I was distressed in conversation with a friend whom I admire for his level head, his learning, his insight, and his wit to hear him speak of his sense of being cramped for intellectual space, of his boredom with what seems to him the narrow opportunities in the country, of his disgust at the eternal back-biting and bitter and belittling rivalries which crowd out any hope of civil discourse.
We cannot afford to cramp or bore our intellectuals and our artists, our wits and our craftsman, our dreamers and our thinking men and women. It may be that to achieve a breakthrough to material success in a nation it is necessary to be single-minded in the economic sphere. I am not enough of an economist or a political thinker to judge that. But in the sphere of art and the intellect to be single-minded is a sort of living death for a nation. I hope, therefore, that my friend was just suffering from indigestion or ennui at the end of an irritating day and was not signalling the symptoms of a national malaise. When such men in any nation feel their minds are no longer being excited their nation’s future is endangered.
Of course personal disenchantment does not flow only or even mainly out of national difficulties. Long ago, in 1591, Giovanni Florio counted the ten pains of death for any man: they do not contain any obvious political distress:
“To wait for one who never comes,
To be in bed and not to sleep,
To serve well and not to please,
To have a horse that will not go,
To be sick and lack the cure,
To be a prisoner without hope,
To lose the way where you would journey,
To stand at a door that none will open,
To have a friend who would betray you,
These are the ten pains of death.”
The individual heart and mind of man can generate quite enough misery and self-contempt without ever touching on the business of the state.
And, of course, the opposite also is true. We can easily find within our individual selves the means of deep satisfaction, sensual and intellectual and spiritual, without the slightest recourse to political stimulus or state favour.
You only have to read a biography of John Donne, the great 17th century poet and preacher. He was a complex, hard, ambitious man – very much at home in the politics of his day. Yet in the end he had a straightforward view of what would make him happy. Above all, he said, we must put something useful into our own hands, and our children’s hands: “put a sword”, he wrote, “put a ship, put a plough, put a trade.” He said that if we do not choose a definite and regular calling, and pursue it unremittingly, we shall pass through life as a hand passes through a basin of water, “which may be somewhat fouler for thy washing in it, but retains no other impression of thy having been there.”
Skip a couple of centuries and look into Sigmund Freud’s famous book Civilisation and its Discontents. He wrote this near the end of his life and in it says that he had found that “work and love” were the only ways in which human nature can come close to real satisfaction; “work and love” are the sovereign remedies. I think Freud was right – love certainly, and work also, if you include in work the hard but marvellous disciplines of sport.
Yet, as always, for me Samuel Johnson is the best teacher on the human condition. “It is by studying little things,” he wrote, “that we attain the great art of having as much happiness as possible.” And he went on to write: “The main of life is made up of small incidents.” The fact is that too much of any bitterness in our lives comes from impossible expectations. Johnson was himself quick to irritability and despair but he saw clearly where the truth lay. The great sin to fight is “a refusal to be pleased,” with its stock assumption that superiority is more effectively shown by disapproval than by praise. He hated in any man, as we all should, “the cultivation of the powers of dislike.”
Many mornings, standing by my window, I see a hawk fly from branch to branch in a tree. There is great beauty, with the early sun gleaming through the green leaves on its under-wings. What folly to cultivate powers of dislike when in the main of life there is enough beauty and diversion to find for ourselves enchantment in every passing hour.
The joy of life can suddenly strike you like a gust of wind off the sea. I tried to capture this feeling in a poem written in a flash one lovely morning.
What It Was Like Once Forever
The perfect day is upon me.
I wake to see the gleaming salmon
spring in the dark river of the morning,
the wind full of sea-salt and garden-flower,
the trees brimming slowly with green.
Mongoose, snake-catcher, sleek as a seal,
darts out of sight. I give him a sharp salute.
I give life a salute, the beauty it provides.
The day progresses well, people are well- disposed,
what is owed to business is efficiently transacted.
At home I leap heavenwards as high as I can,
not far but bravely done; my wife smiles,
she shakes her head, after all I am close to seventy-five.
There is no limit to our love,
even death will set no limit.
Our sons are content, healthy as snorting horses,
they will be coming soon.
I write this absurdly happy verse
to tell what it was like once forever.
