This Solemn Tenderness for Life
written by: Michael Graeme
I am sitting outdoors with coffee and a book, but I have set the book aside for now and am reading the sky instead. Rain is forecast and I want to see it in. The distant fell tops are spilling over with mist and looking gloomy, but just here the sky retains a soft, hopeful glow. Time passes, seems to slow. I’m wondering if the rain will pass us by. But then the woodland, up the hill, raises a sigh as the wind comes down the valley. The temperature falls, the leaves show silver, and the rain comes on.
For a moment, before I gather my things and move indoors, there is a feeling of connection. It is a deepening, an expansiveness, a feeling I am no longer this small creature, this accident of evolution. There is a part of me that makes up a mysterious whole with the universe. Except, it’s more than that, more than a feeling I mean. It’s a certainty. It passes, of course, as these things do, but I am left for a time at peace with our crazy world. It is what the writer JB Priestly, who knew this valley long before my time, once called a solemn tenderness for life.
Anyone who has spent time in the countryside, in nature, has felt the same thing. It’s why we do it. It’s one of the gentler of the so-called peak experiences, and hard to put into words. A sunset will do it, or a walk across the tops with a cloud inversion at our feet. A walk through an upland hay meadow, with more wild flowers than we can count, or even a drive to work on a fresh spring morning, if our head’s in the right place, will do it. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s not automatic. We seem to have to bring something of ourselves to the moment, as well. We have to relax into it, or at least have the heart to let it in when it comes knocking.
Such moments stand in contrast to the times, of course. I don’t know if things are truly any worse than in times past, or if it just feels that way. But the stories the world is telling me definitely speak of living in an age of defeat. We are in decline, our economics, politics, even the fabric of our societies are worn so thin we are falling through into a pit of despair that not even our great-grandparents knew. It’s been like this for decades, these vexed narratives telling us how much we’ve lost, and it offends our sensibilities, because our instincts, as people, are to grow, to ripen, to harvest the fruits of a life, not to wither on the vine.
Our opinion regarding what it is that thwarts our ambitions will vary depending on our politics. But what we have in common is a growing sense of bewilderment that there is nothing we can do, and no truly wise men coming to our rescue. As for the nature of our being and the meaning of our lives, well, there things are even worse. Our scientists tell us we are nothing more than our genes, and there is no meaning as such. Even our consciousness is an illusion, and all the philosophers can say is, sure, life sometimes isn’t great, but we make way as best we can, and then we die. Our defeat is therefore complete. We are routed, body and soul.
But hold on,… this can’t be right.
From the materialist perspective, we’ve not a lot going for us. And I know even my peak experience doesn’t weather the analysis of all the clever men who dismiss it as a hiccup of the brain. But I don’t think we can so easily discount a thing as wholly positive as that, just because it seems to serve no clear evolutionary purpose – at least by their rules, not mine. By my rules, the experience points the way to a more wholesome future, if we can only find a way to engage with it. But we also need to be careful.
The Romantics of the nineteenth century came this way, and they asked what would it be like to live in a world where, instead of all this life-shrinking rhetoric, this political Punch and Judy, and all this reductive scientism, everyone could feel like that, all the time? The peak experience, I mean. I’m not talking about a full-blown LSD trip here. On that score, I’m with Aldous Huxley, who cautions us that while there would be no more wars, there would be no civilisation either. No, we don’t want to blow the doors of perception off their hinges. We only want to open them a crack, let some more of the light inside, illuminate the darkness a bit, and see how we go.
Exploring the question a little deeper, we then ask, are we humans really living in an age of defeat, or are we not yet human enough to prevent ourselves from drowning in the complexity of our own civilisation, our own self-consciousness? The danger here lies in misinterpreting the direction the peak experience is pointing. It is not inviting us to disengage from the banality of life, in exchange for a purer metaphysics of the mind. To walk this path risks more of an elitist snub, and a capitulation to the forces of darkness. In this regard, we do well to remember it is the aim of post-truth propaganda that we disengage from having an opinion on anything that is materially relevant. For then the malevolent, who have always stalked our histories, can get on with their nefarious business, without us plebeians and our tiresome demands for a say at the ballot box. Me? Nah, I’m not voting, all the same aren’t they. Can’t trust any of ’em.
So the answer is not a rejection of the material world in favour of a retreat into the fairy-land of our heads, much as it might be tempting. Because to dwell there among the fairy-dust, we disappear from life, where we are of no use to our benighted fellows. Then, to risk confusing you further, the opposite is also the case, that there is an equal comfort to be had from not engaging with these ideas at all. Better to go on living with the volume of our selves turned down, so we are assailed instead, and forever distracted, by the discordant jangle of everydayness, then we do not heed the call of the peak experience. Indeed, it’s clear the door to a greater engagement with the world, this solemn tenderness for life, is already open, but we refuse to enter.
We can liken it to a bug in our heads, one that prevents the peak experiences getting through. And perhaps that is a good thing. The Romantics did away with it, chased it out, saw the world anew, and in extraordinary colour. But then most of them went mad or died young, and in despair when the old grey world fought back, and laughed at the visions they took so seriously. It is tempting therefore to view the peak experience as a Siren, come to tease us with her beauty, pathological in the sense she comes only to lure us to destruction if we are fool enough to fall for her charms. It is evolution at work, then, a ruthless force come to eliminate us dreamers, leave only the scientistic, and the grubbers of money, and power. And if that be so, I’d say it was doing very well, for these are tough times to be a dreamer, and a boom time for the grubbers.
The rain comes on heavier now, rattles against the glass, looks bleak. It speaks once more of this age of defeat, when not so long ago, it was hinting at something very different, the only difference between then and now being something in myself. If only I could remember what it was, but like a dream it slips away on waking. And, like the Cheshire Cat, only the smile remains.
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