1/1001 Bradburian Nights

 

Bufflehead in the marsh

1/1001 Bradbury Reading Plan:

Poem: Thyme by A.E. Stallings    

Short story: The Plutonian Fire by O. Henry

Essay: The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis

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Thyme

by A.E. Stallings

I have some of it still,

We gathered on the hill

In empty glass, the bunch of wild thyme.

Faded now, and dried,

But in which yet abide

Some purple, a smell of summer in its prime,

When we stopped the car

Bought honey in a jar

At a roadside stand. It makes me think about

The theft of bloom, the sting,

A swiftness on the wing,

Things that sweetness cannot be without.

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The Weight of Glory is an essay I try to read every year, either at the beginning or the end. I have several sections underlined, and of course having not read the essay for a year at least, these sections hit with fresh though familiar force. But I was struck this time by a part I have read and nodded along with every time, but which felt a little remote on previous reads. Now, I feel like I can understand it more deeply:

"Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, an dwell even appear as the rival of that object. And this, I think is just what we find... If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy. ...we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. ... Here, then, is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies. Our sacred books give us some account of the object. It is, of course, a symbolical account. Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience. The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself...the difference is that the scriptural imagery has authority. It comes to us from writers who were closer to God that we, and it has stood the test of Christian experience down the centuries. ...If I had rejected the authoritative and scriptural image of glory and stuck obstinately to the vague desire which was, at the outset, my only pointer to heaven, I could have seen no connection at all between that desire and the Christian promise. But now, having followed up what seemed puzzling and repellent in the sacred books, I find, to my great surprise, looking back, that the connection is perfectly clear. Gory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed. By ceasing for a moment to consider my own wants I have begun to learn better what I really wanted. When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies aways, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as "the journey homeward to habitual self." You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. ... A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribably something of which they become for a moment messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for s, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, a to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last. ...Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache."

He goes on to talk about the desire to be a part of the beauty calling to us, but this section especially reminded me of Northrop Frye in The Educated Imagination: "Underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us." We know we are not like the natural world. We are, but we are not. We are in it, not of it in the same way a fox or a centipede or a wave is a part of nature. To quote again from The Educated Imagination:

"Our emotional reaction to the world varies from “I like this” to “I don’t like this.” The first [statement], we said, was a state of identity, a feeling that everything around us was part of us, and the second is the ordinary state of consciousness, or separation, where art and science begin. Art begins as soon as “I don’t like this” turns into “this is not the way I could imagine it.” We notice in passing that the creative and the neurotic minds have a lot in common. They’re both dissatisfied with what they see; they both believe that something else ought to be there, and they try to pretend it is there or to make it be there.”

And another:

"The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know."

"We cannot mingle with the splendors we see," Lewis says in the same essay. And yet we have to try. Artists hear the call, they hear " that indescribable something of which" the splendors "become for a moment messengers," and their art is an attempt to express it, or maybe echo it, or even better, to amplify it, even though many artists don't know themselves where the call originates from or where it will take them. They are simply moved by its sublimity and cannot be silent. Art is the response of the soul to the resonance of home, the last thrum of the final note of a familiar Voice, saying, "Come in."
As Lewis said, "Some day, God willing, we shall get in."