The Excerpta Reportage #112800
Playing in the World

“Moon Swing

“The Climate of Despair

“All sentient creatures live and move against a background of despair. Coexistent with consciousness is an awareness of being in the grip of elemental forces unconcerned with life. Growing intelligence merely gives greater variety, civilization different names, to these annihilating powers. We pursue geology, only to learn in what an infinitesimal fragment of time is contained the whole human story; or astronomy, to find our universe to be no more than a dust speck dancing in a momentary sunbeam. By the light of this gray truth happiness is no better than a brief forgetting, wisdom a fleeting mastery, of despair.

“This is the truth from which the beautiful sick philosophies derive, the sad and lovely visions of Ecclesiastes, of Khayyam, of Santayana; the strength of whose appeal lies in their subtle compensations. At the cost of the abandoning hope, of becoming acclimatized to despair, such philosophies offer equality of justice, at last, to both heart and head; giving at the same time a poignant and autumnal beauty to the world scene, and a calm assurance of rational superiority over the mass of hope-deluded men.

“A considerable achievement: for undeniably, confronted by the subtle web of forces from which, fly-entangled, life struggles to be free, most of the meliorist philosophies begin to wear a rather sorry look: Idealism ‘grows pale and spectre-thin and dies’, the silly progressive grin is wiped off the Humanist face, the clamant theories of a Nietzsche or a Whitman sound like a nervous whistling in the dark; and even the creeds and consecrated rituals of the great religions are seen to be no stronger than the little dams that beavers build...

“The Climate of Delight

“Delight is a secret. And the secret is this: to grow quiet and listen; to stop thinking, stop moving, almost to stop breathing; to create an inner stillness in which, like mice in a deserted house, capacities and awarenesses too wayward and too fugitive for everyday use may delicately emerge. Oh, welcome them home! For these are the long-lost children of the human mind. give them close and living attention, for they are weakened by centuries of neglect. In return they will open your eyes to a new world within the known world, they will take your hand, as children do, and bring you where life is always nascent, day always dawning. Suddenly and miraculously, as you walk home in the dark, you are aware of the insubstantial shimmering essence that lies within appearances; the air is filled with expectancy, alive with meaning; the stranger, gliding by in the lamplit street, carries silently past you in the night the whole mystery of his life...

“Delight springs from this awareness of the translucent quality in all things, whereby beauty as well as ugliness, joy as well as pain, women as well as men, life as well as death--the grinding clash of opposites between whose iron teeth all systems of philosophy are cursed at last to pulp--are seen to be symbols; in the true meaning of a symbol, whose Janus-face contains at once that which exists in time and space, and that which transcends it.

“Delight has a glancing, dancing, penetrative quality, the quality of Sophia the Consort of God, as when she sings--

“From the beginning I was with Him, forming all things:
“And was delighted every day, playing before Him at all times:
“Playing in the world; and my delights were to be with the children of men.

“Playing in the world! This is what Wisdom does. And this is what they miss, those sad, resigned ones. And what they also miss--the thinkers cast in the mold of a Paul, a Marx, a Freud: the will-driven, over-masculinized betrayers of life.

“Delight is a mystery. And the mystery is this: to plunge boldly into the brilliance and immediacy of living, at the same time as utterly surrendering to that which lies beyond space and time; to see life translucently...” (pp. 155-157)
--Alan McGlashan “The Savage and Beautiful Country” (Houghton Mifflin Company Boston 1967)