A month and more since my last post. Apologies, friends. It could not be helped. Here is an imagined conversation that actually might have happened between two key figures of the nineteenth century. See what you think. 

                                  

                   I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

                                          --   Isaac Newton 

                  

                            (image credit: Godfrey Kneller, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                     A Conversation In 1848

“Pardon me, sir, but I am moved to be forward and speak to you, though I own that we have not been introduced. I hope you shall not take offense, but I feel I must ask: Are you the poet, William Wordsworth?”

“I am he. To whom am I speaking? Surely it cannot be Mister Charles Darwin.”

“I am amazed that one as famous as you could know my name. I am indeed Charles Darwin. I am also amazed that we are so propitiously brought together by chance in such an unlikely place. I was given to understand the you did not care for train stations.”

“I do not care for trains or the modern age generally, it is true. I am here but to meet a friend who is arriving on the express from London in a few minutes. But you are right, Mister Darwin. This is an alien place for me. I find it oppressive even when none of the clanking, huffing metal monsters are about for I know one will come along at any moment. They are unnatural, Mister Darwin. No good is going to come of this fashion for things that huff and clank.”

                      

                                               

                                                               William Wordsworth 

                                   (credit: B. R. Haydon, via Wikimedia Commons)

“Please, I beg you, sir. Call me ‘Charles’. I would be honored if you would.”

“Very well. I would also welcome your calling me ‘William’. I still peer about to see who is being addressed when I hear the title ‘Mister’. The salutation surely cannot be addressed to me.” (laughs quietly)

“Ah, I find your sensibilities agree with my own. Give me the wilds of del Fuego rather than the trials of a mannered company. I like you well already, sir.”

“I am glad to hear it, Charles, but I must confess that I am very cautious of you right now. I have heard of your reputation in scientific circles in England. You have even published some papers that are much admired in the community of naturalists in the civilized nations of the world. The view of the world that Science offers to our kind seems dangerously amoral to me. Not immoral, which might be contended with, but amoral as it takes no position on what constitutes decency or a decent way of life. This is the illness of our age, in my view.”

                      

                                                             Charles Darwin 

                                                   (credit: G. Richmond, via Wikiquote) 

“Now there, William, most respectfully, I must disagree with you. Science tells us to dedicate ourselves to the truths of the solid world. We must be able to test a proposition in the material processes of this world before we can assess the truth or falsity of that proposition. That is the prime directive that I and many others take from Science.”

“But, Charles, surely you see that, first, no propositions concerning decency may be tested in such a manner, and, second, no life for humans in community is possible without principles of decency firmly embedded in the modes of thought and behavior practiced daily within the community.”

“Ah, my dear Mister Wordsworth. Pardon me. My dear William, as we agreed. I am most inspired by the quality of your mind. You refuse to be detoured by the trivial appurtenances of a discussion and leap right to the heart of the matter in one fell swoop. Pardon me again, but I do not flatter. I have attempted to have this same discussion with so many of my friends and colleagues, and they simply get side-tracked in minor corollary issues and propositions, while the main question remains neglected between us. When I attempt to steer the debate back to that main question – Where do the principles of what we call “decency” come from? – they keep wandering away toward hobby horses of their own: their trades, their travels, their farms, their families, and so on. The conversation then rapidly becomes wearying in the extreme. I feel I must affirm again that I value the quality of your mind. I have read your poetry and found much sense and sensibility in it. Thought and feeling in fine balance. As a younger man, I dreaded the thought of meeting the authors of my favorite works. They were heroes of superhuman proportions to me. I feared meeting the man for real would puncture my balloon utterly. But you …you have not failed me, sir.

“But, as Hamlet says, to the quick of the ulcer. I have speculated long upon this matter. I do not know the extent of your knowledge of Natural Philosophy, but I am now working very hard on the proof of a theory which discloses the cause of the variety of living things that we see in our world. My wife has also been much distressed several times by the mechanical view of life that I am laboring to prove. But I am certain that the world view I am developing is the correct one. Or to be accurate, I am as certain of it as it is possible for one to be of anything in this life.

“Life began from a few simple forms at least ten million years ago on our world, and it has been progressing by the laws of variation from generation to generation under the pressures of a second law, which simply requires that the individuals fittest to survive in their environments go on to reproduce, while those not so fit to survive die out before reproducing, thus taking their peculiar qualities and modes of activity out of the population with them.”

“You are a delightful young man in many ways, I feel certain, Charles, but do you not see that we humans are not in this model of yours. Everywhere human beings have a deep moral sense, a deep sense of which acts and utterances are decent and which are not. I agree that there are large numbers of varied customs and modes of living among the many nations of our world, but embedded in their belief systems, we find universally that they all have notions of right and wrong so similar to our own as to require the conclusion that these must be coming into their hearts by some means other than the physical. It is from this consideration that I and many like me draw the further conclusion that there must be a higher dimension from which this faculty flows into our very beings.”

“Yes, William, yes! Again, you proceed to the heart of the matter practically in an instant. Thank you, sir. But to rejoin with you …as I said, I have given much private time to the contemplation of these matters, and the conclusion I, as a scientist, am driven to is that like our physically inherited traits of eye color and length of finger nail and so on, so our socially acquired beliefs and customs are in constant competition for survival. Societies which have modes of discourse and activity that enable them to survive well in their places and times flourish, while those that do not die out. The mechanism is as clear and as harsh as that.

“The whole theory has given me much inner turmoil and distress as I have worked to explicate it for my colleagues in Science, and perhaps for the rest of the world as well. I don't think I shall ever publish these musings on the competitions between nations, belief systems, and ways of life. I fear my conclusions on the ways in which species in the non-human realms arise, compete, flourish, and then are extinguished are going to be explosive enough to draw all the wrath down upon me that Hell can offer. All I can bear. But I must follow Truth where she beckons. That is the way of Science.”

“You are a wholly delightful young man to bare your inner soul to me after an acquaintance of less than half an hour, Charles. But do you not also see that if you insist on characterizing our human inclinations and sensibilities in this mechanical way of yours, then you are honor-bound to tell your fellows the source from which these customs, and the values and concepts that underlie them, are taking their direction. Why did human creatures in these remote eras that you imagine ever come to live by any values in the first place?”

“Excellent point, William. The truth is that like the origins of life, the origins of decency are shrouded in mystery to me. I can’t say with any comfortable degree of confidence why we believe and behave as we do. I have speculations, but as I have little to no evidence to support them, I keep them to myself. But I can assert that granted that such things as customs do exist, I can explain how they work. That is the truth of the matter. As a scientist, I wish to promulgate to the world that which I can demonstrate with material evidence. Wonderings such as those spoken of by our own Isaac Newton I do not share with the world, nor even with close friends and associates. They remain my own.”

“I am going to extend your view of this universe in which there is no benign and loving universal presence and ask you now a couple of very hard questions, Charles. I hope you will bear with me.”

“You are a complete gentleman, William. I cannot be persuaded that you could ask a question of any sort that would be other than pertinent and penetrating. For me, as a scientist, no question of this kind can be thought rude. It is simply the key element in the best sort of discourse between men.”

“Very well then. I shall enquire: Charles, have you any children?”

“I do, sir. A houseful of them that I love very, very much. They are the fruit of my love for my wife. Treasures beyond all tallying. Yes, sir. I do.”

“I perceive in your very tone that these assertions about yourself are only the unvarnished truth. So now the hard question steps forward: Have you ever experienced the death of a child of your own?”

“I have not. But I think I see where you are pointing with this question. That life is too cruel to bear if we do not believe in another dimension where the love of a Creator reigns and the principles of decency are the laws of that other existence. Am I correct in surmising so?”

“You are, Charles.”

“I fear such an event in ways that dissolve all my processes of thought. Could I face the death of one of my children? I fear such a possibility more than the Armageddon portrayed in the cruelest verses of the Revelation of St. John, the Divine. But I remain a scientist. Pain and death, and even our extreme distress in the face of them, are but parts of a natural world that is ultimately more kind than cruel. Like the firm father who will not appoint his own child for a medal at the school where the father is headmaster unless he is certain that his child truly is the best of all candidates for the award, so the presence I sense is only firm with us. Never cruel. Just firm. Death is a key part of the evolution process of all life on our world. I don’t know that I would be able to remain true to my model of the world if I did lose one of my children. One’s whole response to such a terrible thought is that it is more than merely cruel. It is unnatural. It is against every decent instinct and cognition in our deepest selves. But from the view of Science, even these are parts of the larger process.

“Oh, my heaven! It is just occurring to me now! I am so ashamed, William. So ashamed, my friend! You have …you have known such a loss? Can it be so?”

“My London friend’s train is arriving momentarily, Charles. I am sorry, but I must end my part in this discussion. Let me close with this thought upon which you may ruminate. I once believed in the benevolence of Nature. I believed in a view of the world not dissimilar to the one you have expounded for me today. But yes, I have known that cruelest of blows. I lost my rosy view of the natural world. It never returned. I will end by bidding you a polite farewell. And bestowing upon you my fervent wish that you may remain true to your scientist’s faith, for faith is what it is. And may you remain true to it even when you do come to know what incredible, despairing suffering can afflict those of us who love. But to wish you may be spared such loss I cannot do. I know you will not be spared. It is the way of the world. Bear up as well as you can, Charles. One hour at a time, one minute at a time if need be. There is nothing else to do.

“Farewell and good luck, my young friend. I now must receive a much older, but no less worthy friend. Shall we shake hands, then?”

“You have not disappointed me in even one minor trait, my dear William. I feel a fondness for you that is all out of proportion to our short acquaintance. Indeed, fare well. Fare however you need. You have given me the best discussion of, perhaps, all my days. Utterly and wholly courteous, intelligent, and candid.”

“You are very kind, Charles. Farewell.”

“Farewell.”     

                                   

     

   

                                               

                                                                leopard kill 

                                          (credit: NJR ZA [CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

                        

                                               Suor Maria Celeste 

                                          (credit: unknown artist, Wikimedia Commons)

                                                                                                           Florence, Italy        

                                                                                                           Mar. 31, 1634

Dearest Papa

Finally, I have some privacy. This convent does not grant us much of that. 

A last letter and it is meant to be read only by you. We both know our letters have been secretly opened in the past. Vincenzo will carry this letter to you. I trust him. How I pray the two of you will find peace between you! He is your son, Papa. You must, must, forgive his past follies.

I’m sorry this letter is such a mess. Jumbled. Repetitious. I do not have the strength to fix it. But it must get to you, whatever its flaws.

The truth I wish to tell first is that you were the only person in the world who understood me and loved me. This letter is a sad farewell from your grateful daughter. All my life, from the earliest I can remember, I knew I had your love. It made up for all the other sorrows of this world. Thank you.

I used to think you were invincible and immortal. I took this proposition as an axiom. I see now that you grow old, and now your aging years shall be lived in near-poverty. This is why I beg you to reconcile with your son. You must not get old unloved and unwell in addition to poor. I cannot bear such a thought.

This letter is not meant to be a confession, but it’s tone will almost certainly make it sound like one. However, I am past caring. I have been ill many times before, as you know, but never anything like this. I know this is the end.

I will try for mere truthfulness. In the face of death, all else is pretence.

The truth is that I have struggled with so much anger for the cruelty and stupidity of the people of this world in these last days. For example, I was clever and determined from an early age. These traits were inherited from you and nurtured by you. But I also saw more clearly as I matured that these traits stir envy in too many others in this fallen world. Traits that should be viewed as gifts bring such resentment from the “sinners”, as I once called them. Sinners. Yes, but now I know truly I too am one.  

In my girlhood, neighborhood brats bullied me whenever they could get away with it. Angela Teresa, especially.

I should have told you, Papa, I know.

I never told you that it was she who pushed me off the Fortezza bridge railing when I was seven. Twenty-four feet to the water below. She was enraged that I could already speak and write Latin better than she. So lucky I wasn’t killed!

Your friend, Antonio, saved me. He glows with heroism in my memories. Ask him to verify this story when you see him. Tell him he is a good man.

For years, I gave in to anger whenever I recalled incidents such as that one. Anger is my great secret sin.

Resa became a monster in my childhood memories. Three years older than me and much … “heftier” would be too kind a word. For years, I dreamed of seeing her caned twelve of the best on her drawers. In my fantasy, for years after I came here, Sister Carlotta administered the blows. She pumps water for all the Poor Clares in the convent. She has an arm like a smith.

But as I see the end drawing near, I have ceased to think or speak in such ways. Jesus said we must forgive a brother seventy times seven, then again. He was right, and I was wrong. As we are instructed to forgive a brother, so also, of course, we must forgive a sister. Then, as we forgive those who sin against us, God forgives us. So simple a rule, but still His mercy passes all understanding.

I relearned this truth just recently. I had come to hate one of the novices here in the convent. But we finally talked in Mother Superior’s cell. After an hour, I suddenly realized why Pia is as she is. Then, I forgave. It worked. Again. And oh, the tide of joy that welled through my being. All of me. Cleansed.

I had to go through a cycle, but I did arrive at forgiveness. It washes the spirit newborn clean. I see that now with sharpest clarity as I face my earthly end.

I have never let you see this angry side of myself, Papa, but now I am dying. I know it. I feel in my viscera my vital force is dwindling. Too great a looseness of the bowels for too many days. No matter what I eat or drink, no matter what cordials I mix – in my shaking condition – nothing does any good.

Now I leave my dying wishes to you.

I ask again: reconcile with Vincenzo. He has offended you, I know, but he does love you. He so longs for your blessing. He just cannot show it. Fathers and sons! Harder than mothers and daughters? I just don’t know. How would one judge such a thing?

Please also keep supporting the Poor Clares in any way you can. I know your finances have been painfully reduced by this present pope and his lackeys and the cruel, stupid measures they have taken against you. But they shall pass, as shall you and I. Then, only the love and truth we showed while alive remain.

All things pass. But the love shown in our forgiveness for each other endures. The greater the difficulty of the forgiveness, the greater the merit in granting it. This I have learned from Mother Superior and Maria, Mother of Christ, in my years here. It is very hard, but it is possible if we give our hearts, our trust, to Him. Possible for any of us to truly forgive.

I’m sorry this letter is jumbled, repetitious, but I am ill and slipping toward the final shade. I know only enough to know that this message to you will be my last honest communication with any in this world. I have days now. Perhaps, hours.

Please, keep supporting the Poor Clares in this nunnery. They do much good in this world, despite the vile poisons in other realms that corrupt precious Mother Church. She is assailed from without and within in our times. Were ever times as trying as these?

                                   

                                                                     Pope Urban VIII

                                      (credit: Pietro da Cortona, via Wikimedia Commons) 

And now, lastly, I can speak of the truth that you shall leave when you must pass. Only one in the past and very few in the future shall leave to their kind a truth as precious and prodigious as that you will leave. Therefore, please forgive the fools who govern the Church in our time.

What they have done and continue to do to you is past belief. You worked so hard for a lifetime to demonstrate the genius past all human understanding that is evident in the operations of our cosmos. The energy, beauty, majesty, mercy, wisdom of our world – no, our worlds, as you have demonstrated by replicable evidence past all question. Yet they chose to put you on trial. With no rights accorded to you and no legal counsel save your own.

Tried for heresy! When what you have showed is the very opposite of that! The universe is far more amazing than ever humans had known, and it can be understood by thought, study, and testing in this world of matter, space and time. The incredible world we have been granted by the generous One who loves us so. And still they insist that to speak of real observations of this world and build understanding from one’s observations is heresy. 

To use our God-given minds is heresy! 

I admit I raged at them sometimes. Never grow. Never learn. It passes all sense.  

Heresy!! And when you refused to recant, they showed you the instruments with which they would torture you if you did not change your mind. You, who began your serious university years as a student of Medicine. I hated them till only these last few days, Papa. I prayed for understanding of why.  

And then I found the peace that comes by forgiveness. Those authorities hurt me perhaps more than they did you because I love you so. Sometimes it was past bearing. When the messenger told us you were to be tortured, I fell in a swoon. Mother Superior thought I might never awaken. I was that cold.

But I have learned to truly, sincerely forgive.

Why?

Because, Papa, what they say matters nothing. Not to History. The truth you placed before people is out, free among mankind. It will never be recaptured and contained. Your discoveries and, most of all your method, have set humankind free. Now, we can face, and someday even master, this world.

You have won, Papa. What need we care for these flawed present judges? I know past all question that God loves you, wants you to be at ease. Wants you to retire in quiet, if rather impoverished, circumstances.

Above all, do not question your own courage. Yes, you gave in to their threats. You officially recanted so they would lift the threat of torture. You buckled to the will of a gang of bullies.

But what does it matter? What would you have gained if you had let them rack you? I repeat: your truth is out; it has become the truth of mankind. We grow in knowledge by observation, thought, and testing in reality. In the finest example of your method, you showed the mathematics of elliptical revolutions. This truth has spread to every corner of Europe. One day it will reach around the globe.

The beauty of that model! The awesome power of it!

Them and their vain little picture, hundreds of years out of date, unsupported by evidence or reasoning, devised by a man who, on his best day in this world, would not have been fit to fill one corner of your shadow.

Forgive them, Papa! Let their crimes go. I repeat: I have learned the power of forgiveness, how it cleanses and heals. Life here in this convent, a life that was a gift from you, has given me that. “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” That is the simple formula that contains the magic.

As you and God know, I too have been a sinner. As have we all.

Understanding this simple truth brings forgiveness. Then love blooms within. This is the precious gift Lord Jesus left for us. I praise Him for His mercy in showing it to me before I meet him at the Gates.   

I must leave off. I am fainting weak.

Good-bye, Papa. There will never be another like you. I am so proud to have been your girl.  

                         All of all my love,

                                 Your ever-loving daughter,

                                              Virginia  

   

                                                   Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition 

                                   (credit: Cristiano Banti, via Wikimedia Commons)

                             

                                                   Virginia Woolf (credit: Wikipedia) 

Yes, Virginia, There Is A War

I read some of Virginia Woolf’s works, as a young man in my 20’s and re-visited the same works in my 50’s. They were being touted at my university as genius works, literary art from arguably the finest stylist of the twentieth century.

For the life of me, I could not see what the fuss was about. She did handle the technique called ‘stream of consciousness’ with amazing skill. But her novels were about the trivial. For example, in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway has a party. Several very "interesting" people are coming. We skip through the protagonist’s mind and into the minds of several of those guests as lightly and easily as if we were metaphorical swallows or wrens. Quick, smooth, gentle, even delicate. It is all handled with amazing skill on the part of the author.

But I know what I thought, in my twenties, at the end: boring. Boring past belief. Who cares if one spoiled upper-middle-class woman has a party to which a slough of other boring people come, and think and talk about boring, trivial things? I might as well have daydreamed about a hundred things and sat and stared out the window for five hours. Catatonic. A waste of skin and breath and hair.

It is only now that I’m past sixty that I am beginning to see something more.

In Mrs. Dalloway, one of the characters whose consciousness we pass through briefly is a soldier returned just a few years before from World War One. He is haunted by what he saw and did there. We feel his anguish, but only briefly. Then, we skip into another mind and dance delicately on into Triviatown. We find out later in the novel that, oh dear, he has committed suicide. Jumped off a high place, I think it was.

I know when I first read the novel, I felt a stab of real anger and sorrow that this woman, Clarissa Dalloway, and her trivial friends could treat as trivial the one person in the novel that maybe had a truly important, compelling story to tell.

But to me today, at 69, the whole novel speaks differently. What I see in it now is that Woolf was well-aware of how callous her 1920’s society had become. The Roaring 20’s. All were doing well, returned to their pre-war games and trivia. 

What had just transpired, 1914 to 1918, they did not have the depth of character to cognize, let alone empathize. All of this she saw, a woman who had lost men she loved in that war, including one of her own brothers. I now believe that Woolf subtly constructed the novel for people of sensibilities similar to her own.

   

                                                  At the front in World War I

                                                      (credit: dailymail.co.uk) 

How I wish I’d had better teachers when I first read Woolf.

But today, I think I see further. The author not only made me painfully aware of what that poor fellow and his comrades went through and then had to carry in their heads - if they were lucky enough to survive. She made the horror of war implant and then evolve in my imagination on its own. As a result, I did research and learned what the reality had been. She did not need to have the soldier tell of what he'd been through. And then, he killed himself - in the midst of a society that to all appearances didn’t “get” him and didn’t care to try. I ache for him as I write these lines.

I know now of the young officers on all sides from the upper middle class. Educated, sensitive, full of idealism and patriotism, which they had been programmed to think were the same thing. England, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, Italy, Russia, Canada, the U.S., Turkey, Australia, New Zealand …the list could go on. Over 100,000 casualties in sub-Saharan Africa, a “theater” of that war that most people today know nothing about. Millions of fine young men, near to boys really. Squandered like found money. And more in the wars since, of course. How bravely they charged. Into machine guns.

Woolf was, it seems to me today, also trying to do what Thornton Wilder in his way did in “Our Town”: place a value beyond all measure on the small dignities in everyday life as shown in the decencies of ordinary people just interacting with other ordinary people. She felt instinctively that we don’t need to read any more about, and for sure don’t need to glamorize or celebrate, the horrors of war. She knew that there had been way more than enough of that particular form of madness. World War One only took it to a previously unimaginable, undeniable extreme. All illusions of “patriotism” and “idealism” got swept away in trenches full of rats, shit, mud, and exploding, gangrenous corpses.

I keep hoping some work of literature or film may tell it all and get the people of the world to give it up. But I believe I see now what Woolf was trying to do. 

Her effort to try to push her society’s consciousness in another direction came to little in the end, of course. Fellow authors could have told her as much. Vergil may have celebrated “arms and the man”, but Homer knew better, as did Thackeray, Mann, Hesse, Tolstoy, and many others. They wrote sensitively and changed nothing. Woolf was simply trying to tell that same message in a new way, one that might actually get results at the level of public consciousness. Or so I think now. Reading authors’ minds is one more trivial pastime, I suppose.

But I know because it is a matter of open public record that Virginia Woolf was deeply distressed when, in spite of the best efforts of herself and many others, another World War came, even larger and more terrible.

She really was a soul too sensitive for this world. She was likely what we now call “bipolar”. She had many mental breakdowns and had to retreat to total rest many times.  Many times, she tried to kill herself. Finally, while staying with friends in 1941, nearly two years into WWII, she succeeded. She walked into a river and drowned. Death by suicide, like the poor soldier in Mrs. Dalloway.

In the preceding months, she had seen the German bombers over London and the new generation of maimed young men coming back from the fronts. She had been to patriotic rallies in England where the rabid shouting of crowds whipped into patriotic frenzy had made her physically ill.

Was she trying unsuccessfully to repress her true lesbian self all those years? Was she born with other genes that made her bouts with madness inevitable? I believe these questions are not what we need to focus on in our assessment of Woolf.

I think I get her now. No wonder she seemed crazy. She saw with her eyes and felt with her heart and her whole self the cruelty and stupidity of this world.

Oh, no, Virginia. How I wish you had chosen to live. You weren’t crazy. No. It’s the world that’s crazy. You were the sanest person in the England of your time. 

Rest in peace, gentle lady.


   

                     German SS troops being executed by U.S. troops in a coal yard 
                                                   (Dachau, April 29, 1945) 
                                  (credit: Arland B. Musser, via Wikimedia Commons)