John Cowper Powys : The Self Isolated
John Cowper Powys
A Philosophy of Solitude
THE SELF ISOLATED
(...) The person who makes it the main purpose of life to clarify, concentrate, crystallize his inmost self against the universe, can be immensely assisted in this task by the ideas of the early Greek philosophers, and the early Mediaeval Schoolmen. It is St. Thomas Aquinas who says, “Creare proprium personae,” which might be translated, “To create is the prerogative of personality.” St. Thomas is right; but such creation by personality is not done by accident. It is done by practice. It is done by focussing the mind upon the mind, the self upon the self, the life upon the life. It is done by acquiring the habit of doing it. It is done in the beginning by an act of faith and it is done to the last by repeated acts of will.
(...)
It is easy to show how the isolation of the self, this “guest and companion of the body,” increases our happiness; nor would it be difficult to show how it diminishes our griefs. The isolation of the self gives us the habit of contemplating at every moment the wide swing of the planetary world. It enables us to feel the wind of outer space blow across the surface of our earth as we ride with it through the eternal ether. It gives a dignity, a beauty, a high and tragic significance to every phenomenon of mortal life. Everywhere it destroys dullness. Everywhere it slays the commonplace. Everywhere it touches with a natural, poetic poignance the ultimate conditions of our existence on this earth. People can acquire flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes, boisterous laughter, while they pursue pleasure in their groups and in their crowds; but it is only in solitude that men and women can come to know the happiness that is like the delight of children in nothing at all.
There are many modern thinkers who emphasize the individual’s dependence upon society. It is, on the contrary, only the cultivation of interior solitude, among crowded lives, that makes society endurable. These isolated selves cannot be recognized, going to and fro among the rest. You cannot recognize them in trolleys, in railways, on pavements, in subways, in shops, in offices, in factories, in theatres, in warehouses. But their will-power broods obstinately in their souls. Their ironic detachment remains inviolate. They are observant and clairvoyant. Their friends say : —“Well ! Let her go ! We all know how selfish she is; how she prefers to be alone”; or they say : — ‘Well ! Let him go ! We all know what a morbid nature he has, and how he has a mania for being by himself.” But these derisive opinions are to these adepts of life no more than a little dust upon the wind !
The art of life consists in the creation of an original and unique self; and this is something that the simplest mind can achieve. Thought creates a thought-body of its own — a new and spiritual body — which although it is linked in space and time with the material body feels itself to be different, feels itself to be inviolate. This feeling of the ego’s difference from the material form of its body is the important thing. What we steadily, consciously, habitually think we are, that we tend to become.
(...)
Delivered from ambition, aiming at interior peace rather than glory or success, the isolated self, when it is driven to enter the society of alien minds, consciously avoids taking upon itself their tone, their colour, their aura. This it does by means of a thousand subtle devices, a thousand cunning tricks. Unwilling to hurt the feelings of these other selves, either by malicious sincerity or by blunt rudeness, it has found many curious ways of satisfying them without betraying its own identity.
An artless and childish candour is one of its most effective weapons. Once liberated from ambition, a person has nothing to lose by being taken for a fool. There is even an advantage in being actually accepted as worse than a fool; as a nit-wit, an idiot, a harmless ass. Too self-centred to desire to score off or overcome or humiliate another self, such a person only seeks the immediate interest of watching this other ego expand and assert itself after its own fashion. In its fight for its identity against heavy odds, the soul has acquired one supreme device by which it can escape disintegration under this out-rush of another’s personality. This device is the self-obliteration of its own circumference !
Vigorous, robust, expansive natures cannot refrain from overriding and overwhelming every other self that they approach. They mean no harm. They are not cruel or malicious. They are simply exuberant. Nevertheless in their innocence they are the worst enemy against which the religious solitude of the soul has to be defended! And the self, in its habitual struggle to retain its lonely identity, has been driven to supply itself with this supreme art of self-obliteration.
(...)
Such is the psychological device by which the identity of the menaced ego defends its solitude. But it is not only from outside that attacks are made upon our central peace. It is of small avail that we protect our soul's integrity from the invader, as far as others are concerned, while we suffer our own mind — and nothing can be more cruel than a person’s own mind —to torment us with evil phantoms. Against these phantoms, against this goblinish cruelty of the auto-sadistic demon in our own mind, the only defense is the power of forgetting. For if our mind hath its own self-tormenting demon, it also hath its own pool of Lethe, deep and healing in its fathomless oblivion. And if we have faith in our will to forget, greater and greater will grow our power of forgetting. In this power we must trust. In this power, however we are tormented, we must have faith. For the moments of ecstasy are so transporting, the level of unfevered happiness so high, which we attain by this isolation of the self, that we must be prepared to pay the penalty of such a privilege.
And the penalty of this privilege is that we have often to move consciously and deliberately along the slippery edge of madness. Throw overboard all the gregarious conventions; throw overboard all the rivalries and ambitions; present the impenetrableness of a stone to human intruders, of a hard round stone to the intrusions of pain, there will still be left these phantoms of the mind to be constantly and deliberately forgotten. But since this may well be our one conscious life between two incredible eternities, and since no mortal may live without taking heavy odds and grievous risks, it seems better to trust in our power of forgetting these images of insanity than to live cheek by jowl with such dusty companions as Conformity, Ennui and Futility.
It must always be remembered that the isolation of the self, in a deliberately lonely life, need not imply living in actual solitude. What it does imply is the choice of a contemplative life over every other; but a contemplative life that can be lived under almost every conceivable condition. A person can be a soldier, a sailor, a school-master, a revolutionary agitator, a farmer, a factory-hand; a person can be any kind of working-woman, or domestic woman, and live in profound loneliness. But though a contemplative life is possible in connection with any kind of job, a passion for moneymaking, by reason of its needing so much concentration, tends to render such a life difficult. It is unquestionable that many material advantages have been attained by the gregariousness of the human race but it is also certain that if our ancestors had lived more lonely lives various deep secrets of existence would now have been revealed that have not been revealed.
One aspect, in particular, of earth-life, might be mentioned in passing, as an example of the kind of planetary secret which our ancestors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — yes ! and earlier than that — habitually neglected. I refer to what might be called the “expectancy-mood” of Nature. This is a most characteristic mood of the Cosmos, and one which cannot be caught save in complete solitude. City-born, or country-born, almost every child of our race can, if he is patient enough and seeks some solitary path under the wide heaven, enter into this mystery. For it seems to be a recurrent aspect of the universe, this curious “waiting-mood,” this hushed and muted in breathing, this tense expectancy. Not only among the tall pines on the desolate mountain-ledges, not only among the drooping willows by the unfrequented streams, but wherever there is a patch of moss or a blade of grass, if you catch the earthlife in an unguarded hour, you find it waiting for something. Who has not stumbled upon some lonely pond hidden away among the hills and caught this mood in its pure arrest ?
(...)
Even in the heart of the most clamourous city there are fragments and vestiges of this mysterious, primordial earth-mood, so neglected by our social-minded generation. From the smoke-blackened trunks of stunted city trees, from the withered patches of pitiful city grass, arise vague intimations of this strange expectancy of all planetary life ! It is as if rocks and stones and recurrent vegetation held some secret denied to animals and birds and man; the very earth-mould, the very sea-sand waiting there, in dumb sub-conscious brooding, for some vast, catastrophic event.
You may call this an illusion; you may say that if there were such a secret it would be revealed rather to the cooperative labours of social-minded men of science than to the lonely ponderings of obscure and anti-social contemplation; but how few of these gregarious seekers seem able to catch the processes of Nature with that physiognomic eye that Spengler praises so highly in the case of Goethe ! But meanwhile, letting the fashions of the hour flourish and fade, the isolated ego, self-created in its solitude, moves through the world, waiting upon the spirit, communing with the elements, self-poised and patient in its hushed passivity.
Egoism if you will ! But there is a humility too about this isolated self that often puts the fussy self-assertion of the warm-blooded crowd to shame. What it holds precious for itself, it holds precious for others also. Listening in silence to the silences of the universe it is unwilling to disturb the memory-essences of other human selves. The faintest, filmiest, most tenuous stirrings of their identity, are sacred to it. Habituated to waiting upon the hushed planetary vigil, no individual tragedy fails to touch it. Every organism that breathes the air affects it, and in its place and measure all that lives cries out to it. Thus for the isolated self there wells up from the depths of the universe a mysterious humility, more natural than the humility of the crowd. The humility of the crowd is boisterous, unctuous, self-righteous. But the soul that has re-created itself in isolation has gained something of the humility of the grass, the rocks, the winds. All that lives is holy unto it; and it realizes, taught by the innumerable voices of Nature, a certain ultimate equality in everything that draws breath.