the ancient sway of the world

First thing you think of: how ancient England is. Those pragmatic heads, devoid of any spiritual concerns; the language plain and square; those faces, repeated every two or three generations, as if nature only had a limited repertoire of possibilities. The names: solid, matter-of-fact; the places, dark and unredeemed, just as they've always been. Eternal summer, comes around again, unimaginably so. Warmth on the back, profound and reassuring, beer sloshing in thick glasses, hands that would know...

Well, not quite the first. At the airport you see a beautiful woman, dark haired, an intelligent and compassionate face (Mr. Heinz was right in this respect, after all). And they're the strangest of places, airports: people crossing each other's paths, barely noticing one another...just the most furtive of glances, a tentative finger to the lips ("what if"..) and then everyone moves on, back.

On the way home, the clouds radiant, the light full and peaceful, so that everything seemed to be swimming in its brilliance; past St. Mary's and the leafy park, the gravestones old and weather-worn, slumbering in the green shade. People walking in this high light seem somewhat unreal, as if this day and this day alone defined them, or as if a dense fog had suddenly lifted and one could now, for the first time, clearly see where one was going. The late flaring of the sun, the golden light relating and revealing each face to another. Past another church in the east, with the words 'Alive and Kicking' written in huge letters on the front. What next, 'Rapping with MC God'?

Down Euston road, a beautiful woman striding past you, her hips swaying like an Egyptian. And your first thought (well, not quite your first one!)...you only see individuals here. Yes, that much abused word. But better to burn with one's own 'lights', than with those of another's vision. The coming community will need a deeper sense of the individual, one that underpins a far more profound sense of the 'we' than hitherto produced by the state or religion with their army of clones and clowns.

"Being able to read means being able to change yourself more effectively, ..it means being being able to see yourself differently and to empathise with others more fully. That is why literacy and democracy go together."
---Rowan Williams.

You persist with JCO, despite your instincts and reservations. Quite simply because it's written with such directness and honesty (and craft, of course...candidness without dexterity is boring). The odd line here and there strikes you:

"Without meaning, the world is things, and these things multiplied to an infinity."

or, Pascal: "The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the play is; at the last a little earth is thrown upon our head, and that is the end forever. "

You don't believe that, not for a second. The ancient sway of the world; things and people return; we take delight in beholding familiar faces, seen in a new light, one that is as deep as the images produced by memory, that are remembered by heart.


‎"Common names are a kind of time capsule, a record of the powers of observation and literary inventiveness of ordinary people. They log resemblances, uses, sounds, mythic associations, smells, seasonal appearances, kids' games, superstitions, habitats. They're witty, concise, evocative, sometimes even satirical....Here are wild organisms' hues, habits, habitats, histories, and humans' histories and curiosity, too. It's not stretching meanings to say that the vernacular lexicon is part of the ecosystem, a living and growing web which links us with all other species."
---R. Mabey.