Monday, September 23, 2013

臉書



當初我花了整整三個星期的時間,去研究臉書到底是怎麼一回事。我發現它其實是幫街頭藝人提供了一個舞台,然後敲鑼打鼓的:好朋友快來捧場!

我的研究結論是:

世界上有這麼兩幫人,一幫是愛現,另一幫是愛看;然後交叉錯綜的統統塞到臉書這個大雜院,愛現的展開渾身解數,賣力的表演;愛看的可以像壁虎般的作壁上觀(說不定倒著看也另有一番風味),也可以一面磕瓜子、飲茶,一面拍案叫好,台上台下熱呼呼的;這叫做該現的都現了,不該看的也都看了

只是千不該萬不該的,它把這些人都界定為朋友,就像走進教堂的,都得互稱弟兄姊妹一樣。所以我的老婆,一看到我把臉貼到臉書上,就在心裡嘰咕:又去看女朋友去了死老頭!!!


**小老頭

Sunday, September 22, 2013

卿卿如晤-第四章


卿卿如晤 A Grief Observed
C. S. Lewis
1961
曾珍珍譯
第四章
(擁有曾珍珍的譯著,是很值得的 ─ Bill Lin)

這是我在家裡找到的第四本,也是最後一本,空白筆記簿。幾乎完全空白,只是後頭有幾頁年代久遠的算術練習題,J作的。我決定寫完這本,就把近日來的塗鴉作個結束。為了這件事去買新的筆記簿,我看,不必了。這本手記作為一種防禦,像安全活瓣一樣,在防止我的澈底崩潰上,已產生了些許果效。其他我所預期的目的,結果証明是出於一種誤解。我以為自己可以描述出一種状態,為喪妻的悲慟製作出一張地圖,然而,悲慟不是一種状態,而是一道過程。它所需要的不是地圖,而是一部歷史。而且,我若不在某一任意擇定的點上停筆,就没有理由不再繼續寫下去。每天都有一些新的事物值得紀錄。悼亡的悲情恰似一條狭長的山谷,一路蜿蜒、連綿。每一轉折都有可能展現另一全新的風景。然而,正如我已察覺到的,並非每一轉折都是這樣。有時使你驚訝的,正是相反的現象;呈現在眼前的正是你以為早在幾哩之前便已越過的那類原野。這時,你開始懷疑,這峡谷難道是一道環形的壕溝嗎?其實不是,重覆的只是部分景觀,整道過程並未重覆。

譬如,這便是一種新的境况,新的失喪。白天,我總是盡量散步,因為若不筋疲力竭地上床,簡直就是自討苦吃的傻瓜。今天,我舊地重遊,走了一趟相當長的越野漫步,是獨身時代最讓我心曠神怡的。這一回,大自然的風光明媚依舊,世界也不再像一條鄙陋的大街,如我幾天前所怨對的。相反的,每一處地平綫、每一座農莊、或每一簇樹叢,都向我招手,想把我喚回一種過往的喜樂裡,那在她未出現之前我已享受到的喜樂。然而,這樣的邀約却讓我毛骨悚然。它所邀請我進人的喜樂是種索然無味的喜樂。我發覺自己根本不想回頭沉緬於那種方式的喜樂。一想到竟然可能回到原來的光景,我不覺害怕起來,因為這種結局,在我看來,就是最糟糕的。在這樣的景况中,過去幾年的愛情和婚姻,一經回顧,彷怫只是一段迷人的插曲——像一段假期——短暫地介入我不断往前的人生,過後,又讓我恢復原状,與昔日没有兩樣。這段戀情于是乎變得好像不是真的——與我的過去格格不入,使我幾乎相信它是發生在别人身上,根本與我無關。果真如此,對我而言,她在我的生命裡等於又死了一次;比第一次更讓我難捨。什麼都行,就是不容許這樣的事發生。

你可知道,卿卿,當你離去時,帶走了多少東西?你甚至剥奪了我的過去,我倆從未分享過的東西。我錯了,竟然說残肢可以從被切除的疼痛中復原。我之所以被騙,是因為它使盡了各樣伎倆傷害我,我最多只能逐一地識破。

然而,還是有兩項大收獲——現在,我已有自知之明,不至於把它們稱作「永久性」的收獲。當我轉向神時,我的心所遇見的再也不是那道緊閉的門;轉向她,也不再是一片空茫,——也不再嘀咕她在我心中的形象有何問題。我的塗鴉顯示出我已有了些許進步,但與我所期望的仍有些許差距。也許,真正的情形是,這兩種改變都非可以輕易觀察得到的,因為没有突然的。驚人的、和情緒性的轉變。就像室内的逐漸暖和起來,或晨曦的瀉入,當你開始察覺時,它已持續一陣子了。

這些手記談到我自已。她和神。無論就次序或比重看,都與應有的情况恰恰相反。而且,我還特别留心,不管在哪一方面,都不讓自己掉人那可稱之為讚美的思考模式裡。然而,對我最有帮助的,應就是這種讚美的心態。讚美原是愛的一種表現,其中永遠不乏喜樂的成分。讚美要先後代序。先讚美將她賞賜給我的神,再讚美神所賞賜給我的她。在讚美中,我們豈不已多少享受到所讚美的,無論離它行多遠?的確,我應該多多讚美。現在,我已失去了以往可從她身上嘗到的佳美果實,而今陷在自己乖僻的幽峡裡,也遠離了那原可從神那裡嘗到的,不過,神的恩典若真是無止境的,將來有一天,或許還有機會吧。雖然這樣,透過讚美,此刻我猶能或多或少地享受到她;而且,也已約略享受到神了。這比虚無好太多了。

但是,我也許恩賜不足。我知道自己曾把她比擬成一把劍。這個比擬雖然差强人意,細究起來,却似不足涵括她所有的好,並且容易誤導。我應該將它平衡一下,用另一個比擬——「她同時也像座大花園,由無数的小花園層層環抱而成。牆圍著牆,樹籬繞着樹籬。愈往裡去,愈讓人覺其奧妙。芬芳,愈見其生機蓬勃、沛然丰茂。」。

然後,對她,對自己所賞悦的一切受造物,我理應稱美一句:「各以某種方式,憑其獨特的風貌,酷似著創造它的主宰。」。

就這樣,從花園上溯造園的大師,從劍上溯鑄劍的精匠,上溯賜予生命的生命源頭,上溯美化萬物的美的本体。

當我想到她是一把劍時,「她在神的手中」這句話便刹時活化起來。或許我與她一起度過的塵世生活原是鑄劍過程的一部分。現在,也許神正握著劍柄,打量著這把新造的武器,随後在空中揮舞起來,雷光閃閃——「真是一把正宗的耶路撒冷宝劍」。

昨晚的某一片刻可以用些比喻來形容,否則,不是語言所能訴說的。想像一個人陷在全然的黑暗中,他以為自己困在囚房或地牢裡。這時,傳來了一陣声响,他判断是遠處傳來的声响——半哩之外的海涛。林梢的風嘯、或牛群的哞叫。果真如此,就証明他並未困在牢房裡,而是自由的人,在空曠的野外。或者,這可能是一種較細微的声音——近旁的一陣咯咯的笑声。果真如此,黑暗中有個友伴就在他身旁。無論如何,這總是一道令人快慰的、友善的声音。我還不至於瘋狂到把這樣的經驗當作有何東西存在着的証據。它只不過等同於歡然躍入與一道理念有關的想像活動裡,過去,這道理念,對我而言,只是純粹概念化的理論——什麼理念呢?亦即我,或任何生命有限的凡人,在任何時刻裡,對於自己真正的處境,都可能產生全盤的誤解。

五種官覺,一種抽象得無可救藥的理性,片面取樣得幾可造成危害的記憶,一套先入為主的觀念,和無数的假設——多到讓人只能察驗其中的一小部分,遑論全盤加以反省。這樣的一種工具,你說,能觀照出多少事物的全貌?

如果可能,我決不會去攀爬一棵羽毛似的或佈滿荊棘的樹。近來,兩道迥異的思想變本加厲地壓向我的心頭。其一是,那永活的獸医遠比我們所能想像的更要嚴酷而不近人情,而可能施加在我們身上的手術,其疼痛的程度,也遠非人心所能預料。其二是,船到橋頭自然直。待塵埃落定,所有的問題都會消失。一切事態終將否極泰來。

她的每張照片若都走了樣,其實無所謂;我對她的記憶若不够完整,也無關緊要——不那麼重要。不管是紙上的或心上的,形象的本身並不重要,它的作用僅在引發聯想。從另一個無比高超的範疇舉個對等的例子吧,明天早晨,牧師會遞給我一片冷冷的,没有味道的小圓薄餅。這樣的一片薄餅絕對無法偽飾自已讓人以為它與透過它而與我合而為一的那位,有何相似之處。難道這個缺陷是不利的嗎?其實,從某方面看,恐怕是有益的。

我所要的是基督,而非與他相似的某樣東西。我所要的是她,而非她的拷貝。一張相當傳神的照片最後可能變成一道陷阱、一層阻礙。一種相當恐怖的東西。

肖像——無論是心頭外的圖画或雕像,或心中由想像構築而成的影像,其實都一樣,我想,必有它的用處,否則,不會這樣普受歡迎。然而,在我看來,它們具有相當明顯的危害性。至高神的肖像很容易變成「神聖」的肖像——被當作聖物崇拜。其實,我對神所持的信念絕非神聖不可侵犯的。相反地,它必須不断地被搗碎,而且是神自己把它搗碎的。他正是那位偉大的偶像破壞者。這種搗碎的行為,我們幾乎要說,正是顯示他存在的標記之一,不是嗎?道成肉身是至高無上的例子;它使前人對彌賽亞所持的觀念全盤毁滅。大部分人會被偶像破壞的情事「激怒」,那些不為之氣惱的人有福了。同樣的事也會發生在我們私下的禱告裡。

一切事物的真相都具有偶像破壞的特質。你的塵世的愛人,即使在今生裡,豈非也經常超然獨立於你對她所持的理念之上?這恰好正是你所要的。你要她,乃是包括她一切的頑抗、過失以及讓你錯愕不已的種種表現,換句話說,她那率真的,由不得你左右的本樣。正是這樣的她,而非任何的肖像或記憶,才是我們仍應戀戀不捨的,雖然所愛的她已經亡故了。

不過,如今,這樣的她已非人用想像所能搆著的了。在這點上,她和所有已亡故的人,與神頗有相似之處。也是從這角度看,依戀她變得有點近乎依戀神。在這兩件事裡,我都必須向著事物的真相張開愛的双臂(眼睛在這裡是派不上用場了),穿過——越過——一切瞬息萬變的,由思想、激情或想像構築出來的幻象。絕對不能坐下來沈緬於幻象的本身,把它當作神來膜拜,她來愛。

不是我對神所持的理念,而是神的本身。不是我對她所持的理念,而是她本人。是的,也非我對鄰舍所持的理念,而是鄰舍本人。對還活著的人——與自己住在同一屋頂下的人,我們豈不常犯這樣的錯誤?講話和應對時,不是針對這人的本我,而是我們心中為這人所勾勒的圖画——其實頂多只是幾筆模糊的輪廓。他的表現必須與這幅圖画大相逕庭了,我們才會對實况稍加註意。在現實生活中——這是它與小說截然不同的地方之—,如果我們就近觀察,他的說話和舉止幾乎從未真正「性格一致」過。換句話說,從未吻合我們所認為的他的性格。他的手中永遠握有一張你我無法知道的牌。

我認為自己是這樣待人的,所憑的理由是我發現别人經常,極其明顯地,這樣對待我。我們都以為自己完全摸清了對方的底細。

這會兒我可能又,再一次地,用紙片搭盖起房子來了。若真是這樣,祂必定會再一次地把它拆毁。除非我終於被判無望而這棄絕,永遠沉淪在地獄裡搭盖紙的城堡,「在死人當中逍遙」。

例如,這會兒我溜回神這邊,是否只因知道若有任何通往她的途径,必得經過神這裡?然而,我當然十分清楚,神是不能被當作途径利用的。追尋神的人若不把祂當作終點,而是途径,非作為目的,而是手段,那麼,就根本不在追尋祂。這就是那些市面流行的「彼岸團圓圖」發生錯誤的地方。問題不在圖中那些幼稚的、非常世俗化的描繪,而在於把抵達真正的目標時才能連帶獲得的東西,當作目標的本身。

主啊,你真的設定這樣的條件嗎?我可以與她重逢嗎?唯當我學會愛你到極致,甚至不在乎是否能與她重逢時,我才能再與她相會?思量一下,主啊,對我們而言,這像怎麼一回事。别人會怎樣看我呢?假如我對孩子們說:「現在不能吃太妃糖,不過,當你們長大了,不再真正需要太妃糖了,那時,要多少,就能有多少。」。

如果我知道與她永隔和被她永遠遺忘,能給她的存在增加更多的喜樂和光彩,我當然會說:「那麼,開槍吧!」正如,在人間,若不見她的面便能治愈她的癌症,我會妥善安排,不再與她見面。我非得這樣作不可。任何有品德的人都會這樣作。但這是另一回事,我目前的處境並非這樣。

當我把這些問題攤在神面前時,並未得到任何答案,不過,却是一種非常特殊的「没有答案」。不是拴緊的門,比較像一種默默不語的,但絕非無動於衷的凝視。好似祂摇著頭,不是拒絕,而是把問題揮開,意味著:「安心吧,孩子;你不懂得的事多著呢。」。

人可能提出連神都回答不來的問題嗎?太容易了,我這麼想。所有荒謬的問題都是無法回答的。一哩有多少小時?黄是方的或圓的?也許我們提出的問題--那些偉大的神學和形上學問題——有一半正是這樣的問題。

既然我這麼想了,對我而言,眼前似乎再也没有任何牽涉到實際行為的問題了。兩大誡命我是知道的,最好守住它們。說真的,她的死已經結束了所有實際上的問題。當她還活著時,我可以,在實際的行為上,把她擺在神的前面;換言之,可以作她所要的,而非神所要的事;如果其中有衝突的話。而今剩下的,不是關於我能作什麽事的問題,乃是情感、動機和這一類的事情有什麼份量的問題。這是我給自己設立的問題。我毫不相信這是神為我設立的。

得嗜神的佳美果實;與亡妻團圓。這兩件事浮現在我的腦際,無異於筹碼,亦即空白支票。我對於前者所持的理念——如果可以稱之為理念的話——是把塵世中獲得的極其少数而短暫的經驗加以擴大推衍而得的,本就具有打賭的性質。這些經驗也許並不如我所以為的那樣有價值,甚至比一些被我漠視的其他經驗還更没價值。我對第二件事的理念也是一種推衍。這兩者中任一者的實現——空白支票的兑現——可能會把我對這兩者所持的理念炸成碎片(尤其是我對兩者之間的關係所存的理念)。

一端是心靈神秘的結合,另一端是肉体的復活。我實在想不出有什麼意象、公式或甚至感覺能把這兩者聯合起來——真的連點鬼影都没有。但事物的真相,神容許我們了解的,却辦得到——再說一遍,就是那能把各樣偶像摧毁掉的事物真相。將來天堂會為我們的問題提供答案,但絕非藉著彰顯表面看來互相矛盾的概念(之間其實存有微妙的和諧)。相反地,這些概念將被連根廢除——那時,我們便知道,原來,未曾有過任何問題。

而且,再提一遍,就是那個除了將它形容為黑暗中咯咯的笑声之外,我無法多作描述的印象。感覺上,似乎某種能瓦解人心,叫人放棄敵對態度的單純,便是真正的解答。

人們常說死人看得見活人,而且,我們推想,不管合不合理,倘若他們看得見活人的話,一定比從前看得更透徹。那她生前稱為,而此刻仍被我堅持著的「我的愛情」,她現在可完全看透了裡頭有多少浮沫和虚華吧。是又怎麽樣?遠遠地瞧一瞧吧,卿卿。就算能遮掩,我也不願。我倆從未把對方理想化,總盡量不向對方隱瞞什麽。我身上大部分腐朽的地方,你早就知道。如果你現在又看到更糟糕的,我會坦然接受。你亦然。責備、解釋、揶揄、赦免,這正是愛的奇迹之一。它給予兩人——尤其是女人——一種能力,使她能看透愛情的蠱惑,却還能繼續為它着迷。

在某種程度上,像神一樣知心、明察。神的愛和他的洞察人心是密不可分的,與神的自己也本為一体。我們幾乎可以說,他之所以能洞察人心是因他的愛,所以,即使看透了,也還能愛。

有時,主,人忍不住要說,如果你希望我們的動作存留像野地的百合花一樣,朝脆替我們創造像它那樣的生理結構吧。然而,我推想,人是你的一項輝煌的實驗;或者不是,不是實驗,因為你不需要測知什麼。應該說是你的一項輝煌的嘗試。你創造出一個同時也是靈的生物,因而產生了一個可怕的矛盾語辞——「属靈的動物」。你揀選了一種靈長類的動物,一種全身佈滿未稍神經的獸類,它有個胃需要填滿,又需與異性支配才能繁殖。然後,對著這個動物,你說:「去吧,就憑著這些,去活出神的樣子來。」  

幾章以前,我曾說過,即使獲得了有關她仍繼續存在着的証據,我也不會相信的。「說比做容易多了。」甚至現在,我也不會將任何那類的東西當作証據。不過,昨晚的一個經驗—非因它能証明什麼,而是它的「本質」—它的所是,值得記錄下來。說來難以叫人相信,它竟然未帶給我任何情緒上的波動。印象中,只覺得她的心與我的心瞬間面面相覷。心,而不是一般所謂的「靈魂」;更無所謂「驚心動魄」—絲毫不像情人間興高采烈的團圓,比較像接到她的一通電話或一通電報交待了一些事務的安排。並未傳達任何「信息」,只讓我感受到她的知心和關注。無憂無喜,甚至也没有愛,一般所謂的愛;也没有非愛。我從未在任何心情下想像過死者會是這樣的——嗯,這樣的務實。不過,這本是「心有靈犀一點通」,一種不必透過感官或情緒傳達的体已、知心。

如果這是從我的無意識蹦出來的,那麼,我的無意識必定是個非常有趣的領域,遠超過精神分析學家.要我預期的。舉個例吧,與我的意識領域相比,它顯然解人多了,並非那麼鴻蒙未化。

不管從哪裡來的,這經驗已經在我的心中進行了一種近乎春季大掃除的工作。死去了的人可以像這樣子的—一種純粹心智的存亡。類似我這樣的經驗,希腊的哲學家不會感到驚訝的。人死後若有什麼遺留下來,他會預期應就像這樣—在這之前,我總覺得這是最枯燥、最冰冷的觀念,由於其中情感蕩然,讓我對它退避三舍。但在這次的接觸裡,(不管是實質的或表面的),它並没有造成這類的反應。在情緒不起絲毫波動的情况下,完全進人「心有靈犀一點通」的境界,你整個人因此振奮起來,重新出發。這樣的心有靈犀一點通就是愛嗎?在今生裡,它總是與情感相随;並非因為它的本身就是情感,或需要伴随而生的情感,而是因為人本身的獸類靈魂。神經系統,和想像特質,需用這樣的方式來回應?果真如此,我對事物的感應需要經常磨拭的,不知有多少!眾多心智的聚集和交融並非一定是冰冷、單調和讓人不舒服的。另一方面,也不像人們用[属靈的」、「奧秘的」、或「神聖的」這類字眼所意味的。這樣的境界,我若曾驚鴻一瞥,它應是—哦,我幾乎被自己必須使用的形容詞嚇着了—活潑的?興奮的?敏銳的?靈活的?昂揚的?蘇醒的?在這一切之上,具体的。全然的可靠、穩固。死去了的人所存在的境界裡,没有荒謬的東西。

當我用心智這字眼時,它裡頭還包括了意志。傾心關註是一種意志的行為。付諸行動的知心是意志的至極表現。那前來與我相會的,充滿了決心。

在她臨終之前,我說:「若使你能,若容許的話,當我也躺在臨終的床上,請回來看我。」「一言為定。」她說,「天堂要大張旗鼓才能留住我;至於地獄嘛,看我把它搗得唏哩嘩啦,爛成一堆。」她知道自己使用的是神話的語言,甚至還帶點詼諧的成分。她的眼瞳亮了一下,有一個清淚。但是,那道像電般掠過她全人,比任何情感深邃的意志,没有一丁點神話或玩笑的意味。

但是,絕不可因我對純粹的心智或許是什麼樣子已稍可避免全盤的誤解,便把它扯遠了。另外還涉及一個問題,無論它意味著什麼,就是肉体的復活。這是我們完全了解不來的。上好的往往便是我們了解得最少的。

人們不是曾經争論過嗎?最後見神面的這件事,比較是心智的或愛的活動?這大概又是一道荒謬的問題。

把死去了的人召喚回來,假如辦得到的話,是件多麼傷天害理的事。她對牧師,而非對我說:「我已跟神和好。」說着,她微微笑了,但不是對我,「然後,轉身回到永世的源頭」(註)。

註:語出但丁「神曲」天堂篇第31章,描寫碧兒翠霞(Beatrice),但丁的「最愛」,死後的幽魂引領詩人進入天堂至境,任務完成之後,嫣然一笑,與之告别,回到她的永世歸宿。

CHAPTER FOUR

This is the fourth—and the last—empty MS. book I can find in the house; at least nearly empty, for there are some pages of very ancient arithmetic at the end by J. I resolve to let this limit my jottings. I will not start buying books for the purpose. In so far as this record was a defence against total collapse, a safety-valve, it has done some good. The other end I had in view turns out to have been based on a misunderstanding. I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I’ve already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.

Here, for instance, is a new phase, a new loss. I do all the walking I can, for I’d be a fool to go to bed not tired. Today I have been revisiting old haunts, taking one of the long rambles that made me so happy in my bachelor days. And this time the face of nature was not emptied of its beauty and the world didn’t look (as I complained some days ago) like a mean street. On the contrary, every horizon, every stile or clump of trees, summoned me into a past kind of happiness, my pre-H. happiness. But the invitation seemed to me horrible. The happiness into which it invited me was insipid. I find that I don’t want to go back again and be happy in that way. It frightens me to think that a mere going back should even be possible. For this fate would seem to me the worst of all, to reach a state in which my years of love and marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode—like a holiday—that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged. And then it would come to seem unreal—something so foreign to the usual texture of my history that I could almost believe it had happened to someone else. Thus H. would die to me a second time; a worse bereavement than the first. Anything but that.

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.

Still, there are the two enormous gains—I know myself too well now to call them ‘lasting.’ Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum—nor all that fuss about my mental image of her. My jottings show something of the process, but not so much as I’d hoped. Perhaps both changes were really not observable. There was no sudden, striking, and emotional transition. Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight. When you first notice them they have already been going on for some time.

The notes have been about myself, and about H., and about God. In that order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not to have been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that mode of thinking about either which we call praising them. Yet that would have been best for me. Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this. I have lost the fruition I once had of H. And I am far, far away in the valley of my unlikeness, from the fruition which, if His mercies are infinite, I may some time have of God. But by praising I can still, in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some degree, enjoy Him. Better than nothing.

But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I’ve described H. as being like a sword. That’s true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have balanced it. I ought to have said, ‘But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you entered.’

And then, of her, and of every created thing I praise, I should say, ‘In some way, in its unique way, like Him who made it.’

Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.

She is in God’s hands.’ That gains a new energy when I think of her as a sword. Perhaps the earthly life I shared with her was only part of the tempering. Now perhaps He grasps the hilt; weighs the new weapon; makes lightnings with it in the air. ‘A right Jerusalem blade.’

One moment last night can be described in similes; otherwise it won’t go into language at all. Imagine a man in total darkness. He thinks he is in a cellar or dungeon. Then there comes a sound. He thinks it might be a sound from far off—waves or wind-blown trees or cattle half a mile away. And if so, it proves he’s not in a cellar, but free, in the open air. Or it may be a much smaller sound close at hand—a chuckle of laughter. And if so, there is a friend just beside him in the dark. Either way, a good, good sound. I’m not mad enough to take such an experience as evidence for anything. It is simply the leaping into imaginative activity of an idea which I would always have theoretically admitted—the idea that I, or any mortal at any time, may be utterly mistaken as to the situation he is really in.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them—never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

I will not, if I can help it, shin up either the feathery or the prickly tree. Two widely different convictions press more and more on my mind. One is that the Eternal Vet is even more inexorable and the possible operations even more painful than our severest imaginings can forbode. But the other, that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’

It doesn’t matter that all the photographs of H. are bad. It doesn’t matter—not much—if my memory of her is imperfect. Images, whether on paper or in the mind, are not important for themselves. Merely links. Take a parallel from an infinitely higher sphere. Tomorrow morning a priest will give me a little round, thin, cold, tasteless wafer. Is it a disadvantage—is it not in some ways an advantage—that it can’t pretend the least resemblance to that with which it unites me?

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him. I want H., not something that is like her. A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.

Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular. (It makes little difference whether they are pictures and statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.) To me, however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images—sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not. But the same thing happens in our private prayers.

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.

But ‘this’ is not now imaginable. In that respect H. and all the dead are like God. In that respect loving her has become, in its measure, like loving Him. In both cases I must stretch out the arms and hands of love—its eyes cannot here be used—to the reality, through—across—all the changeful phantasmagoria of my thoughts, passions, and imaginings. I mustn’t sit down content with the phantasmagoria itself and worship that for Him, or love that for her.

Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbor, but my neighbor. For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive—who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture—almost the précis—we’ve made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. In real life—that’s one way it differs from novels—his words and acts are, if we observe closely, hardly ever quite ‘in character,’ that is, in what we call his character. There’s always a card in his hand we didn’t know about.

My reason for assuming that I do this to other people is the fact that so often I find them obviously doing it to me. We all think we’ve got one another taped.

And all this time I may, once more, be building with cards. And if I am He will once more knock the building flat. He will knock it down as often as proves necessary. Unless I have to be finally given up as hopeless, and left building pasteboard palaces in Hell forever; ‘free among the dead.’

Am I, for instance, just sidling back to God because I know that if there’s any road to H., it runs through Him? But then of course I know perfectly well that He can’t be used as a road. If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you’re not really approaching Him at all. That’s what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions ‘on the further shore’; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by-product of the true End.

Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, ‘No toffee now. But when you’ve grown up and don’t really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose’?

If I knew that to be eternally divided from H. and eternally forgotten by her would add a greater joy and splendor to her being, of course I’d say, ‘Fire ahead.’ Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her cancer by never seeing her again, I’d have arranged never to see her again. I’d have had to. Any decent person would. But that’s quite different. That’s not the situation I’m in.

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask—half our great theological and metaphysical problems—are like that.

And now that I come to think of it, there’s no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with them. Indeed, H.’s death has ended the practical problem. While she was alive I could, in practice, have put her before God; that is, could have done what she wanted instead of what He wanted; if there’d been a conflict. What’s left is not a problem about anything I could do. It’s all about weights of feelings and motives and that sort of thing. It’s a problem I’m setting myself. I don’t believe God set it me at all.

The fruition of God. Reunion with the dead. These can’t figure in my thinking except as counters. Blank cheques. My idea—if you can call it an idea—of the first is a huge, risky extrapolation from a very few and short experiences here on earth. Probably not such valuable experiences as I think. Perhaps even of less value than others that I take no account of. My idea of the second is also an extrapolation. The reality of either—the cashing of either cheque—would probably blow all one’s ideas about both (how much more one’s ideas about their relations to each other) into smithereens.

The mystical union on the one hand. The resurrection of the body, on the other. I can’t reach the ghost of an image, a formula, or even a feeling, that combines them. But the reality, we are given to understand, does. Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.

And, more than once, that impression which I can’t describe except by saying that it’s like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.

It is often thought that the dead see us. And we assume, whether reasonably or not, that if they see us at all they see us more clearly than before. Does H. now see exactly how much froth or tinsel there was in what she called, and I call, my love? So be it. Look your hardest, dear. I wouldn’t hide if I could. We didn’t idealize each other. We tried to keep no secrets. You knew most of the rotten places in me already. If you now see anything worse, I can take it. So can you. Rebuke, explain, mock, forgive. For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives—to both, but perhaps especially to the woman—a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, nor from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees.

Sometimes, Lord, one is tempted to say that if you wanted us to behave like the lilies of the field you might have given us an organization more like theirs. But that, I suppose, is just your grand experiment. Or no; not an experiment, for you have no need to find things out. Rather your grand enterprise. To make an organism which is also a spirit; to make that terrible oxymoron, a ‘spiritual animal.’ To take a poor primate, a beast with nerve-endings all over it, a creature with a stomach that wants to be filled, a breeding animal that wants its mate, and say, ‘Now get on with it. Become a god.’

I said, several notebooks ago, that even if I got what seemed like an assurance of H.’s presence, I wouldn’t believe it. Easier said than done. Even now, though, I won’t treat anything of that sort as evidence. It’s the quality of last night’s experience—not what it proves but what it was—that makes it worth putting down. It was quite incredibly unemotional. Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own. Mind, not ‘soul’ as we tend to think of soul. Certainly the reverse of what is called ‘soulful.’ Not at all like a rapturous reunion of lovers. Much more like getting a telephone call or a wire from her about some practical arrangement. Not that there was any ‘message’—just intelligence and attention. No sense of joy or sorrow. No love even, in our ordinary sense. No un-love. I had never in any mood imagined the dead as being so—well, so business-like. Yet there was an extreme and cheerful intimacy. An intimacy that had not passed through the senses or the emotions at all.

If this was a throw-up from my unconscious, then my unconscious must be a far more interesting region than the depth psychologists have led me to expect. For one thing, it is apparently much less primitive than my consciousness.

Wherever it came from, it has made a sort of spring cleaning in my mind. The dead could be like that; sheer intellects. A Greek philosopher wouldn’t have been surprised at an experience like mine. He would have expected that if anything of us remained after death it would be just that. Up to now this always seemed to me a most arid and chilling idea. The absence of emotion repelled me. But in this contact (whether real or apparent) it didn’t do anything of the sort. One didn’t need emotion. The intimacy was complete—sharply bracing and restorative too—without it. Can that intimacy be love itself—always in this life attended with emotion, not because it is itself an emotion, or needs an attendant emotion, but because our animal souls, our nervous systems, our imaginations, have to respond to it in that way? If so, how many preconceptions I must scrap! A society, a communion, of pure intelligences would not be cold, drab, and comfortless. On the other hand it wouldn’t be very like what people usually mean when they use such words as spiritual, or mystical, or holy. It would, if I have had a glimpse, be—well, I’m almost scared at the adjectives I’d have to use. Brisk? cheerful? keen? alert? intense? wide-awake? Above all, solid. Utterly reliable. Firm. There is no nonsense about the dead.

When I say ‘intellect’ I include will. Attention is an act of will. Intelligence in action is will par excellence. What seemed to meet me was full of resolution.

Once very near the end I said, ‘If you can—if it is allowed—come to me when I too am on my death bed.’ ‘Allowed!’ she said. ‘Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.’ She knew she was speaking a kind of mythological language, with even an element of comedy in it. There was a twinkle as well as a tear in her eye. But there was no myth and no joke about the will, deeper than any feeling, that flashed through her.

But I mustn’t, because I have come to misunderstand a little less completely what a pure intelligence might be, lean over too far. There is also, whatever it means, the resurrection of the body. We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

Didn’t people dispute once whether the final vision of God was more an act of intelligence or of love? That is probably another of the nonsense questions.


How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me. Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana.

卿卿如晤-第三章


卿卿如晤 A Grief Observed
C. S. Lewis
1961
曾珍珍譯
第三章

說我一天到晚想念她,與實情不符。工作時,與人交談時,怎能分神去想她呢?不過,那些不想她的時刻,恐怕是我最糟糕的時刻,因為雖已暫時將緣由抛諸腦後,却依稀覺得像有什麼事出了岔,整個人不由得悵然若失起來。這就像在那一類的夢境中,什麼可怕的事都没發生—吃早飯時,你若把夢裡的情景說給人聽,任誰也不以為稀奇—但是,整個夢的氛圍和味道却活像你遇見了鬼。就是這樣的感覺。我看見山梨果開始變紅了,却一時想不起來到底為什麼在所有東西中,它特别引我黯然神傷。我聽到鐘响,那裡頭向來有的一種音質兀然消失了。這世界怎度搞的?變得如此平板、破落、疲憊?這時,我才想起為什麼。

這是我所怕的事之一。心頭的劇痛、午夜的驚狂終於逃不過自然的定律,势必平息下來。但随之而來的是什麽呢?就是這種麻木嗎?這種茍延残喘?是否這樣的時刻終於會來到,我不再繼續求問為什麽這世界看起來像一條鄙陋的大街,因為我將對污穢視若無睹?是否喪妻之慟終會式微、退落,我整個人將變得百無聊賴,成天頭暈暈的,直想吐。

感覺,感覺,層出不窮的感覺。且撇在一旁,静下心來思考吧。從理性的觀點看,她的死給宇宙的問題引進了什麼新的因素?它提供了什麼理由,讓我對自己的信仰產生全盤的懷疑?這些事,甚至更糟的事,天天都在發生,這是我早就知道的。應該說,這些我都曾考慮過。我已警告過自己—不要顧念塵世的幸福。而且,所應許給我們的,原也包括種種的苦難。這是整套計劃的一部分。我們甚至已被告知:「哀哭的人有福了」,這句話,我從前也接受。可以說,我所得到的,没有一件不是事先講明的。當然,不幸的事臨到自己,而非别人;成了事實,而不再是想像,就有天壤之别。是的,但對一個頭腦清醒的人,應該造成這麼大的差别嗎?不,對一個有真實信心又向來真切關懷他人愁苦的人,不應是這樣子的。這情形太明顯了。如果我的房子不堪一擊,這就意味著它原是一間紙片叠成的的房子。那「曾把這些事考慮進去」的信心便不是信心,而是想像。把它們考慮進去的用心,也不是真正的同情。如果我家自己所認為的那樣,真心誠意關懷世人的愁苦,當自己的愁苦臨到時,不應這麼潦倒的。原來,這只是想像出來的信心,用没有危害性的筹碼下註,雖然上面標著「疾病」、「疼痛」、「死亡」、和「孤獨」。我向來以為自己信得過這條繩子,直到它能否栓得住我變成生死攸關。現在,它的確具有千鈞一髮的重要性,而我發現自己信不過它。

玩橋牌的人告訴我,非得用錢打賭不可,(否則,没有人會認真打牌。)顯然,就是這麽一回事。倘若不涉及任何重大的賭註,你叫牌時—有神或無神,神是良善或宇宙的虐待狂,生命是無止境的或虚空一場—就不可能當真。而且,你不可能發現事情有多嚴肅,直到賭註抬高到嚇人的地步;直到你發現,白己不是在為筹碼或六便士打賭,而是為今生所擁有的每一分每一毫打賭。少於這個的話,不足以把人—至少像我這樣的人—從拘泥字句的思考和純粹概念化的信仰中撼醒。他必須被擊打得整個人都傻掉了,才能清醒過來。只有酷刑才能把真理催逼出來。只有在嚴酷的責打之下,他才會親自去發現真理。

而我確實必須承認—她也會三言兩語就逼我承認—倘若我的房子果真是紙片叠成的,那麼,愈早被砸碎,愈好。而且,只有苦難能作成這事。若接受了這點,說他是宇宙的虐待狂或永存的活物解剖者,似乎都變成莫須有的假設了。

上一則手記是不是一種症状,恰好指出我的無可救藥?當事實把我的夢砸成碎片時,初受震撼,我忽而抑鬱,忽而咆哮,過後,却又耐心地、痴愚地重新把它拼凑回來?而且,向來如此?不管紙片叠的房子塌了多少回,我總又重新搭盖?此刻,我是否正作著同一件事?

的確,極有可能,那將被我稱為「信心重建」的,終究只是一棟紙叠的房子。是這樣嗎?我無法得知,直到下一個打擊來襲——譬如,我的躯体也被診断得了絕症,或戰争發生了,或由於工作上出了離奇的差錯,我把自己毁了。不過,這裡頭有兩個問題,從哪一層意義看,這是一棟紙叠的房子呢?因為我所信的只是一場夢?或我不過夢見自己相信罷了?

至於事物的本相,憑什麼我一個星期前的思想要比此刻顯然較為良質的思想可信呢?大体而言,現在的我肯定比一個星期前清醒。為什麼一個頭暈目眩的人在絕境中的胡思亂想——我曾說過,像腦部受到震盪——特别可靠?。

因為在那些胡思亂想裡,没有一廂情願的思想?而且,正由於其可怕,所以,較可能是真的?但是,除了有願望獲得滿足的夢之外,也有讓懼怕得逞的夢。這類的思想難道不討人嫌嗎?不,從某個角度說,我還蛮喜歡的。我甚至察覺與之相反的思想,自己還挺不情願接受。其實,那些有關宇宙虐待狂的講論,與其說是思想的表達,不如說是恨。從中,我嘗到了在極端痛苦中的人所能嘗到的唯一樂趣——反擊的樂趣。它們的確就是市井間常可聽聞的那類專門談來污穢人的話(有種的話,且讓神聽聽我怎麼数落他!)——真是乖謬到了家。當然,像在所有污穢語中一樣,「我認為這樣」並不意味「我認為真有這一回事」。所在乎的是,我這樣認為是否最能惹火祂(和祂的崇拜者)。說這類的話從來都讓人覺得痛快淋漓。(一吐胸中塊壘),一時之間,你覺得舒服多了。

情緒的宣泄不能當作証據。對向它開刀的人,猫當然會咆哮、吐口水、其至反咬,但是,問題的症結在於這人是獸医呢?還是專門從事活物解剖的人?對真正的答案,猫的髒話提供不了任何指引。

所思索的若是自己的苦難,我可以相信他是個獸医。若思索她的,就難些了。喪偶之慟與肉体的痛苦比較起來,哪一種劇烈呢?不管愚頑人怎麼說,肉体的痛苦大過二十倍。人的心智天生具有某種退避的能力。最糟的情况,莫過於人無法忍受的思想一再地回潮。但是,肉体的疼痛却有可能持續不断。喪偶之慟像一架轟炸機在上空盤旋,每飛一圈,下一顆炸弹。肉体的疼痛則像第一次世界大戰中的壕溝戰,槍林弹雨連續幾個小時,没有片刻的停歇。思想永遠不會瘀積不動;疼痛通常會。

我算那門子的情人?念念不忘的盡是自己的折磨,較少顧念她的。甚至那惶亂的嘶喊(歸來吧 !,也全是為了自己。我甚至從未質疑過,這樣的歸來,若有可能,對她好嗎?我渴望她魂兮歸來,以便能挽回自己的過去。對她,我能希冀比這更糟糕的事嗎?她已嘗過了死味,叫她再回陽,等到將來的某個日子,再經歷一次死亡?人們稱司提反為第一個殉道者;其實,拉撒路所遭遇的豈不更慘烈?。

我開始明白了,我對她的愛與我對神的信心,本質上,竟有許多相同的地方,雖然我不擬過度渲染。信心裡是否容不得一點想像的成分,愛裡是否絕無自我?神知道,我不知道。也許有那麼一些些吧,尤其在我對她的愛裡。但兩者皆非我所以為的那樣。我理念中的兩音皆頗有紙叠城堡的味道。

我的哀傷如何演化,或者我如何調理這樣的情緒,於事無補嗎?我如何悼念她,或者我是否悼念她,幹卿底事?成這或那,都無法减輕或加重她那已逝的身心劇痛。

已逝的身心劇痛?我怎知她所有的痛苦都已過去了?我從來都不相信——我認為十二萬分的不可能——那絕對信靠神的靈魂在咽下最後一口氣的霎那,能直接進人完美和安息。現在,若這樣相信,是帶有報復意味的非非之想。她是個相當精彩的人,一條率直、明銳、經過千錘百煉的靈魂,像一把劍。然而,她絕非一個已臻完美的聖徒,而是一個仍帶著罪性的女人,嫁給我這個仍帶著罪性的男人;我們是神的兩個病人,正等著他医治。我深知不只眼淚需被擦乾,還有污點需被磨拭。要它更明銳,這把劍還需再磨拭。

但是,神啊!輕輕地。當她還披戴著肉身時,接連幾個月,幾星期,你周而復始地凌遲她的躯体。這樣還不够嗎?。

恐怖的是,做這種事,一個完全良善的神可能比宇宙的虐待狂更叫人害怕。愈相信神擊打人是為了医治,便愈難相信懇求他輕柔下手是行得通的事。一個心很手辣的人,你可以收買他。而且,怎麼倒行逆施,他總有疲倦的時候——偶而也會發點慈悲,就像醉鬼也有酒醒的片刻。然而,若你遇見的是一位外科医生,仁心仁術。那麼,他愈仁慈、敬業,開刀時愈難手下留情。如果他聽了你的哀求,在手術尚未完成之前停手,那麼,你先前所忍受的疼痛豈不白費了?這這麼嚴酷地責打,對我們而言,是完全必須的嗎?這說得過去嗎?就自己抉擇吧!酷刑發生了,如果是多餘的,那麼,若非没有神,便是神並不良善。如果神是良善的,那些酷刑便是必須的,因為若是多餘的,稍有良知良能的生靈都會不忍心將它加諸在人身上的,或者根本不容許它發生。

或這或那,我們都接受了。

有人說:「我不怕神,因它是良善的。」這句話什麼意思?難道他没看過牙医?。

這可是十分難捱的事!接著,你或許會脱口而出:「讓我來承担吧,無論多糟糕,怎樣都無所謂,只要不是她。」但是,誰也不知道這樣的打賭有多嚴重,因為不涉及任何的賭註。除非突然間真有這種可能了,我們才會發現自己到底有幾分當真。不過,這種事容許發生嗎?。

經上告訴我們,這樣的事曾被容許發生在那「唯一的一位」身上。而此刻我發現。自己又能重新相信他已代替我們作成一切可代替我們作的事了。對我們脱口而出的豪語,他的回答是:「你辦不到的,而且,你不敢。我辦得到,而且,我敢。」。

出乎意料的事情發生了。是今天一大早發生的,由多重原因促成,一點也不神秘。我的心情是幾個星期以來最輕鬆的。有一點,我想,肉体的疲憊已恢復了大半。而且,昨天,我過了極端累人却有益身心的十二個小時。晚上,又睡了飽飽的一覺。而經過十天的陰霾,和郁積不去的濕熱,陽光終於又普照大地,微風陣陣吹來。突然間,就在我最不為她哀傷的霎那,她清晰地浮現在我的心頭,比記憶更具体,一種瞬間的,讓人來不及回應的印象。說這恰是重逢,有點太過。然而,是有那樣的意味,使人忍不住想要用類似的字眼。似乎愁懷一釋除,障隔就挪開了。

為什麽没有人告訴我這樣的事?别人若有同樣的處境,有多大的可能我會對他作出同樣錯誤的判断?我也許會說:「他過關了,終於把太太忘了。」其實,真相是:「正因他稍能釋懷,所以,能更貼切地懷想她。」這才是事實,而我相信自己能為這現象說出個道理來。淚眼婆娑時,你什麼都看不清。被你要得死去活來的東西,多半,你是要不到的。至少,你得不到它的菁華。「現在,讓我們認真地討論。」這話一出,每個人都噤若寒蟬。「今晚一定要好好睡它一覺。」這下子好了,保証你幾小時無法合上眼。可口的飲料供渴得半死的人咕嚕牛飲,簡直是浪費。同樣,那使鐵幕深垂的,使我們緬懷故人時只覺眼前横陳一片空茫的,豈不正是過度强烈的眷戀?無論如何,「求索太急切的人」就是得不到,或許是無法得到。

或許,求告神也是這樣。我已漸漸醒轉過來,不再覺得門緊緊閉着或上了栓。那使門當著我的面砰然關閉,豈不正是我自己惶亂的索求?當你的靈魂裡除了求救呼喊之外空無一物,也許正是神無法給你任何救援的時候——就像溺水而無法獲救的人,通常因為他拚命抓拿。也許,是自己重覆呼喊使你耳聾了,聽不見想聽的声音。

另一方面,「叩門的,就給他開門」不過,叩門是否意味著捶們或踢門。然而,又有話說,「凡有的,還要加給他。」畢竟,你必須有接受的能力,否則,甚至全能者也無法給你什麽。也許是你自己的激情暫時把這接受的能力給蒙蔽了。

因為,求告神的事,什麼樣的錯誤都可能發生。許久以前,那時我們還未結婚,有一整個早上,她一面作家事,一面隱隱約約地覺得神就在「肘旁」要求她的註意。當然,由於不是完美的聖徒,她直覺可能涉及某樁未認的罪,或某件瑣碎的義務,像通常有的情况。後來,她終於投降了——我知道人多麽善於推拖——停下手邊的工作,面對祂。結果,神給她的話是:「我要把某樣東西賜給你」,她立刻進入喜樂中。

我想我開始体會出為什麼守喪感覺上像把事情懸擱着。這感覺是從許多慣性的衝動受到挫折而來的。向來,許多的想法、感覺、和行動接二連三產生,都是以她為目標。現在,目標消失了,由於慣性,我仍繼續把箭搭在弦上,等到猛然想起,才又把箭擱下。那麼多的路径引我想起她,我欣然踏上其中的一條,眼前却横豎着一面「邊塞要地,請勿逾越」的牌子。曾經條條是通衢大道,現在却四處窮途末路。

因為在一個好妻子的裡面的確涵括了太多人的角色。對我而言,她無所不是。她是我的女兒兼母親,我的學生兼老師,我的臣民兼君王。而且無時不刻,把這些角色兼容並蓄了,還是我的同志、朋友、船伴和同胞。她固然是我的情人,但同時又具備了任何男性朋友(我不乏這類的知交)所能給我的,也許給得還更多。我們如果未曾墬入情網,應該也會成天膩在一塊,引來各種閑言閑語。基於這樣的感受,有一天,我稱讚她,讓她具有男性的美德,她馬上堵住我的口,問我可喜歡别人稱讚我具有女性的美德。這反擊真是厲害的一招!卿卿。不過,你的確有點像亞瑪森、潘瑟西雷雅和克蜜拉(註)。而你自己,我亦然,都頗得意你有這樣的特質。我能察覺你的這種特質,你蛮欣慰的。

所羅門稱他的新婦妹子。一個女人能算是個完整的妻嗎?除非,霎那間,在某種特殊的情境裡,她的男人忍不住要呼她一声「哥哥」。

「太完美了,所以,不能長久。」我忍不住要這樣形容她和我的婚姻。不過,這樣說可有兩層意義。一層意義悲觀得讓人悚然心驚——好似神一見造物中有兩人鶼鰈情深,便得立刻拆散他們——「此情只應天上有」。神又好像社交酒會的女東主,一見兩位客人露出傾心交談的迹象,按例便得即刻把他們拉開。然而,這句話也可能意味著「這個婚姻已臻人造化至境,達到婚姻應有的樣子,所以,不必再延續下去。」好似神說:「好極了,你們已精通此藝,到達炉火純青的境界。我非常滿意。現在,且準備往下一步去。」當你已學會二次方程式,而且駕輕就熟,你不可能繼續在這範圍逗留太久的,老師會催促你更上一層楼。

因為,在婚姻中,我們的確有所學習和成長。兩件之間,或隱或現,確實經常劍拔弩張,直到完全的結合使双方重歸和好。對男人而言,在女人身上看見率真、講義氣、和古道熱腸的性子,便稱之為「男性化」,是大男人主義作祟。對女人而言,形容一個男人的敏感、細膩、温柔為「女性化」,也可視為大女人主義。不過,那些所謂十足的男人和十足的女人所擁有的人性,必定相當貧乏、偏狭、片面,才能使這種隱形的驕矜心理顯明出來。婚姻恰好根治了這毛病。兩個人合起來成為「完足的人」。「神按着自己的形像造男造女」,就這樣,看似矛盾,兩性靈肉一致的結合,把眾人帶離了性别的囿限。

接著,兩人中的一個亡故了。我們將這視為被截断的愛情,有如舞過半場,戛然中止;或即將盛開的花朵小幸被折了花苞;又像某物平空被鋸掉一截,因此,失去了它應有的形状。對這說法,我不以為然。倘若正如我不得不懷疑的,死者也能感受到離别的痛苦(這也許只是他們在煉獄中必須承受的痛苦之一),那麼,對兩個彼此相愛的人而言,對天下一切有情人而言,毫無例外地,死别正是戀愛經驗中普遍化的、不可或缺的一環。它随著婚姻而來,本是一種常態,正如婚姻随著戀愛或秋天随著夏天而來一樣。並非整個過程被攔腰一截,而是其中的一個段落。不是舞蹈的中場受挫,而是轉人下一回旋。當所愛的人活著時,我們為她而「忘我」,然後,當整部舞中悲劇的回旋臨到時,雖然她肉体的存在已被撤回,我們仍需學會「忘我」——愛她本人,而非退縮回去愛自己的過去、回憶、哀愁、無憂、甚或愛情。

驀然回首,我發現,不久以前,我還十分担心自己對她所在的記憶,唯恐它變得虚幻不實。由於某個原因,我已經不再担心這件事了。——体會到神的慈悲、良善,是我唯一想得出的原因。值得註意的是,我一停止懮慮,她似乎便随時在每一個角落與我相遇。「相遇」這個字太强烈。我所意味的,與顯靈或声音的再現無關,甚至也非意味在任何特定時刻所感受到的令人震顫的經驗。而是一種絕不突兀、瀰漫一切的感覺,覺得她像從前一樣,不折不扣,是個讓人輕慢不得的事實。

「輕慢不得」也許不是挺恰當的說法。乍聽之下,有如她是一把打仗用的斧鈸。怎樣說才妥切呢?「具有份量的實存」或「頑强的實在」?行嗎?經驗的本身似乎在對我說:「喏,現在,你可高興了。根據所發生的,她果真仍是個事實。不過,請記住,她之仍為事實這件事並非取決於你的好惡。」。

我已到達什麼地步?我想與另一類型的鰥夫差不多吧。對人們好奇的探問,他會停下來,靠在鋤把上,這樣回答:「謝謝你的關心,但請别過問。我的確擺脱不掉與她有關的一些令人魂縈夢牽的回憶。人人說這些回憶是被喚來審判我們的。」我與這位仁兄可謂半斤八兩。他用鋤頭,我,目前不善於挖土,用的是自己特有的工具。不過,「喚來審判我們的」這句話,需要正確地領會。神從未以實驗的方法測知我的信心或愛情到底属於何性質。他早就知道了,不知道的是我。在這個審判中,他讓我們同時處在被告席、証人席和審判席上。他一直都知道我的聖殿是紙叠的房子,唯一能讓我察覺這事實的方法是將它砸碎。

這麼快就痊愈了?不過,用詞還有點含糊不清。說病人接受了盲腸手術之後已經痊愈了,是一回事;說他一只脚被切除了之後已經痊愈了,又是另一回事。手術之後,這個人或残肢愈合了,或死了。如果愈合了,那劇烈、持續的疼痛會停止。不久,他將恢復体力,可以頂著木製義肢到處走動。他已「痊愈」了,但鋸掉的那條腿可能一輩子都會間歇性地作痛,而且,恐怕還蛮痛的。此外,他將永遠是個獨脚漢。同時,可能片刻也忘不了這個事實。洗澡時、穿衣時、坐下、起來,甚至躺在床上,都和從前不一樣了。他的整個生活方式都發生了變化。從前認為理所當然的各類樂趣和活動,都被迫取消了,職責亦然。目前,我正學習拄着拐杖到處走動。也許,不久會裝上義肢。然而,無論如何,我再也不是双脚健全的人了。

然而,不可否認的,就某層意義而言,我的確比從前「好多了」。随之而來的却是一種羞愧感,以及覺得有義務要盡量珍惜、醞釀、延續自己的哀傷。我曾從書中讀到有關這類的情緒,但作夢也想不到自己會有同樣的傾向。我明知她不會讚同的。她會叫我别作傻瓜。我也十分清楚神亦然。這類的感覺背後是什麽?。

無疑的,多少與虚荣有關。我們要向自己証明自己是個超級情人、悲劇英雄,不只是有親人亡故的芸芸眾生中的一個,日子照樣得過下去,勉强在那裡蹣跚向前。不過,這樣的解釋不够周全。

我想,還有一種混淆有待厘清。其實,我們所需要的並不是悲慟——尤其是初期的心理劇痛——延續下去:没有人受得了的、但是,我們却需要另一種東西——悲慟只是其中反覆出現的一種症状,而我們誤把症状當作事情的本身。前晚,我寫說,死别並非婚姻之愛的截断,而是固定會發生的一環——像蜜月一樣。我們所應自我期許的是好好享受婚姻生活,然後,忠實地度過這一悲傷的階段。如果它讓人心痛(絕對會的),便應接受痛苦乃是這階段不可或缺的一部分。我們不願以抛棄或離婚為代價逃避它,這等於叫死者死兩次。夫妻本為一体,現在既已被切割為二,我們不願假裝仍是完好無缺的整体。不過,婚姻仍然存在,我們仍在彼此戀慕着。所以,還會心痛。然而,畢竟不是為了心痛而心痛——如果我們够了解自己的話。其實,婚姻既能繼續保存,愈不悲慟,愈好。在死者與生者之間的婚姻裡,愈多喜樂,愈好。

在許多方面都是更好的,因為,正如我已發現的,激切的傷慟非但不能使我們與死者相遇,反而會切断彼此的連續。這是愈來愈清楚的事。就在那些我最不悲傷的時刻——晨澡通常是這樣的時刻——一她會突然湧上我的心頭,帶著十足的真實感——她那有别於我的個性;絕非那在我最凄慘的時刻,被我的哀愁矮化,顯得過度悲戚、莊嚴的她,而是她最泰然自若的樣子。這太美妙了,叫人精神為之一振。

我似乎能記得——雖然此刻無法随手摘引——在形形色色的歌謠和民間傳說裡,死者總是告訴生者切勿哀悼他們,這樣反而有害。他們懇求生者停止哀哭。這裡頭或許有比我所了解的更啟人深思的道理。果真如此,我們祖父輩的作法簡直太離譜了。那些「有時延續一輩子」的哀悼儀式——掃墓、守忌日;將空下來的寝室,依死者的習慣,保持原樣:或者完全不提死者,或者總用特别的声調提起;或甚至(像維多利亞女王)每晚用餐時,擺出死者的衣服——簡直可以媲美製作木乃她的習俗,反而使故人已死的事實更强烈地呈現出來。

或許這正是它「潛在」的目的,可能有極其原始的因素在其中作祟。使死者完完全全的死去,確定他們不再回到陽界來凑興,是野蛮的心靈最在意的一件事——不計一切代價,要讓死者「人土為安」。上述的儀式行為的確强調了死者已死的事實。也許,正如崇奉儀式的人所相信的,這樣的結果,人並作不樂於接受,有時這正是他們所要的。

不過,我實在不必費神去論断他們,一切都純属臆測。我最好好自為之。至少未來的計劃已有明顯的定案。我將快快樂樂地盡可能常常依偎她,我甚至應用爽朗的笑容迎接她。愈不哀悼她,愈能親近她。

這是一個令人讚嘆的計劃。不幸的是,無法實現。今夜,新的哀愁又像地獄一般轟然洞開了;狂亂的囈語、苦毒的怨恨、胃裡的翻攪、夢靨似的虚空。潸潸不止的淚水——因為,對哀慟中的人没有「人土為安」這件事。你不断從一個階段掙扎出來,但一個循環接一個循環,它總是重覆再現。我是否原地繞著圈子打轉?我爬的可是一道螺旋梯?若是螺旋梯,我正往上爬呢?還是往下爬?

多少回——難道永遠這樣「去」嗎?——無垠的虚空,像從末見過的事物乍然襲來,一再讓我驚駭莫名,我不断重覆喟嘆:「直到這一到,我才恍然大悟,明白自己失落了什麼。」同一只脚一次又一次地被切除。那刀子戳進肉裡的痛楚,我一而再,再而三捱受着。

他們說:「儒夫死幹回。」有愛的人亦然、那以普羅米修斯的肝臟果腹的蒼鷹,它每天所攫食的,豈不都是長回原樣的新肝?
  
註:亞瑪森(Amazon )是希腊神話中一個純由驍勇善戰的女傑組成的部落名稱,潘瑟西雷雅(Penthesileia)是這個部落的女王,在她的率領下,亞瑪森眾雌参與了特洛伊戰争,是特洛伊人的盟軍。在一場戰役中,潘瑟西雷雅為希腊名將阿契裡斯(Achilles)所殺。克密拉(Camilla)出現在味吉爾所著的羅馬建国史詩中,也是一位英氣凛人的女豪杰。

CHAPTER THREE

It’s not true that I’m always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I’m not are perhaps my worst. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs—nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast-time—but the atmosphere, the taste, of the whole thing is deadly. So with this. I see the rowan berries reddening and don’t know for a moment why they, of all things, should be depressing. I hear a clock strike and some quality it always had before has gone out of the sound. What’s wrong with the world to make it so flat, shabby, worn-out looking? Then I remember.

This is one of the things I’m afraid of. The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From the rational point of view, what new factor has H.’s death introduced into the problem of the universe? What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe? I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. I had been warned—I had warned myself—not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accepted it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination. The taking them into account was not real sympathy. If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came. It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labelled ‘Illness,’ ‘Pain,’ ‘Death,’ and ‘Loneliness.’ I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t.

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously.’ Apparently it’s like that. Your bid—for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity—will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me— out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

And I must surely admit—H. would have forced me to admit in a few passes—that, if my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better. And only suffering could do it. But then the Cosmic Sadist and Eternal Vivisector becomes an unnecessary hypothesis.

Is this last note a sign that I’m incurable, that when reality smashes my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always? However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I’m doing now?

Indeed it’s likely enough that what I shall call, if it happens, a ‘restoration of faith’ will turn out to be only one more house of cards. And I shan’t know whether it is or not until the next blow comes— when, say, fatal disease is diagnosed in my body too, or war breaks out, or I have ruined myself by some ghastly mistake in my work. But there are two questions here. In which sense may it be a house of cards? Because the things I am believing are only a dream, or because I only dream that I believe them?

As for the things themselves, why should the thoughts I had a week ago be any more trustworthy than the better thoughts I have now? I am surely, in general, a saner man than I was then. Why should the desperate imaginings of a man dazed—I said it was like being concussed—be especially reliable?

Because there was no wishful thinking in them? Because, being so horrible, they were therefore all the more likely to be true? But there are fear-fulfillment as well as wish-fulfillment dreams. And were they wholly distasteful? No. In a way I liked them. I am even aware of a slight reluctance to accept the opposite thoughts. All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back. It was really just Billingsgate—mere abuse; ‘telling God what I thought of Him.’ And of course, as in all abusive language, ‘what I thought’ didn’t mean what I thought true. Only what I thought would offend Him (and His worshippers) most. That sort of thing is never said without some pleasure. Gets it ‘off your chest.’ You feel better for a moment.

But the mood is no evidence. Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector. Her bad language throws no light on it one way or the other.

And I can believe He is a vet when I think of my own suffering. It is harder when I think of hers. What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours of it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static; pain often is.

What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers? Even the insane call, ‘Come back,’ is all for my own sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, if it were possible, would be good for her. I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn’t Lazarus the rawer deal?

I begin to see. My love for H. was of much the same quality as my faith in God. I won’t exaggerate, though. Whether there was anything but imagination in the faith, or anything but egoism in the love, God knows. I don’t. There may have been a little more; especially in my love for H. But neither was the thing I thought it was. A good deal of the card-castle about both.

What does it matter how this grief of mine evolves or what I do with it? What does it matter how I remember her or whether I remember her at all? None of these alternatives will either ease or aggravate her past anguish.

Her past anguish. How do I know that all her anguish is past? I never believed before—I thought it immensely improbable—that the faithfulest soul could leap straight into perfection and peace the moment death has rattled in the throat. It would be wishful thinking with a vengeance to take up that belief now. H. was a splendid thing; a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword. But not a perfected saint. A sinful woman married to a sinful man; two of God’s patients, not yet cured. I know there are not only tears to be dried but stains to be scoured. The sword will be made even brighter.

But oh God, tenderly, tenderly. Already, month by month and week by week you broke her body on the wheel whilst she still wore it. Is it not yet enough?

The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed—might grow tired of his vile sport—might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t.

Either way, we’re for it.

What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?

Yet this is unendurable. And then one babbles—‘If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.’ But one can’t tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed?

It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble, ‘You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared.’

Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks. For one thing, I suppose I am recovering physically from a good deal of mere exhaustion. And I’d had a very tiring but very healthy twelve hours the day before, and a sounder night’s sleep; and after ten days of low hung grey skies and motionless warm dampness, the sun was shining and there was a light breeze. And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier.

Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’

Such was the fact. And I believe I can make sense out of it. You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it. ‘Now! Let’s have a real good talk’ reduces everyone to silence. ‘I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about our dead? ‘Them as asks’ (at any rate ‘as asks too importunately’) don’t get. Perhaps can’t.

And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

On the other hand, ‘Knock and it shall be opened.’ But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac? And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.

For all sorts of mistakes are possible when you are dealing with Him. Long ago, before we were married, H. was haunted all one morning as she went about her work with the obscure sense of God (so to speak) ‘at her elbow,’ demanding her attention. And of course, not being a perfected saint, she had the feeling that it would be a question, as it usually is, of some unrepented sin or tedious duty. At last she gave in—I know how one puts it off—and faced Him. But the message was, ‘I want to give you something’ and instantly she entered into joy.

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.

For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My
mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more. If we had never fallen in love we should have none the less been always together, and created a scandal. That’s what I meant when I once praised her for her ‘masculine virtues.’ But she soon put a stop to that by asking how I’d like to be praised for my feminine ones. It was a good riposte, dear. Yet there was something of the Amazon, something of Penthesileia and Camilla. And you, as well as I, were glad it should be there. You were glad I should recognize it.

Solomon calls his bride Sister. Could a woman be a complete wife unless, for a moment, in one particular mood, a man felt almost inclined to call her Brother?

It was too perfect to last,’ so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic—as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it (‘None of that here!’). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean ‘This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.’ As if God said, ‘Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.’ When you have learned to do quadratics and enjoy doing them you will not be set them much longer. The teacher moves you on.

For we did learn and achieve something. There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them. It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry ‘masculine’ when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them to describe a man’s sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as ‘feminine.’ But also what poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible. Marriage heals this. Jointly the two become fully human. ‘In the image of God created He them.’ Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes.

And then one or other dies. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid-career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off—something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here. Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.

Looking back, I see that only a very little time ago I was greatly about my memory of H. and how false it might become. For some reason—the merciful good sense of God is the only one I can think of—I have stopped bothering about that. And the remarkable thing is that since I stopped bothering about it, she seems to meet me everywhere. Meet is far too strong a word. I don’t mean anything remotely like an apparition or a voice. I don’t mean even any strikingly emotional experience at any particular moment. Rather, a sort of unobtrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into account.

To be taken into account’ is perhaps an unfortunate way of putting it. It sounds as if she were rather a battle-axe. How can I put it better? Would ‘momentously real’ or ‘obstinately real’ do? It is as if the experience said to me, ‘You are, as it happens, extremely glad that H. is still a fact. But remember she would be equally a fact whether you liked it or not. Your preferences have not been considered.’

How far have I got? Just as far, I think, as a widower of another sort who would stop, leaning on his spade, and say in answer to our inquiry, ‘Thank’ee. Mustn’t grumble. I do miss her something dreadful. But they say these things are sent to try us.’ We have come to the same point; he with his spade, and I, who am not now much good at digging, with my own instrument. But of course one must take ‘sent to try us’ the right way. God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.

Still, there’s no denying that in some sense I ‘feel better,’ and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness. I’ve read about that in books, but I never dreamed I should feel it myself. I am sure H. wouldn’t approve of it. She’d tell me not to be a fool. So I’m pretty certain, would God. What is behind it?

Partly, no doubt, vanity. We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job. But that’s not the whole of the explanation.

I think there is also a confusion. We don’t really want grief, in its first agonies, to be prolonged: nobody could. But we want something else of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom with the thing itself. I wrote the other night that bereavement is not the truncation of married love but one of its regular phases—like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase too. If it hurts (and it certainly will) we accept the pains as a necessary part of this phase. We don’t want to escape them at the price of desertion or divorce. Killing the dead a second time. We were one flesh. Now that it has been cut in two, we don’t want to pretend that it is whole and complete. We will be still married, still in love. Therefore we shall still ache. But we are not at all—if we understand ourselves—seeking the aches for their own sake. The less of them the better, so long as the marriage is preserved. And the more joy there can be in the marriage between dead and living, the better.

The better in every way. For, as I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This become clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow—getting into my morning bath is usually one of them—that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.

I seem to remember—though I couldn’t quote one at the moment—all sorts of ballads and folktales in which the dead tell us that our mourning does them some kind of wrong. They beg us to stop it. There may be far more depth in this than I thought. If so, our grandfathers’ generation went very far astray. All that (sometimes lifelong) ritual of sorrow—visiting graves, keeping anniversaries, leaving the empty bedroom exactly as ‘the departed’ used to keep it, mentioning the dead either not at all or always in a special voice, or even (like Queen Victoria) having the dead man’s clothes put out for dinner every evening—this was like mummification. It made the dead far more dead.

Or was that (unconsciously) its purpose? Something very primitive may be at work here. To keep the dead thoroughly dead, to make sure that they won’t come sidling back among the living, is a main pre-occupation of the savage mind. At all costs make them ‘stay put.’ Certainly these rituals do in fact emphasize their deadness. Perhaps this result was not really so unwelcome, not always, as the ritualists believed.

But I’ve no business to judge them. All guesswork; I’d better keep my breath to cool my own porridge. For me at any rate the programme is plain. I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness. I will even salute her with a laugh. The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her.

An admirable programme. Unfortunately it can’t be carried out. Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

How often—will it be for always?—how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss till this moment’? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again.


They say, ‘The coward dies many times’; so does the beloved. Didn’t the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?