetic or poetic appeal of the places & houses in which he is looking for traces of a crime etc…

Now take In these cases there is, if you choose, a

deliberate, & if I may speak irishly, an intentional kind of intention. But such intention dominating our perceptions & thoughts & directing these attractions & rejections, can also be unintentional in the sense that we do not do not wish it and 99 times out

of 100, do not know of it.

Such is the attitude, the intention, the active selective nucleus of dominating the perceptions & thoughts, recollections & associations, as well as the actual VpresentV perceptions of the person in love, or angry, or hopeful or despairing . Loving, desiring, hating, fearing,

hoping, despairing, are in truth active attitudes, they are a readiness for the kind of action appropriate to each of them, & Vin defaultV of this action, readiness to perceive, remember, select, accept everything present or offering itself to our present experience or stored up by memory

from our past experience, which suits the particular kind of active attitude, i.e. which increases or keeps it up ; with which goes, of course, a rejection of everything that co runs counter to it.

We are, in fact, each a little active center of the universe, at every moment of our existence assimilating some, & rejecting others,

of the countless items of the sea of happenings, the sea of possible experiences, in wh. we are plunged. And the passionate xxx which makes the belligerent capable of perceiving & remembering only th whatever is calculated to height his warlike hatred, is only a more complicated version of the same

phenom mental phenom tendency making us hear the expected (ajout) footfall (or in these air raids days) the sounds which might be guns for what we are watching, while entirely excluding from our hearing the loud ticking of a clock or the flapping of a blind.

This domination of int attenti

intention over attention, this a makes us understand the delusions we are all subject to in sight & hearing, & those far subtler & greater ones of the Logique des Sentiments.

It makes us under-stand also one of the peculiarities wh., when di first discovered, discredit our thougths to ourselves viz ; our the

taboo action of mere words. I w Just now I was idly dialoguing with my imaginary friend : if you were obliged in order to avoid killing enemies, to serve the Ld Black, why not kill him ? It would not be worse killing him than killing an unknown alien enemy ; it might even be better for the world at large. Yes, but

it would be Murder. And at that word murder I become aware of something in myself like the letting go of a portcullis, the sudden barring of a passage wh. had hitherto sloped easily to the thought of dealing out death to someone. Similarly in sexual matters. The word marriage similarly closes v channels of

possible disgust which would remain open if no such words stood there. The word, as we say, makes it all right. Hence the Jesuits « direction of intention » and the direction of intention wh. all of us, not Jesuits, perpetually practice. There are certain words, murder, lie, adultery, sexu even the « seedowner » in the sexual sense, which by long

association, produce in our our mind an attitude of turning away from , of refusal. Substitute another word which has not been the levier or button automatically producing refusal & revulsion, & the same action will be turned towards quite willingly. For words, we are

apt to forget, stand in reality not merely for things i.e for definite groups or objective quantities, but also for our responses to things. Anthropologists tell us that savages have a difficulty in thinking things apart from their own need

or fear of them. And Dr Head has shown that on its way to the cortex, which somehow deals out sense of relationship, & the stimulating pass them & often stop in the thalamic centers which set up not only sensations but pleasure & displeasure reactions to those

So similarly we have, as Kirk Patrol says, only gradually attached to our « free » ideas, meaning thereby such ideas of things are as free from our passions & convictions of the moment.

And the man --especially the collectivity--

in a state of strong desire or hatred, revert to this unfree state. Their perception of their recognition of, « whats what » is tyrannised over by their attitude of « I want » or « I hate ».

March 9

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By a labour saving, but sometimes dangerous « short circuit » or automatism, we obey not ideas, but words.

Brahms

But while these thoughts of the peaceful long ago hung, a precious dust or vapour in the luminous atmosphere of that music aut taking on changing definite but changing shapes afterwards, there was clearly always present, a solid frameword, the comparison with between this afternoon spri Lent afternoon at the Temple, daylight still in its windows, and that evening Xmas eve winter (ajout) evening now so far back. When I sat there listening to

Bach’s Xmas oratorio, and thinking of all those Germans, women & children & old men & recruits ready for slaughter, who were listening to the same notes, & perhaps with the same feelings, there accross the unpassable sea of war & hatred. One seemed then simply steeped in a woe beyond all words, as it certainly was beyond all

?foreseting. Yet, looking back at xx those days which seem VfeelV now so endlessly far away, they seem almost, even in their mornfulness & horror,happy VsomehowV serene, happy. They had the serenity, the something restful apaisant of great or the moments of great private sorrow occuring in all our lives; an a strangeness, an apartness, something like participation witnessing

some VtheV great brief revelation of the mysterious heartless fate indulging the wo universe and «e nelia sua voluntade e molto pace ».

So at least it seems, doubtless an illusion of distance, after these more than three whole years. For these y three years have made the war no from a horrible spectacle occasionaly like some great thunderstorm

smitting and laying in ashes something of us who were wanting it into a con part of our daily life, rubbing into our it in every detail, galling us, chaining us, something swallowed like its bread, hanging over us like its the threat of its air raids. We have become part of it, or it of us. And even in our attempts to adapt to it, to dodge it, to xxxx

xxx VinterposeV some former habit between its galling & our sensibilities, even (& because of) our efforts to live our lives despite it, it has lived worked (ajout) itself deeper & deeper into the very stuff our private life is made of.

Battersea Park March 17

I did not this time at the Temple, think in the intervals of following that German music, of the German people, listening to it or something similar at the other end. What it evoked was not the unattainable in distant & unattainable present, but the past. The past which at times like these, seems less unclutchable and to in su whose tatters we miserable

outcasts of the present and disinherited of the future, can still attempt to sometimes to screen ourselves, like the beggars & disinherited (no metaphor nowadays!) clinging to the rays of what former warmth splendour, alas, formerly barely perceived, taken for

granted.

I learned to know the B. Requiem the autumn preceding the Boer War, at Abbeyleix. Certain passages _ the sort of siciliana of the « How beautiful » etc _ still can still evoke the drawing rooms there & the view through its long windows of that piece of park cut out of primaeval forest & sloping to a mysterious dark river under the blue

high dome, the black squales & white cloud bales, of that lofty & changing Irish sky.They were p reading it fourhands because they were going, as I was, to Mei in a few weeks to the Brahms Fest at Meiningen. As it turn turned out, none of them went, and I travelled to Meiningen

alone, & stayed there those three days, with quite other friends, from whom again I parted, returning alone across Germany by Eisenach & Bamberg & to Italy or rather to to Trent, to Italy. But the Meiningen days, though filled wi touched by painful circumstances of other things kinds & painful forebodings, were, like the journey

thither, all shot with the thought of Abbeyleix ; and its inhabitants, who should have been there, companioned me in the more intenser manner in which the absent sometimes do. It was This was the background of inner background in which the Requiem embrouied ((embrouillé)) itself during the

actual performances, its amazing amazing luminous sweetness pattering itself on that serene sweetness of might have been & parting.

Moreover it was on this journey that I became aware to the fact that I loved Germany, that Germany meant something quite unlike other countries,

something out of my childhood as in that Schuman song _ aus alten sagen klingt es und winkt es_ I had not been During my first previous returns since my childhood (very brief) I had not felt this and it seemed to come to me suddenly as,

the day morning after my solitary journey from England, I walked in the Autu October sunshine on the terrace at Cassel. Then, as only once before on a bench between two trains at Augsburg, it was borne in upon me that I had been a been brought up in this country as a child & in that so much of me came out of it.

After Meiningen I stayed alone at Eisenach ; and that knowledge was borne into me still further as I walked down in the evening through the Wartburg woods to the l little town where the lights shone in the still were already lit, winterlike Vau crayon,

écriture de Berthe Noufflard: winterlikeV, unshuttered windows Vau crayon, écriture de Berthe Noufflard : unshuttered windowsV, &

next morning in a snatched bicycle ride among the fig tree glades where the crocuses Vau crayon, écriture de Berthe Noufflard : crocusesV were lilac in the frosty grass. And then even more, climbing up & down those still mediavel streets at Bamburg.

Strange that this sudden revelations of what Germany was & could be, what it had done for my childish soul should perhaps have come proximately come through the tales of that Irish friend of mine about her German Governess, by the talk of German plans

& things while she & her friends discussed the place of Meiningen & practised that Meiningen music _ the Requiem & also, I remember, a Schubert quintette of similar luminous unearthly poignancy

of melody. And strange that when I saw that friend again after this War’s beginning, she should have said « --they are not the same people. They have been changed, poisoned by false ideas. » Anyhow, that is the associations gathered round the

Brahms Requiem, which I have never heard, only shunned & hummed to myself, since Meiningen. It is, as the modern psychologists would say, a complex : a woof of feelings & associations from various moments of my life, of images, of places & people, all united

by the particular _ the very particular German mixed sadness & gladness, (allemand), of the Requiem’s words & music, a preparation, almost a prophecy of everything, then quite undreamed of, which Germany, her music, poetry, family, children & humour, were so soon

going to give me a hundredfold in that still undreamed of new friend. That friend of whom, alas, how much will still be left, or rather left of me in her, in this war ? Of course at the Temple it was the « trösten_ trösten » which caught me ; and

the Sehnsucht –xxx xxx xxx The music with their inextricable words. It seems to me that for a moment that after all it was better than when I listened to her Bach. Those children singing the top parts

they, at least, would outlive the War. And who knows ? Even outlive its hatred. They would grow up out of our morass of darkness, witness some sunrise, some daylight, though we may go not survive this War=night.

And I wondered whether of all those people who swallowed Fears Fear & coughed their

feelings down at that music, those who remember their dead, their dead days _ whether any feel realise that this really is a region of eternal beatitude, of such luminous sweetness as is that music’s, but not after after, but in all our living souls when stop off the cruel movement of life & let ourselves face our eternal, our transfigured past ? You … you human!

March 17 XVIII