¶34“Well, so what?” said the pilot, with a secret smile. “What? Well, you know as well as I do. Added to everything else there was the terror of the coming World-War. And stratosphere rocket-planes and subatomic bombs promised something far worse than the last war.” “But,” the young man interrupted, “the Third World War never happened. Why? You’re forgetting something very important. You’re forgetting that when both sides were mobilizing, and the war was due at any minute, something happened that would have been impossible at any other stage of history. You remember how government propaganda for the war never really caught on, on either side; and how at the critical moment an extraordinary popular clamour against war and against social robotism broke out on both sides. Who was really responsible for that? Why, the new ‘agnostic mystics,’ of course. They started the world strike in America and Russia. Decades earlier, the pacifists had tried to stop war by popular protest, but they failed miserably, because conditions were not ripe. But the new group, who weren’t strictly pacifists at all but social revolutionaries with a religious motive — they found conditions ripe, and they did the trick. Obviously you must know that story, how everyone downed tools and was ready to die for the new hope. Thousands must have been imprisoned, hundreds shot. But presently the governments found their armed forces were mutinying. Then came the American Revolution and the big change in Russia. The driving force, as you must surely know, was an odd assortment of airmen, skilled workers, and — the agnostic mystics. You ignore those modern saints, but it was those that inspired the whole movement and kept it going. Remember, of course, that for many decades a big change had been slowly going on deep down in people’s minds. It had begun away back in the First War and made steady progress through the inter-war period, but it was never effective till after the Second War. It came to a head among the
¶35young fighters in that war, particularly among the airmen, and also among all the oppressed peoples of Europe, and in the occupied parts of Russia and China, and later in broken-down Britain. These two very different groups, the fighters and the broken, rediscovered the power of comradeship, as the Russians had done in their first Revolution. But this time it was discovered with far deeper consciousness of its meaning. So much had happened since that earlier awakening. This time it developed into a purged and clarified will for the light, as you yourself called it; a will for a more fully human way of living, for intelligence, and other-respecting community, and for creative action in all human affairs.” “Not much new in that,” interposed the old man. “Oh yes, there was,” said the junior, “it was a moral passion for this way of living as an absolute good, not just as a means to social prosperity. It was mystical, too, because though these people didn’t pledge themselves to any beliefs about the ultimate reality, and were mostly outside all organized religion, they felt with complete certainty that in some way, which they couldn’t state intellectually at all, the struggle for the light was the real meaning and purpose of all conscious existence. And in keeping themselves in severe training for that struggle they found — well, ‘the peace that passeth all understanding.’ It was this new attitude, this humbly agnostic, yet deeply mystical, feeling, that broke the spell of disillusion and spread like a fire from heart to heart.” The old man had been shifting restlessly in his seat, and now he expostulated. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! What are you getting at? This mystical feeling, as you call it, was just the subjective side of the objective pressure of circumstances, which forced people to see that they must stand together or perish. Of course, I know your mystics mostly came in on the right side, and that they provided a lot of heartening though questionable
¶47The supreme incident was still to come. It was one which showed by its obvious power over the assembled multitude the extraordinary change that had come over mankind within a few decades. No earlier populace could have understood, still less have been so profoundly moved by, a symbol of such austere significance. The President of the World was at the height of his speech. He had been dilating upon the incredible improvement in the fortunes of the common man in all lands, and glorifying the achievement and the promise of the human species under its new regime. He was, of course, frequently interrupted by applause. After the most vociferous of these outbursts, at the very moment when silence had been restored and the President was about to continue, the Fool stepped up to him, laid a hand on his shoulder and gently ousted the surprised orator from the microphone. Most startling fact of all, the President, with an awkward smile, acquiesced. And no one interfered. Then the Fool, confronting the microphone, spoke to the world, “Happy, happy beings!” he said, and his quiet voice was now for the first time heard. “Happy, happy beings! But death dogs you. Conquerors of a world, but of a sand-grain among the stars! We are mere sparks that flash and die. Even as a species we are upstart, sprung so lately from beasts and fishes; soon to vanish. After us our planet will spin for aeons, and nothing will remember us. Then why, why, why are we here?” He was silent. Throughout the Great Square there was a sound like a drift of air passing over a ripe cornfield. The whole populace had drawn in its breath. For a long moment the silence and the stillness continued, broken only by the quiet movement of the flags, and the sound of wings as a couple of pigeons settled in the Square. Then at last the Fool spoke again. “The stars give no answer. But within ourselves, and in one another, and in our unity together, the answer lies; for
¶48in consciousness of our humanity we see deeper than through telescopes and microscopes. And from the depth of each one of us, and from our community together, a will arises; whence, we know not, but inexorable. ‘Live, oh fully live!’ it bids us. ‘To be aware, to love, to make — this is the music that I command of all my instruments. Let your sand-grain resound with a living flood of music; harmonious in itself, and harmonized with the song of all the spheres, which I alone can hear.’ Thus commands the will in us. And we, little human instruments, though death will surely hunt us down, and though our species is ephemeral, we shall obey. Weak we are, and blind, but the Unseen makes music with us.” Silence once more occupied the Great Square, and persisted. The ranked columns and the surrounding populace stood motionless, held by the Unseen. Then at last the Fool, with bowed head, withdrew from sight. And then the President, after a moment’s hesitation, returned to the microphone and said, “Our celebration has found an unexpected but a fitting climax. I will say no more but that your leaders, who are also your comrades, will go forward with you to make the living music that is man.” As the President retired, a murmur rose from the populace and soon swelled into an oceanic thunder of applause. When at last the noise had died down, the massed bands struck up the familiar strains of the world anthem, the “Song of Man,” while the whole great company stood at attention to sing. Then the columns, one by one, moved and wheeled, and flowed out of the Square, and the huge crowd of onlookers dispersed. In deep abstraction and perplexity the old man threaded his way along the congested streets, brooding on the strange scene that he had witnessed. To his shame he found that tears had spilled from his eyes. Oh yes, it was a great feat of stage-craft. One could not but be moved. But it was dangerous, and subtly false to the spirit of the Revolution. The President of the World,
¶69and looked into the darkness. Between the tops of two great commercial buildings across the street there was a patch of sky and one bright star. The left arm extended itself slowly toward the darkness, toward the star. The back of the hand was uppermost, the fingers were loosely spread. For a moment the arm remained stationary, then slowly sank to his side. There was no mistaking the gesture. It expressed salutation, self-surrender, peace. For a full half-minute Sir James gazed in silence at the star. Like others, he accepted intellectually the vastness and mystery of the universe, but emotionally he rebelled against it. In that half-minute he had a new experience, one which he certainly could not have described adequately. “The heavens declare,” he whispered, but could not finish the quotation; for a sudden sense of the pitiful inadequacy of human language silenced him. “Beauty, mystery, love,” he said, “and terror too! And all, all must be accepted, gladly, by the heart.” But no sooner had he said this than he was frightened. Could he be going quite mad? Horror must be accepted? Now the star became merely a symbol of the brute power and brainless immensity of the material universe. It seemed to him that in such a universe there was no place for divine love. His faith crumbled away, and he was left with utter negation and hate. In a sudden passion of self-assertion, he clenched his right fist and raised it against the star. But then his left hand rose and gently stroked the raised fist, soothing it downwards, until it subsided into quietness. For a moment peace returned to him; a peace which did indeed pass understanding, since it seemed to him irrational that this sense of immensity and mystery, and of the inadequacy of his faith, should rouse him to any emotion but horror. Interpreting this strange experience as another trick of Satan, he reached out impatiently with his right hand and drew the curtain, shutting out the night. Once more he sat down at his desk and covered his
¶132all its harvest is flotsam. How should it possibly reach down to the beauties and horrors of the deep? Human reason, a fluttering moth, can never soar. Then what, I asked myself, was the appropriate attitude to the dark- bright, hideous-lovely Whole? Fear? Proud rebellion? Obsequious worship? Rather, I told myself, a difficult blend of acceptance in the heart and cold scrutiny in the mind. Acceptance, merely? For a moment the presence of the Whole, or of some greater thing beyond the Whole, seemed to bear down upon me in inconceivable majesty. My heart whispered, “Thou! Oh, Thou!” But immediately another thought, another prayer, was wrung from me. “Oh, let my heart strongly feel that presence, but let my mind be utterly silent before it. For even if I say, ‘Thou! Oh, Thou,’ I say too much.” Praying in this strange way, I laughed. Thereupon the Christian, mistaking my long silence and final bark of laughter, slipped his arm in mine and said, “My friend you have won through. Merciful Christ has saved you.” But at his touch I had stiffened, and now his arm retreated. Our eyes met, and for a long moment each searched the other. I was preparing to do battle against his proselytizing, and to conquer his faith. But his eyes checked me. For his Christ had indeed saved him from his self-loving despair; and without his Christ he might be lost. In his present state of partial waking (so I told myself, perhaps complacently) he could not endure the severer vision. So I said, “You have been very good to me, and very patient. But the upshot is that your way is not mine. You need belief; for me it is unnecessary. Without it I travel lighter, yes and perhaps farther. Strangely, in my unbelief I gain full peace, the peace that passes understanding. And joy too. I have found joy in the sheer given reality, with all its dark-bright
¶180shadow, a veil of illusion drawn between him and the reality for which he yearned. I could not wholly doubt that the mystic had experienced some deep significant fact. Indeed, in my hesitant way I too had experienced something of it. But though logically his withdrawal might, I told myself, be justified by his supreme experience, I was repelled by his readiness to abandon the damned to their fate. Spirit, we had agreed, was for individuals in community. To withdraw from the concrete community which gave one individual being, even to withdraw for the sake of a future and better community, or even for the sake of the pure spirit itself, smacked of desertion. My heart protested, if our world is damned, let us all be damned together! And yet I had to admit that if his vision was indeed authentic and rightly interpreted, his course was right. And yet, and yet … This yearning for the reality behind appearance, this readiness to sacrifice the actual to the ideal, smacks unpleasantly of the blind old cult of progress, and faith in a far off millennium. That the heaven is to be had here and now, and eternally, makes no difference. Cosmical piety dictates that I, a finite and ephemeral being, shall not lust even for union with God or the universal spirit. If at heart, though unwittingly, I have that unity all the while, well, it is so. But to lust for it is surely an addiction, a greed, and the subtlest betrayal of the spirit. Rather, “my station and its duties.” But the mystic would reply, and not without reason, that this craving for union with God or the Whole was not a mere individual’s craving; it was the urge of God in him to wake wholly to his godhead. Well, let each of us be true to his own light. But for me there must be no withdrawal. Let me live somehow in the two world at once. Immersed in the temporal, let me nonetheless look with a far-seeing or an inner gaze on the eternal. Let me indeed see the eternal; but I must find it within the
¶181temporal, not beyond. The grit and hardness of the rock under the climber’s fingers are not phantom. If he thinks them so, he is lost. Yes, and his goal is no cosmical panorama from a summit perhaps inaccessible; his goal is the climbing; to adapt himself, body and mind to objective reality, and thereby to express the spirit in him. This; but also (in sidelong glances only) to be as aware as may be of the depth below and the sky above, and the whole horizon of mountains. This, surely, is the truth that you and I together have conceived, each contributing. Is it not so? I found that the mystic had left his chair and was standing beside me, considering my face, and smiling. “My way,” he said, “is not yours; and yours, not mine. Be true to your own light, as I shall be to mine. There is a place for both our kinds.” Gently, he took my arm and led me to the door. OceanofPDF.com