This section could be regarded as optional (though of course reading the book at all is that). What I mean is that Chapters 2a and 2b won't advance the story at all, but they may help explain why it's like it is. The narrative will resume in Chapter 3.
I hope that all the ideas expressed here are grounded in objective reality rather than my personal preference or self-validation. However, like anyone else, I can work only within the limits of my experience, my reasoning and my imagination. These together form my perspective which is unique even if it largely overlaps (the philosophers’ word is ‘intersubjectivity’) with those of some of the other creatures to whom I am related most closely. [Footnote: if my own perspective is unique so must there be trillions of perspectives in the world, and trillions more which might have been held by the creatures who never existed down the pathways evolution never took, experiences which are no less valid simply because they have never been and never will be felt.
By the way, in using the words ‘creature’ and ‘creation’ I am not in any way implying a divine ‘Creator’. ‘Creation’ avoids the industrial associations of ‘production’ while ‘creature’ is a more creaturely word for our fellow-beings than ‘organism’ or ‘life-form’, which bear a whiff of the laboratory and its hierarchical scientist-specimen relationship.]
There are, of course, things I cannot see and thoughts my mind cannot untangle; even my imagination is finite. There are more things on earth (let alone in heaven) than are dreamt of in my philosophy.
A 2,500 year-old Eteocypriot inscription now in the Ashmolean. No one has a clue what it says.
So dogmatism is out of place and I am open to criticism from anyone else’s perspective, which I will accept with as good and cheerful a grace as I can if it is offered in a generous spirit, and will try to ignore if not. I certainly won’t engage in polemic or man the barricades to defend the infallibility of my judgment. I know I often get things wrong. I will, instead, take a tip from Muriel Spark.
Muriel Spark was brought up in Edinburgh. “To have a great primitive black crag rising up in the middle of populated streets of commerce, stately squares and winding closes,” she writes, “is like the statement of an unmitigated fact preceded by ‘nevertheless’… I find that much of my literary composition is based on the nevertheless idea.” [Footnote: Jainism has an invaluable word for this ‘Anekantavada’ – ‘non-one-sidedness’, the doctrine that no single perspective can provide the whole truth.] I too am constantly aware of possible counter-arguments. My hope is that if I ‘show all my workings’ (like a diligent schoolboy doing his maths homework), even though you reject the conclusions I draw, you will at least be able to trace where I went wrong and smugly avoid the same ‘errors’ yourselves.
All of which seemingly necessary preamble only nudges my reticent personality further to the fore (‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.’ Which is not to boast. So do we all contain multitudes, so do the thoughts of all of us multitudinously murmur so long as we let them, so long as we do not smother them by jerry-building an ‘identity’ or ‘personality’ over them.) but without being self-indulgent, it is necessary to be personal to avoid empty generalisations. Like you, I can only describe the world in front of me. We do not reject Cézanne because he painted his local mountain, Mont Sainte Victoire, rather than Hay Bluff or some generic fancy of a mountain. ‘Parochialism is universal,’ writes Patrick Kavanagh. ‘It deals with the fundamentals.’ I think what I am saying is true (or, at least, as true as I can make it) but I won’t presume to tell you how you experience the world. I have no authority beyond my epidermis (and who knows how much within it?) ‘Let these things be regarded as approximations to the truth,’ says Xenophanes with cautious assertiveness.
‘Coacervavi omne quod inveni.’ ‘I have made a heap of all I have found.’
And having read quite a lot of books (mostly for pleasure or curiosity, very rarely as research for this) I have found quite a lot of wise thoughts which I have not scrupled to borrow in the form of quotations. That STA is intellectually robust (in my judgment) doesn’t mean, however, that you need much intellect to observe it. The universe is not an IQ Test or an interview – every creature is accepted equally, conception confers your admission. Reading, though I cherish and recommend it, is not necessary to living well. As Karen Armstrong has pointed out, ‘we have found to our cost that a great university can exist in the same vicinity as a concentration camp.’ STA is something you can work out yourself by looking at a tree or the sun shining through the mist. You don’t even have to read this book.
Although what I say is said in my voice via my haecceity, [Footnote: I'm sorry to use a perhaps unfamiliar word, but there is no common equivalent. It means, more or less, 'the innate individuality of each thing.' A later chapter will explore this more fully. It's pronounced 'hexity' or 'heeksity' - I prefer the latter.] the general ideas have been expressed many times before. It is of little importance who originated an idea (if, indeed, any idea can be considered newly-minted). The profusion of quotes in this book is not intended to give weight and dignity – it is not at all a ‘learned work’. Why should it be? Life is not for the ‘learned’ alone. University professors do not live better lives than woodlice, primroses or greengrocers. My reading, like sitting with Ipsy or walking in the hills, is simply part of the experience that has formed the book. ‘A book is not a learning resource,’ writes Frank Cottrell-Boyce, ‘It’s the knife that picks the lock of your isolation’ and here are voices, miles and millennia apart, finding themselves in agreement. The quotes form a cloud of witnesses confirming our common experience – it is reassuring to find that my STA realisations connect with so much that other finer minds have thought. As Ruskin said of Gothic, ‘the richness of the work is, paradoxical as the statement may appear, a part of its humility. No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple … which implies in offering so little to our regard, that all it has offered is perfect.’ What I am offering is certainly not perfect: I have no privileged vantage and no special skill in analysis, so I just keep piling up the evidence for the reader to assess. My aim is Virginia Woolf’s: ‘the poets succeed by simplifying; practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in; yet to saturate.’ Only someone hopelessly addicted to novelty would think that a thing was not worth saying because it had been said before. On the contrary, the more often an idea has been attested throughout history the more likely it is to be true. It is
One more recollection might just be the grain that tips the balance for some reader. Philosophy does not accrue truths like science does (or aims to). Each generation, each individual, needs to discover the same things over again. This work is not done for us by ‘progress’, which we mistakenly imagine makes us somehow existentially different from our forebears. When I find Eliot has made the same point, calling ‘progress’
a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past
I enlist him as a witness, another perspective confirming the idea, as different co-ordinates fix a position by triangulation. The quotes offer too a welcome distraction from the sound of my voice which I hear echoing down these pages like footsteps in a hospital corridor. Some of the authors are little read now, few probably taught in schools, so their inclusion is a small tribute which (who knows?) may spark someone’s interest. The world would be a flatter, duller place for me if I hadn’t had the fortune to discover Browne, Smart, Chesterton, Taylor, Dillard and others, enchanting my mind to recognise the enchantments all around.
Like Traherne,
I have a mind to fill this work with profitable wonders
and so long as I include plenty of other voices, this at least should not be beyond me.
I have, as I say, read quite a lot of books. People think I like books, but I don’t especially – lots of them are rubbish – nor music, nor art. What I like (and ‘like’ is plainly too feeble a word) is differing perspectives, enhanced understanding and, richest of all, experiences, epiphanies, moments of being or direct perception, intimations, bright shoots, call them what you will, and these I often find in books or walking, or sometimes art or music, once even in a beetroot canederli at Julia’s restaurant. These moments cannot be stalked – you just put yourself near where you’ve seen them before and hope. So I read a lot of books. But they may turn up anywhere.
There will be poems and pictures scattered through the book too. They serve the same purpose as the quotes, break up the prose and dissuade any over-enthusiastic reader from attempting to plough through these pages in one go (as if the prose were not dissuasion enough). They are gates on a mountain road. [Footnote: if I suggest that the book should be read slowly, I do not mean to compare it to a fine wine which must be savoured; it is more like a multi-pack of doughnuts which will give you gut-ache if you binge. Most of the photos, by the way, were taken by me and are, in consequence, not very good. This doesn’t matter in the least. They are madeleines and Rosebuds, triggers to thought and memory, not aesthetic treats. A photograph of an oak-tree should, I contend, stir oaky memories, not chatter about cameras and technique.] They beg something different too. When we look at pictures and hear poetry, we relax some of our stringent busy-minded ratiocination, and feel. Without feeling we’re never likely to understand much of the world we inhabit.
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