In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country,
which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am
almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret
in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on
it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the
secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate
conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to
laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire
to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has
never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our
experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at
the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave
as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it
with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth
had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself,
but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a
remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located
will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,
and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of
our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken
for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their
worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a
flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a
country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell?
Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking
enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the
strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of
worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our
whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner
voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that
the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing
that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear
reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want
to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They
begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving
a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this
fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to
your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your
longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole
affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the
recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on
earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last
generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for
ever and ever.
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