MY ROOM is such a clutter of so many things — books, paintings and pictures, pens and paper, stones, bits of driftwood, favourite old pipes, all of them the locus, the portal, the tangible storehouse of particular memories, and moments of significance — that it’s hard to select only three when so many suggest themselves. Let me take three that come handy.
We’ll start with a beloved book, which happens to be on my desk now. It’s G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, first published in 1908: the book through which he describes how he discovered, or slightly rediscovered, his Christian faith. I used to be fortunate to read this book while still an atheist, shading perhaps into an agnostic, starting to wonder if I needs to be sceptical about my scepticism. I’ll always remember reading for the primary time that passage towards the tip of the book, when he writes of the Passion: “In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is simple to debate. . . But in that terrific tale of the Passion there’s a definite emotional suggestion that the creator of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. . . God was forsaken of God. . . let the atheists themselves select a god. They will find just one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; just one religion through which God seemed for an easy to be an atheist.”
My copy is an edition of 1943, much worn, its green card covers and coarse paper a witness to wartime economy. The inscription in it comes from the yr after the war: “To Ralph from Harold, Christmas 1946.” My father had given it to his youngest brother, just as he — like me, 30 years later — was going up to college. After my father died, my uncle passed this copy on to me as a keepsake, knowing how much the book meant to me, and had meant to him when, like me, he had read it in his twenties.
Also among the many clutter on my desk is somewhat picket box with a sliding lid, the letters “WB” inscribed on it. Inside is a fraction of Portland stone, and, beside it, somewhat scroll signed by Lida Cardozo Kindersley. The stone is an off-cut from the identical piece of Portland stone which she shaped into the gorgeous latest gravestone for William Blake, when his body was “rediscovered”. Her inscription on that gravestone, cut in the gorgeous lettering for which her workshop is renowned, has these lines from Blake’s prophetic poem “Jerusalem”:
I provide you with the tip of a golden string;
Only wind it right into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
My whole life, and definitely my poetic and spiritual life, has been following the thread of that golden string, noticing that the moments of insight and revelation — the moments once you sense the sunshine behind the veil, when the things of this world are transfigured, because the veil is lifted — should not random or disconnected, but threaded together; “a pattern of timeless moments”, as one other poet put it. One of those timeless moments was after I stood in Bunhill Fields at the disclosing of the stone. I used to be certainly one of the speakers on that occasion, which was how I got here to be given my little fragment of Portland stone; nevertheless it was a joy to see how diverse a crowd was drawn to that event: people from every walk of life, from all faiths and none, finding common ground in visionary Blake, a prophet for our times.
My third article, also tied in closely with an important visionary author, is a card that I used to be sent, as a thank-you for giving an address in Hereford to the Traherne Society. The card shows Tom Denny’s astonishing memorial window to Traherne in Hereford Cathedral: a radiant sun illuminates and transfigures the poet and the entire valley through which he stands with upturned palms, giving praise. To stand in front of that window is to see, as Traherne did, all of the strange things of the world transfigured in the sunshine of heaven: “The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never needs to be reaped, nor was ever sown. . . The dust and stones of the road were as precious as gold . . . all things abided eternally as they were of their proper places. Eternity was manifest within the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind every thing appeared which talked with my expectation and moved my desire.”
