Olaf stapledon, p.1
Olaf Stapledon, page 1
Four Encounters
By Olaf Stapledon
The Four Encounters were first published in 1976, and, although the exact date of their writing is unknown, it is thought that they were written between 1945 and 1950.
1. A Christian
2. A Scientist
3. A Mystic
4. A Revolutionary
First Encounter:
A CHRISTIAN
I have met a Christian, and now I must tell you about him; for you are always the touchstone.
He was no typical Christian, nor yet one of outstanding saintliness. He was his unique self, but also a Christian, and to me, arresting.
Sitting in the cathedral, I thought how strange that stone should live and praise, while in ourselves faith lies dead. The columns stand so confidently, joined in their upstretched hands like dancers waiting for the music. They have waited for centuries.
Today, more formidable columns, sudden, fungoid, springing from land and sea, threaten all of us.
In the cathedral choir, masons were repairing war damage. I heard metal strike the stone. The windows were pallid, for the warm glass had all been treasured away. Near me in the knave, two spinsters with guidebooks devoured information. A youth in shorts, a peroxide girl, a bunch of trippers, stared vacantly; sheep lost in a desert. Yet a cathedral is a sheepfold. Or so it was intended.
Presently vergers were shepherding out the sight-seers; for a service was due, and a mild bell tolling. I retreated. But as I was nearing the door, the Christian touched me, and said, "You looked unhappy. Perhaps I might help." My resentment was quietened by his face, where peace was imposed on some still restless grief; a face carved heavily, the eyes, dark holes, dark gleaming wells; the nose a buttress; the mouth, mettlesome but curbed.
I said, "If I was unhappy, it was for the world, not for myself." He answered, "The world is indeed unbearable; unless we are given strength. Darkness is everywhere; but there is a light to lighten it." Brutally I said (for you were not with me to temper me), "You want to add me to your converts, but my scalp is not for your belt." His hand reached toward me but withdrew. He turned to leave me. Ashamed, I said, "Oh, forgive me! Please come with me and tell me about your light."
But even as I spoke, there flashed on me a memory. I was a freshman returning to Oxford by train, reading in my corner. A godly woman opposite me laid a hand on my knee. "Are you saved?" she said. Startled and crimson, I answered, "No! At least I don't think so. But I don't think I want to be. Thank you all the same." With knit brows, I stared at my book, incapable of reading.
And now, half a lifetime later, here was I asking this other Christian to tell me about his light. We emerged from the cathedral into the sunshine and the town's roar. Beyond the lawns of the close, how the shops, banks, hotels impended! As though a lava flood had been by miracle congealed to save God's house,
We paced, and neither spoke.
Presently, he said, sighing, "I was obtuse. Why am I still so often insensitive? I was spiritually arrogant." Again he fell silent, so I said, "That is the danger of the light; a little of it goes to the head, and makes one spiritually arrogant." "Yes," he answered, "but it was not for myself I was proud; it was for the light. In myself, I am only a little lens to catch a sunbeam and focus it." Smiling, I interrupted, "What is spiritual arrogance ever but pride of the lens in its office?" At once he answered, "And intellectual arrogance is pride of the knife in its blind dissecting ."
Again we walked silently. Then he said, "Watching you in the cathedral, I saw in your face what I had recently laid bare in my own heart, the unacknowledged, the quite unconscious, hunger for salvation. And at once I knew that I must speak to you. To have kept silent would have been a betrayal of the very thing that had recently given me-blessedness."
The word jarred on me. I found myself saying inwardly, and how foolishly, "Oh God, please save me from being saved!" But immediately I was drawn toward the Christian, for he said, "Why, why can't I say these things without spoiling them, without making them sound pompous?"
He told me that by profession he was an engineer; that he had spent the years of the war far away in the East without his "dear wife"; that he had returned to find her a stranger, loving another, yet still dutiful to him, and anxiously willing to be at one with him again. So he set about to rewin her, and she to rediscover him. But it was useless. Rooted together, they had grown apart. Her torn tendrils, though reaching for him, bled for the other. So in the end, to free her, he had left her. For he loved her, so he told himself, far more than he craved her.
But when he had wrenched himself from her, his bared roots dried, his leaves withered.
He described himself as one of those lonely souls who, exiled from Europe, had maintained contact with the European spirit by reading. He mentioned Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy, but few more modern. He claimed, however, also to be "well read in modern thought." He knew his Wells, his Shaw, his Freud, his Russell. Even Karl Marx he had read out there among the temples and the rice fields. These great writers, he said, had opened his eyes to the world. But now, this desolate homecoming was a new and a disintegrating experience. It fitted nowhere. Those modern prophets, he declared, could not help him; since for all their clever analysis they were spiritually imperceiving (so he phrased it). They could not see, and he himself till now had never seen, that if love fails life is worthless; and if love is not God (so he put it) all existence is pointless.
Formerly, though not unaware of evil, he had never looked squarely at it. There had been no need. Yet he had seen men beaten to death, and women mutilated, and he had responded with the required indignation. He knew also that savagery might conquer the whole planet. (Those lethal fungi that had sprouted once might sprout again.) All this he knew, but only as though from a book; or as a bad dream remembered in daytime. For him, evil had remained a thing unreal, in the end to be abolished from the planet. "I had two anchors," he said, "my love, and my faith in man's triumphant future. So long as these held, evil could only sadden, not shatter me."
But now, the anchor of his love had failed, and under the added strain, the other too had parted. "Evil at last," he said, "had its claws in my own heart. And through my own desolation I realized at last the evil of the universe."
He was silent. And I felt a frost creep in on me. For you and I, we too are held by that anchor. And if it should fail? Though our very differences enrich us, toughening our union, how can we know that some secret poison in one or the other cannot ruin us?
When the Christian had finished, I murmured vaguely of sympathy, but he sharply checked me. "Do not pity me," he said. "Rather envy; for it was only through suffering that my tight-shut eyes could be opened for salvation." In his voice I seemed to hear exaltation uneasily triumph over misery. "But God," he said, "had not yet scourged me enough. I was not yet ready to be saved."
He continued his story. He had a sister, a "beloved sister," and to her he had always turned in any distress. He praised her to me as "the soul of good- ness." (Perhaps, like you, she was one of those who live most fully in giving life to others.) In his present misery he ran to her for comfort. But strangely, though she responded with the old young-motherly words of compassion, she remained withdrawn. The hand that she reached out to save him was now intangible, a mere phantom, always duly proffered, never to be grasped. Perplexed and sore, he drifted from her.
Presently this self-pitying brother learned that the sister was ill and in great suffering. Hurrying to her, he found that a secret pain had been too long ignored. And now, too late, the scalpel ferreted again and again through her body. The added torment was useless. Each time he visited her, the bars of her prison had moved in closer on that trapped, that ever outward-living and still life-hungry spirit. "How I dreaded," he said, "those eyes, that probed through mine for comfort!" For he, bitter from his life's failure and the new-felt evil of the universe, could give only phantom comforts, through which "those eyes" easily pierced to the inner desolation.
The frequent tides of her pain, he said, rose daily higher. They lapped her tethered body with corrosive waves, eating away little by little her humanity, till she was a mere wreck of whimpering nerves. His compassion tormented him, so that at last he implored the doctors to hasten her final sleep. But they refused, since the treatment, they affirmed, might still conquer. To the brother it seemed that they cared only for the interest of playing their losing game expertly to the end. This suspected ruthlessness was for him an added horror, a symbol of that coldly evil will which ruled (so he now believed) the whole universe.
*****
All the while that the Christian had been telling me of these bitter experiences, we had been walking together in the sunny close. Small white clouds were cherubs smiling down on us. Children were playing on the grass. In a quiet corner a cat toyed with a half-killed sparrow; until a girl rushed at it, and it fled with its prey.
But now the Christian gripped my arm and halted both of us. He said, "When my marriage broke, I felt merely that all existence was pointless; but now, far worse, I believed that the point, the meaning of it all, was simply evil. Of course there was good, but only to deepen the evil. There was love, to make cruelty more subtle." Still holding my arm, he said with bared teeth, "For consider! Think of all the evil of the world! Two thousand million of us, and all of us foully sick in a sick world." His hand fell from my arm, and again we walked. He spoke of the great host of bedridden sufferers, each in endless captivity; and of those whose prison is penury; and the rest of us, each with some unique private m
I felt that I ought to have been overwhelmed by all this sum of horror that he had correctly enumerated. But strangely I was divided between pity and aloofness. Out of the corner of my eye, I placidly, frivolously, watched the life of the close: a youth with an unlit cigarette considering whom he should ask for a light; a mother trying to wipe the nose of an unruly child; an old man on a seat enjoying the legs of the passing girls.
The Christian said, "Coming away from my sister’s death I walked the streets with nerves raw to all their horror. A dog crushed on the tarmac, an ignored beggar, a woman with a face of painted lead and eyes where (the harsh phrase jarred) "a festering soul was already stinking." These sights, he said, undermined his foundations. No future millennium could make such things never to have been. Eternity itself must stink with that soul's corruption. But he reminded himself that corruption was actually no worse and no better than saintliness.
One day, as the embittered engineer was passing the cathedral, he conceived a resentful whim. He would insult the Power that masqueraded as Love. He strode in. The place was quiet. Sitting in the nave, he lounged and maintained a careful sneer, planning some bold free outrage. But the place was quiet and the few people ignored him. Presently he was absently studying the structure of column and vaulting; till defiance left him. Strange, he thought, how those old builders transformed efficient engineering with limited materials into high art! Soon he was marvelling, as I had marvelled, that stone should live and praise while in our hearts faith lies dead.
He considered those builders and their faith; and the long succession of robed ecclesiastics, vessels of an aged, a mellow and a potent wine. He considered the hosts of believers who had formerly thronged where now he sat alone; the ploughmen and house- wives, the burghers and gentry. All were believers, however erring their conduct. All were participators in the communal delusion (as it then seemed to him) of love's divinity. In those past days, he supposed, the clouded minds of men were still warmly though vaguely irradiated by the already remote event that had blazed on the Cross. Sitting in that silent place, he tried, not out of reverence but through sheer curiosity and self-pitying resentment, to hear and if possible feel the far-off chanting of those worshippers. With quickened imagination he probed back still farther through the centuries to scrutinize objectively the reputed event itself. That individual, Jesus, if indeed he existed and was not merely a myth, must have been a man of singular sensitivity and intelligence; for he, before all others, clearly conceived (so we are told) that love is for all of us the way of life. And from this perception the remarkable Jew passed on to the conviction that love must be God. Living in an age before reason could expose the fallacy (for so it still seemed to this destined Christian), Christ easily persuaded himself that in the high experience of life he had indeed come face to face with God. And this exquisite delusion so kindled him that he was able to live his whole life as a shining, a dazzling example and symbol of love. And so, in the strength of his delusion, he became the star of a new faith.
So it seemed to this engineer, brooding in the bombed cathedral. But he reminded himself that the crucified prophet, in his last moments, had cried that his God had forsaken him. Those eyes, appealing to heaven, saw only the void.
Once more the Christian seized my arm and brought us face to face. He said, "But now, in that dark night of my despair, light began to dawn on me. I began to see that Christ alone gave meaning to this bleak, meaningless world."
He released my arm, and once more we paced the close. I noticed (but he paid no attention) that the sky was now all sombre, and on the flagstones of our pathway a few large drops had fallen. Nursemaids were already encasing their struggling or patient charges in mackintoshes. A small boy, uncooperative, put out his tongue at heaven, in defiance or merely to catch raindrops.
Self-concerned, the Christian recounted the stages of his conversion. At last he was impelled to consider more and more earnestly the actual character of that remote and singular individual. But he could form no clear picture, so ignorant was he. He conceived only a passionately generous young man, intelligent, yet also in a way simple and even naive, preaching the life of love to a world incapable of it; till the world destroyed him. Yes, but that singular individual had indeed given men a vision of what they might be, if by miracle they could be raised a little beyond their brutishness. In his own person he had indeed shown them the life of love; shown them the divine spirit, the one thing worshipful.
I had been nodding approval. For how well we know, you and I, that in some deep way love is indeed divine; and that one and all we are vessels for that spirit.
But he went farther. Seizing my arm again, he said, "At this point the miracle happened. Without any aid from my intelligence or even my imagination, that unique person, Jesus, became an objective presence in my mind; and I saw that, though human, he was indeed God, the very God who is Love."
I moved impatiently, and the grip on my arm tightened. He continued speaking, and I listening. I began to feel that his conviction had hypnotic power. Once more, half in fantasy, half in earnestness, I prayed inwardly, "Oh God, save me from this salvation!" What was it that was happening to me?
"Do not," the Christian said, "tell me that this overwhelming vision of mine was the outcome in my mind merely of long-forgotten Christian teaching administered to me in childhood; or that it sprang from my own unconscious, figuring out for my guidance an ideal of life." He paused, searching my eyes; then continued, "I have myself considered that hypothesis, but it is not true to my actual experience. What could childhood, or my childish unconscious, give me like this shattering and remaking and entirely adult perception of the divine person?"
He released me, and again we walked. He did not notice that the rain was now tapping on our heads and shoulders, and rustling in the trees; so I steered him to shelter in the arched doorway. There we stood, between two small stone angels that prayed with joined hands and up-gazing eyes. From within, the chanting wanly sounded.
His talk had not ceased. It seemed to him, he said, that the actual life of that perfect human being unfolded before him in detail. With strange vivid- ness, as though he had seen what he described, this transmuted engineer, this newborn Christian, told me how the actual life of Christ had confronted him. He believed (remember) or at least he thought he believed, that he had actually experienced the presence of the divine lover. No wonder his words had power; and even while I rebelled, I, too, almost believed that the man Jesus must indeed have been more than man.
The engineer said that he had watched all the phases of Christ's life. First the warm-hearted and resolute child, genial with playmates; but when they tormented a crippled sparrow, and would not listen to his pleading, he would furiously rout them. Then the boy on the Temple steps, confounding with sheer sincerity of feeling and fresh intelligence all the subtleties of the elders. The young man, gay companion and unfailing friend, who lived each moment fully yet without enslavement to it; for an inner voice constantly judged it, an inner light ruthlessly illuminated it; the voice and the light of his own waking divinity. Then the young man, already old in wisdom, freed of all self-concern, self-disciplined through and through to the spirit, scornfully rejecting Satan's lure of power, intent wholly on doing what God willed of him. Then the perfected man, discovering God within himself, waking fully to his own Godhead, and his self-chosen mission. Then his few years of lucid conduct and teaching, his friendliness for all outcast persons, his fierce challenge to all heartlessness. And then his death, agonized less by bodily pain than by pity for man's blind self-wounding harshness.
