Measure of My Days (4 page)

I
s it possible
that the old can stand any loss better than their intense relationship with themselves? If we are free from pain and disharmony, though idle, uncomfortable and alone, is awareness enough? But for how long, and how much alone? Without loving letters, and with no friendly voice on the ’phone, lacking the loyal concern of one’s family? May I never have that to face, but still—the basic need for me is to meet alone and in silence all that puzzles and pains me and to wait until the turmoil is stilled.

H
ardihood is a quality
supposedly created by difficulty, and I have always felt it to be a stimulating virtue. I like people who have it, and that must mean that I like people who have been disciplined by hardship, which is true. I find them realistic, not easily daunted, and they make few childish claims. This also means that the hardness of life I deplore creates the qualities I admire. Poverty used to seem to create morality. If you were poor you had to be selfless, uncomplaining, independent, ingenious, and courageous. Now in an age of plenty when it is felt that we should have what we want—and when this becomes a practical possibility—what happens to hardihood? Is it a disappearing virtue? I should be sorry to see it go, and very surprised if it did.

We are told that the over-indulged child having had little hardship lacks hardihood, and the weak boy has to be violent to respect himself, so hardihood is wanted and missed. Children must still have to endure the natural rage of parents, and there is no doubt at all that parents have to
summon a wealth of hardihood to endure their children. Even plenty requires a good deal of fortitude. To organise family transport with only two cars, to find leisure or quiet in a house equipped with every machine a modern house can contain is not easy. To combine chores with responsible jobs, not to mention illness, accidents, and the new poverty of the highly paid, all this demands stamina of the highest order, for the strain of it is great. Now when so many have so much, many work harder than their for-bears. So why does having much create strain, dissatisfaction and confusion? Could it be that austerity kept life simple, simple pleasures remaining real pleasures, while plenty makes for complication, and having much leaves us sated?

T
he power to differentiate
used to be taken as the sign of a fine mind, marking the road to wisdom. Is the present longing not to have differences noted a just claim that common humanity is more
important than individual quality, that our resemblances are more numerous than our differences? This is the problem that confronts us, and what is the answer? Modernity demands inclusion of the weakest side, the lowest point, individually and socially. Nothing must be excluded, so where are we? Can strength encompass weakness, or will weakness undermine strength? Is our civilization falling or rising? Must we face the possibility of another dark age, sheltering the great values in our hearts until they are once more prized, or can we open to unheard of good? No answer is possible. No new pattern of living is yet clear.

Looking out on the world I am no longer in, it feels as though we will to be undifferentiated. This must have meaning though the meaning is still hidden from us. It could be a justified recoil, loss of heart, lack of courage, remembering the last sixty years. Yet think what mankind has borne, who could plumb the valour that lies in the human heart? We must wait and hope and watch. Take note of every reflection of the general
situation that arises in our own hearts. Assess, wait—open and aware.

I
f differentiation
has seemed part basis of morality, clarity and order, no wonder the present demand to be accepted without assessment sounds like a demand not to be judged at all. This could be a lowering of life, a recession to the inchoate, and a relinquishment of the responsibility of the individual.

“Judge not that ye be not judged” and “Love your neighbour as yourself” make me wonder and question. Not to judge can be the result of humility and compassion, but even then we must remain clear as to what it is from which we with-hold judgement. If we do not condemn is it because we know we are not fit to do so, or is it that the necessity of value in men has become a concept of little interest? New values will not be defined in the time of the old, so we are uncertain, our minds tired by doubt.

And our neighbour—our neighbour who is crowding us very close these days—what of him, who is he? I have never been sure whether he was the kind people who are near and trusted, and of course the railway porter who can on occasion be a ministering angel, and naturally all the people in the shops, for if you live in a small town and are really old you wonder who is not your neighbour. But is my neighbour the lout I observe, or the author I read when I am advised to “keep up with the times”—he who expresses spleen for spleen’s sake—for these I cannot love. Is the plain fact then that our neighbour is often not easy to love, and most of the time we do not love him? What is more, out of honesty to him, and to oneself, we judge both him and ourselves; we must, in order to know our dislikes and his, or how else is there any reality? If we do not recognise our instinctive recoil (and sometimes it is the wise animal in us giving warning), how are we to have the courage to take our stand? If we are judged, if we do not feel the recoil from us, then what is there to make us pause and judge ourselves?

The cry for an egalitarian society is so strong that it may be the new and needed truth, but the opposing truth flames in my heart, and difference, the precious difference of the individual, sharpens in my thoughts. The difference that is innate in nature—nature whose law is diversity—the difference that is also our most difficult achievement and chief honour must have full recognition or else equality becomes uniformity. It is the individual who can stand alone that can best relate to another person, it is he who can be true to a bond, and it is he who possesses a creative mind. Anyone who has become himself will respect himself for his difference and so be respected by all. But this is not equality. Only identical things are equal, and nature is incapable of repeating herself, great artist that she is, so what is the cry for equality, and what will it bring?

W
e are different
, not equal, so we suffer and compete, rise and fall, lose and achieve ourselves.
We are truly the vehicles of evolution because under stress we make a decisive choice that creates change, enforced by necessity. Necessity can be cruel, and any generous heart and just mind tries to control the inequalities of circumstance. Great good can come from greater equality, less suffering, a flowering of new talent, new pride, increase in understanding, but there is also a danger now seen and weighed. It is the decrease of individuality on a large scale.

Unreal inequality can stimulate to action, but unreal equality seems to dissolve us and distort us. We tend to live at the collective level, undefined, unreal because of claims in our natures that we have not fulfilled, because of differences we have evaded. This is recognised as a present danger, and the word “depersonalized” is used to describe it.

Thoughtful writers in America dwell on the degree of emptiness reached there, middle-aged couples are frightened children, afraid to be alone, only able to live by melting into their Club, their neighbours. English analysts are burdened and baffled by what they call the non-ego
patient, people who are not pathological, but who lack the ability to live their own lives, needing to be carried. It is understandable to assume that fewer differences would mean less suffering, but it is dangerous to create large numbers of people whose first claim is to avoid the inner struggle, the ordeal of self-discovery.

Modern permissiveness makes it difficult to tell good from bad, as though it were simpler to have no differences at all. We used to dislike and condemn our own faults when we saw them in others, so that we parked out our sins on our neighbours where they at least existed for us. Now that it is uncertain when a fault is a fault our vagueness increases. Add to evasion and uncertainty the fact that we tend to annul the heights and depths of experience. If we no longer seek the spirit, if love and relationship should become small because sexual experience has few barriers around it to mark it as important, if the sense of sin is no longer self-recognition, then where is the intensity of our humanity?

Equality could become our greatest danger as
it becomes more true of greater numbers, who live not from the depths built in the past, nor from the uniqueness knit from self-knowledge, but at the herd level where the human being tends to be depotentialised. Facing this with the gravity it warrants may be the truest way to lessen dangers more feared.

These suppositions seem true to me, but I also believe that there is an increase in honesty, in insight, of which some are aware and thus are able to live a larger area of their natures, so that there is an increase in individuality. In fact, we have a new inequality.

I
am so caught
in my own experience of age that it occurs to me only now that it matters who speaks of age, and anyone would have the right to ask, “By what road did you arrive where you are? What experiences formed your viewpoint?”. For over twenty-five years I was a Jungian analyst, and it is this experience, those long years of
observation that force on me the idea that modernity is like an analysis in reverse. Instead of gathering oneself together, it is a dispersal of oneself.

In analysis, as I have known it, you are confronted by your qualities and cannot disown them, though you try to. The animal, the primitive, the child, the crowd, the hero, the criminal, both sexes, the initiate, they are all in you. They appear in your dreams, you cannot deny them. By becoming responsible for them, in as far as you do, you know the pain of becoming conscious. This is made endurable and creative by figures beyond the personal, wisdom greater than yours, mysteries inspiring awe, all formed, one has to presume, by the endless generations whom life has presented with the same problems we all share. This rich and searing process of gathering a centre where you know what you are and are not makes me feel at moments as though modern ethics are a vast evasion. Of what? Subjective values, cause and effect, a many-sided reality that I miss and cannot name.

It is easier to be everyone rather than integrate diversity in yourself, but is the ease not paid for in human quality? In analysis, while never forgetting the degree of one’s own incurability, one experiences eternal truths that give dignity to man. Is that a frequent experience today?

I
f in this time
of planning for order there seems to be an increase of disorder, is it not possible by the strange swing of the opposites that the young as they mature will make a new choice, having tried many ways, and create an order we do not yet see? Will necessity, which can be as good a taskmaster as analysis, teach us that we are contained in an order we do not understand. And how many will accept the discipline of the discovery?

T
o be dominated
by abstract ideas is part of the helplessness of age. Is my emptiness invaded, or do I try to come nearer to my kind by viewing their problems from my isolation? I care, I am torn with care for the quality of humanity. If I suffer fruitlessly, guttering candle that I am, I choose to burn to the end. Though it is mostly under protest. That is understood.

W
hile equality is thought possible
, even a basic right, I want to remember the stimulus and interest of inequality. At once I feel heartless, as though I might wound or dishonour someone who had had less than I. The degree of our lack naturally determines the keenness of our claim. I have lacked much, vital things, and the ache has spurred me to intense living. But isn’t reality the rousing shock we all need, and do we not lose ourselves in pretence if the truth and tragedy of inequality is not accepted? If we could be equal,
what would happen to reverence and compassion?

When I see nature’s inherent inequality, I melt and want to be tender. If one is going to be truthful one has to be very tender. To respect difference, to try to understand difference is the only way. The imagination must be stretched to its widest, every wince of self-knowledge accepted, all this of course, but never accept the utter unreality of wishing for equality. It would mean that individuality went, goals vanished, and you sank in the static. I cannot see it as a fact, but hear it as the cry of unlived pride.

Who would be equal to whom? Do we all go as low as we can to prove we are above no one? Must all the gifts of those greater than we disappear from the world? No triumphs of accomplishment? No drive to discover the rare in ourselves and others? Never to be bemused by beauties we lack? No sudden insight of what might be? No respect or loyalty or humility stirred by what you had not known was possible? But these are our ennobling moments. It is at these times we outgrow ourselves.

Inequality entails resentment, envy, hate, galling realizations, all bitter lessons teaching us who we are as nothing else can; but also teaching us the drama and hope of life’s chaos. New knowledge brings sharp pain, and it can come to the very young. Shyness, self-consciousness can etch your pattern in you like an acid. A hot blush at a blunder is the birth pain of perception, and when you see ease and restraint and simple statement all in one you enter your right world.

No superiors? But nothing is as precious to me as my superiors. I cannot let them go, the mile-stones of my life. From my earliest days shyness held me, hesitation increased as I took in the variety of good I could neither have nor be. Yet it is just here that imagination stirs and world on world appears for exploration.

Admiration is one of the chief delights of living. Interest, increasing to ardour, finding others who agree, one igniting another, and when it is certain that there is far, far too much to be taken in one reaches the bliss of being carefree. You cherish the friends and impressions that have
proved to belong to you and let all the rest go. You have reached a place where you are humble, where you are in fact your own size, and you rest in a contentment between that of the child and the sage; the former not having begun to notice difference, the latter beyond stressing it.