Note by JRW: The following is taken from a handwritten letter, by Myatt, written in 2002 AD and addressed to me. He dated it One Very Cold Afternoon in Spring.
The Greatest Joy,
The Greatest Sadness
It is a very cold day at the start of my second week living in this tent. Last night it was so cold that there was ice on my beard and the inside of the tent, and I could not sleep. Warmth came only by walking to the top of a nearby hill, hours before dawn. But it was good, to be there, in the frosty silence, viewing the dome of stars and wondering about our future as a species. Will we be ever be "out there" - among those stars? Will we ever reach the worlds around, the life upon, some of them? This prospect, the very stars themselves, certainly put our petty personal and Earth-based squabbles into perspective.
As for myself, the days of coldness have worn me down, a little, and I am again like I once was, decades ago, at peace in my homeless world: enjoying the simple joy that a warming mug of tea brings when I sit, on a plastic bag, outside my tent and listen to the silence. There is plenty of time to reflect upon the past. I have been both above time and in time - to use the words of Savitri Devi - enjoying and seeking violent action-in-the-world, and the challenges and stirring of the blood, the soul, that such action, born of duty, brings, and yet also seeking and finding a beauty, a contentment - at least for a while - in peaceful, numinous Nature, while always in the past returning, in some way, to the struggle because this struggle vitalizes, making me treasure even more the beauty, the numen, of the world. Never sufficiently against time to remain with action, and yet never sufficiently above time to scorn the doing of deeds.
There is beauty, certainly, here in this coldness and rural place where my every breath can be seen and where I have to stop often to warm the hand which holds this pen. There is certainly an intimation of such beauty, such numinosity, in some women: a beauty which many times has brought me to tears as I shared with a woman one of those sometimes strange wordless moments when, together, we become more than we are, were, as individuals, as if, together, we are an intimation of the stage of human evolution which awaits. I often feel that some women embody the beauty, the numinosity, the joy, the sensuality, of Nature; as if they are Nature made manifest - an aspect of Nature's living being, a presencing, and one which, alas, so few it seems seem to know let alone appreciate.
And yet: I have always returned to this other, ordinary world of involvement, of action. Was it only duty - a duty to strive to make my vision of a better, more empathic, more honourable, world real - which drew me back? Or was it also that by so returning I knew, and treasured this other, numinous, world which one day we might make real here on Earth? Was this a knowing as when we have loved one person so deeply we miss their very presence and only realize how much we loved them, needed them, should have treasured them, when they were gone: when for some reason - often our own fault - their love for us was no more and we had to learn to be alone, again?
Will I ever, for more than a few months, a few years, and as I often dream and desire, live only in the world of the numen? Will I, for this, need to be alone, isolated, as I am now? Distanced from people by a physical distance, a rural isolation, and distanced in my very being, as if I am some strange alien from another world who finds it difficult to be enclosed in some city or some town or even a vehicle and who, many times, can only be with people for a limited time since I often feel their feelings, their sadness, their hopes, their joys, their anger, their despair, as if they are my own. And if I do so live, in, with, the numen, will it be because I have turned away from duty - too old and burdened by sadness to care about the world - or because I have truely transcended to that compassion, that understanding, that species of time, which, being acausal, is the real genesis of genuine change?
Such ramblings, created by days alone. And are you now my random audience? And do you mind? How many years - well over a decade - since I, by the public then unknown, stumbled into you in the Classics Bookshop that hot humid Summer day in Oxford when the very air sweated us and we went to sit, tree-shaded, by the river to talk of books read, music heard? How many sultry nights since that concert of Vivaldi's Gloria, shared? How many lives have I, you, lived since then? How many stored feelings, impressions, images, memories, waiting for some means of release? How many regrets of what might have been?
I have no music now - no Bach, Brahms, Schubert - to connect me to that world which entwined us then, that Summer, with its intimations of the greatest sadness, the greatest joy; but there are memories, yes there are memories which bring the tears of such sadness and joy and which remind me of how much I do not know, how many times I have been wrong, and of how far we all have to go to reach where we can reach given the faculties of empathy, reason and honour which we can and indeed must develope. Mea culpa; mea culpa; mea maxima culpa.
I am so cold now I have to move, and will walk the many miles to post this letter while the daylight lasts...
DW Myatt