Others Have Felt That Way Too

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“Out of date myself, I like out of date things, and am willing to pass out of focus in that company, inheritor of a mode of life which is wanted no more.”  – E. M. Forster

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Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives. – C. S. Lewis

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We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

– W H Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue

It’s an odd fact that the Christian faith played out unpredictably in the later life of the English poet, W.H. Auden. Being gay made Auden feel claustrophobic in socially constricted England and so off he scuttled across to America just before the outbreak of the war in 1939. Some thought he was a coward for fleeing just as Britain faced its darkest hour and never forgave him.

But more than his gayness, another reason given for why left for America is that he had grown weary of being lionised by the London literary chattering classes as his generations great left wing prophet. If anything he felt like an imposter. That self doubt served him to distance himself from the visceral and vicious debates raging across England’s cultural and political landscape as Europe fell into turmoil and crisis from the bitterness of the Spanish Civil War to the growing onset of war with Nazi Germany.

Auden’s literary friends didn’t grasp what he saw: Evil has a habit of infesting on all sides of ideological battle. No nation, political party or individual was pure and innocent. The ferocious rise of Nazism could happen anywhere, not just Germany in the 1930s. Nihilism was everywhere from the distinct Italian fascism of Mussolini’s Italy to the bloody brand of Communism in Stalin’s Russia. Auden’s answer was to put his faith in Christianity, of the very English kind. Auden embraced the consolations of the Christian faith as the only mature way to understand human darkness and potential. The point of Christian belief, he argued, was to challenge our self-deceptions and self-pity and keep us focused on the only thing that matters – Jesus’ love command. Auden wrote: “For one thing, and one thing only, is serious: loving one’s neighbour as one’s self.”

Auden thought supernatural arguments and jargon distracted from real religion. Christian faith obliged believers to face the facts of this suffering world, not veer from them. He practiced numerous acts of charity anonymously. He didn’t like praying if it meant asking God to bend the universe to his own little purposes. Auden prayed as a way to pay deep attention to something other than himself. He prayed to God in order to forget his own ego.

via blackswaneuroparedux.tumblr.com

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It takes courage to live through suffering; and it takes honesty to observe it. – C. S. Lewis

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Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. – C. S. Lewis

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J.S. Bach – English Suite No. 2 in A minor BWV 807 – Yulianna Avdeeva