Beyond the Occult Read Free Page B

shot.
    They barked orders over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones, and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, to bid them farewell. Suddenly, the troops beat a tattoo, and we were unbound, brought back to the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty … had spared our lives.
    One of his fellow prisoners went insane. It struck me that if Dostoevsky had been offered his pardon on condition that he promised never to be bored for the rest of his life, he would have accepted gladly, and been quite certain that it should be possible — indeed, that it should be easy. And it seemed to me that he would obviously be correct. Surely, someone who had been through such a crisis would only have to remember being in front of the firing squad in order to be ecstatically happy?
    In fact, it was this episode — and the years in Siberia that followed — that turned Dostoevsky into a great writer. Before he was arrested, he was a good but minor writer — in the tradition of Dickens and Gogol — but as a human being he was touchy and self-obsessed to the point of paranoia. His arrest — and long imprisonment in Siberia — made him aware that even to be alive is in itself a cause for rejoicing. The result of his new insight is expressed in a passage in
Crime and Punishment
, where the hero is afraid that he may be executed for his murder of an old woman, and thinks: ‘If I had to stand on a narrow ledge for ever and ever, in eternal darkness and tempest, I would still rather do that than die at once.’ He had seen that ‘life failure’ — to be bored, miserable, tortured by guilt — is a form of childish spoiltness.
    In my mid-teens, my problem was not simply boredom with my working-class existence (my father was a boot- and shoe-worker who earned about £3 a week). It was a longing to escape from it and to retreat into that magical world of the mind that I had discovered when writing the ‘Manual of General Science’. This was intensified by my discovery — through
Practical Knowledge for All
— of the realm of English poetry. I left school when I was sixteen, and for a few months worked in a factory, while I prepared to take the mathematics exam a second time. Factory work made me so miserable that I spent my evenings and weekends reading poetry — all kinds of poetry, from Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
to T S Eliot’s
The Waste Land
. I quickly discovered that, after half an hour immersed in the world of Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth, my rage and despair had turned into a gentle sense of melancholy, which was slowly transformed into a sense of happiness and optimism, as if I was floating above the world, looking down on it like a bird. When, in the writings of Richard Wagner, I later came across the phrase: ‘art, that makes life seem like a game, and withdraws us from the common fate’, I understood instantly what he meant.
    The only problem with this state of mind, the ‘bird’s-eye view’, was that it was made twice as difficult to go back to work the following morning and accept the ‘worm’s-eye view’ of boredom and triviality. Years later, when I read Thomas Mann’s novel
Buddenbrooks
, I recognize my own problem in the episode where young Hanno Buddenbrook goes to the opera to see Wagner’s
Lohengrin
, and is transported into ecstasy, so that he feels he is walking on clouds. But when, the next morning, he has to get up in the freezing dawn and make his way to school through the dark, icy streets, his despair is twice as deep because he has experienced ecstasy the night before.
    It then seemed to me that the problem of human existence can be expressed very simply. At long intervals, we experience moments of strength and happiness in which we feel that we have the power to change the world and our own