Future historians will say, I think, that the great event of the twentieth century was the impact of the Western civilization upon all the other living societies of the world of that day.
But if the impact of the West on other cultures is the really important historical fact of our time, then virtually none of us is in history. For we are not subjectively cognizant of this impact of the West upon other cultures or of the impact of other cultures upon the West.
A similar case in point is the thirteenth century, which is generally regarded by modern historians as one of the great golden ages of the human spirit, the age of scholasticism and the great cathedrals. Yet if you read the works of any of the moralists, the people who were the contemporaries of St Thomas Aquinas and the cathedral builders, you find that all of them are agreed that their age was an age of decadence, that never were men so immoral and delinquent as they were at that time, that they were much stupider than they had been in the past, and so on. Who is right? Were the people who actually lived through the age of scholasticism and of the cathedral builders correct in thinking that theirs was an age of decadence, or are we correct in thinking that it was a golden age when the spirit of man developed in an extraordinary way? This is a question that remains open; probably in a sense both are correct. But what is brought home very clearly is that what we live through subjectively is very far from being the essence of history as perceived by the historians of a future time. We have to be aware of the curious fact that we are living in two worlds and that our individual world does not correspond to the large-scale one with which the philosophical historian deals.
To what extent is individual life, which runs parallel with the great stream of history, in fact within that stream? The most startling fact about every individual life is that a third of it is passed entirely outside of history and even outside of space and time, so far as subjective experience is concerned: a third of our life is passed in sleep, in which we are neither in space nor in time, from an internal point of view. Nor are we in history; we just pass out of the world of history into a state of temporary not-being. It is a state which is absolutely essential to us because in it we take refuge from our hideous egotistic activities in order to regain a certain amount of the health and sanity which we are always undermining by our conscious activities.
Shakespeare has a wonderful passage about sleep in Macbeth:
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
This is exactly what sleep is—the extraordinary accession of new life and new insight which come in during those eight hours out of the twenty-four when we can escape from ourselves. Even the most violent fanatic or the most delinquent gangster is, for a third of his life, in this moment of complete unconsciousness when he can forget his ego, in some way reconciled with the deep, divine source of all being. It is a beautiful thought that even a Hitler, even a Himmler, even a Genghis Kahn, even a Jay Gould, even a Richelieu can forget for a moment his fearful daytime preoccupations.
A very interesting fact, when we come to social organizations, is the discovery that they never sleep. Social organizations live, so to speak, in a state of chronic insomnia; they never depart from themselves nor open themselves up to new accessions of life and insight. They are corrected from time to time only by individuals—who do get the benefit of sleep and therefore can reform social organizations in a rational way. As Mr Bumble said, ‘the law is a ass’—for the reason that the law never sleeps. The Church suffers similarly. There was a hymn which I used to sing very frequently at school, one of whose verses goes,
We thank Thee that Thy Church unsleeping,
While earth moves onward into Light,
Through all the world her watch is keeping,
And rests not now by day or night.
This watchful sleeplessness may account for the deplorable facts of ecclesiastical history. The Church is periodically reformed by people who get inspiration from sleep and from the deep mind, and because of this it remains as sane as it does. But it suffers from the defects of all organizations inasmuch as, not being an organism but merely an organization, it does not have the capacity to retreat and take holidays from itself; it never sleeps and cannot recuperate.
To come back to the individual and the extent to which he is in history, we find that there are a great many periods in his life besides those spent asleep when he is out of history. These include infancy and most of childhood. During those periods he is living an almost wholly private life in which public affairs have very little influence at all. The same is true of old age and decrepitude, and periods of sickness, too; here the individual is so much diminished that he falls out of public life altogether, and because of his narrowed attention and the chronic pain and frustration, he lives quite out of all relationship with the public world. Finally, the most private and non-historical act of all is the act of death, in which there is a narrowing down of attention until the individual is taken totally out of the world of history. It is true that there have been eminent men who have tried to remain historical even on their death bed. There is a very painful story about Daniel Webster, who talked excessively to his friends while he was dying and wound up by asking, ‘Have I said anything unworthy of Daniel Webster?’ It seems to be a terrible thing that a man at this moment of life should feel it necessary to be still a public, historical figure, to worry about whether he was still worthy of his own reputation.
When we add up all the periods during which we are out of history—the period of sleep, the period of infancy, the period of extreme old age and decrepitude, and the period of sickness—we find that out of the average seventy-year life span the individual probably spends about forty years completely outside of history. He just isn’t there at all in relation to the grand historical generalizations which sociologists and historians make.
Even as a mature and self-conscious being, however, the individual spends a great deal of time in a life which is purely private and not historical. The definition of private life which I like the best is one given by the Russian essayist Vasili Rozanov about thirty or forty years ago. He said that private life is ‘picking your nose, and looking at the sunset’. This is a very beautiful definition; if you interpret it in a more general way, you see that what it really means is that private life consists in enjoying your purely physiological reactions and your aesthetic and inspirational reactions. Naturally we tend to rationalize and explain these experiences in terms of the prevailing culture. Nevertheless they do remain amazingly private and apart from the general historical movement of the time in which we live.
It seems to me worthwhile to look at the case histories of some poets and other artists in relation to the time in which they lived. Wordsworth wrote his Lyrical Ballads, the whole of The Prelude, and the great odes (including the ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’) between 1795 and 1807, that is to say, at the height of what was until very recent times the most overwhelming period of change in European history—the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which inaugurated the modern epoch. Although Wordsworth talks in The Prelude about his reactions to the French Revolution, the really significant thing about all this mass of poetry is its nature mysticism, which is what appeals to us, what makes Wordsworth live and seem important in the modern world.
One of Wordsworth’s contemporaries was Jane Austen; Pride and Prejudice was written in 1796 and the other novels between 1811 and 1816. Yet not only was Jane Austen’s life hardly affected by the considerable events going on in the world around her, practically all her characters remained completely unaffected. Once or twice there is a faint hint—some of the men may be in uniform—but that is about all. It is remarkable to think that these novels, with their immensely intimate and ironical analysis of the family life of every day, should have been written in the midst of the most fantastic upheaval of modern times.
Another example—a man I happen to have been much interested in at one time, was the French philosopher Maine de Biran, the greatest metaphysician of the eighteenth century. We know a great deal about his private life because he left a very detailed diary covering almost every year of his adult life. It is interesting to find what was going on in Maine de Biran’s mind in the early summer of 1794, which was the year of the execution of
