The immortal pilgrim

One of the things that has always been a blessing in my life is my attendant sense of my own immortality. I feel it constantly everywhere I go, not necessarily in any acute sense.

The French critic Roland Barthes said that middle age begins not at any particular chronological point in life, but exactly when, early or late, we begin to feel we are going to die — as distinct from abstractly being aware of it. “This is a not a natural feeling,” Barthes said. “The natural one is to believe oneself immortal.”

My life in general has been of middle age, which is probably why I’m such a fan of John Keats’ poetry, that memoir of aggrievement and epithet about death. On November 30, 1820, as the autumn sun decayed into earth’s winter muck, John Keats, suffering from the tuberculosis that killed his mother and his brother Tom, sat down to draft a letter to his good friend Charles Brown. This was to be his last known correspondence, written between bouts of coughing blood. Keats wrote these striking lines: “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.”

Almost everyone I know is uncomfortable with Keats’ writing, which makes me wonder. Unlike most writers, Keats didn’t just wrestle with language but with the meaning of life, rather of death invading lives that have not been sufficiently lived. Keats didn’t want to live only the experience, but to get the meaning too. When you are serious about it, a little callousness is inevitable, because you tend to be a little insensitive to the vulgarities of superficiality, having to develop an interplay between detachment and attachment — worse if, like Keats, you’re cut off from the very human traits that you so glisteningly depict.

Keats’ poems are mostly marked, though not disfigured, by the pathos of stoicism. Not too surprisingly since stoicism is the natural partner to tragedy. The ultimate value of stoicism is in the manner by which it convicts values of existential shallowness as can be detected from a question from one of Keats famous letters written in 1819: “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”

Writers come in luminous variety, their common factor being engagement with their own humanity, drunk on emotion, raw and sacrificial. But, there is something monstrous about the creation process — the entry into the otherworld, the usurpation of ancient and modern gods, trying to prise out beauty from what appears so ugly from first sight.

“Beauty”, as Dostoevsky had Mitya Karamazov declare, “is the battlefield where God and the devil war for the soul of man”. Human creators put themselves in the midst of that at their own peril. “Art is dangerous,” as Iris Murdoch once put it, “chiefly because it apes the spiritual and subtly disguises and trivialises it.”

I’m reminded of Cardinal Newman: “I look out into the world of men, and see a sight that fills me with unspeakable distress. The world seems simply to give the lie to the great truth, of which my being is so full. I look into this busy, living world, and see no reflection of its Creator. To consider…the defeat of good, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the dreary, hopeless irreligion…all this is a vision to dizzy and appal, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution… If there be a God…the human race is implicated in some terrible, aboriginal calamity.”

The lives of the good men teaches me the same thing in different ways. From Keats, that there’s a connection between art and fractious life. That our experience is not just the end result of an elaborate interpretive process, but a transcendent process that’ll end when we break the husk of mystery that surrounds our lives.

And that though our pain may seem like nothing more than vacuous agitation, a life lived with a sharpened appetite for the truth is a spiritual pilgrimage.