Read Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century Online

Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (22 page)

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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Page 55
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
18
The two strategies bear a kind of symbiotic relationship to each other, for the images of light are almost always accompanied by an insistence that it is unlike any earthly light: it does not illuminate anything except itself:
The soul delighted unspeakably therein, yet it beholdeth naught which can be related by the tongue or imagined in the heart. It seeth nothing, yet seeth all things, because it beholdeth this Good darklyand the more darkly and secretly the Good is seen, the more certain is it, and excellent above all other things. Wherefore is all other good which can be seen or imagined doubtless less than this, because all the rest is darkness.
19
The rest is darkness: yet the light itself is a kind of darkness. Because communion with the divine shuts out all earthly interests, even all awareness of anything else, it can be compared with darkness as well as with light. Hence Vaughan's famous lines:
There is in God (some say)
A deep but dazzling darkness
20
lines aptly chosen by Patrick Grant to provide the title of the anthology of mystical writing from which I have taken these extracts:
A Dazzling Darkness
Now such communion, though infinitely more precious to the mystic than any human experience, is quite useless as a cure for human ills. Lewis realized this, and said so with characteristic bluntness:
If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness
 
Page 56
must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.
Lewis's account of grief can stand as an emphatic Christian alternative to, even a contemptuous dismissal of, the recognition of friends in heaven, a standard by which to look at such attempts at comfort, and lay them aside as merely bogus. It is a modern traditionalist's dismissal of Victorian sentimentality, but it can be matched from the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Fry, grieving for her young daughter Betsy, drew great consolation from her religious faith (and even uses the word "consolation") but she was aware of its limitations:
Although faith tells us that the spirit is indeed fled from its earthly house, yet the distress felt in parting with the body, I can hardly describe; for the body of little children, their innocent and beautiful faces and forms, we are prone to delight in; and there is a sort of personal attachment towards little children, that partakes of the nature of animal life, which I believe is hardly to be described, but only fully known to parents.
21
Lewis, whom one would not think of as intuitively aware of women's feelings, turns out to be uncannily accurate in his account of a mother's "natural unhappiness" (Fry's "distress felt in parting with the body"). Religious faith may transcend this grief but cannot eliminate it.
Freud, then, and Lewis: unlikely allies. And not really allies, for though they both reject a view of religion as consolation, they do so for opposite reasons: the lower reason and the higher reason? or the honest reason and another form of wish-fulfillment? No scholarly study can settle that for us.
Reversals
In discussing Coleridge's epitaphs I used the term "reversal" to claim that the same poem could, if we shift the way we look at it, turn into something like its opposite. A well-known graphic figure, that of the duck-rabbit, produces this effect in experiments on perception. A blink or other minor stimulus can cause the long ears to turn into a bill and, thus, the same drawing to turn from one animal into the other. Such a cartoon figure, for
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