'Refuges, Lights, Visions, Deep Sources'

I have not read Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) though I plan to now that a reader has sent me an interesting passage from the book. “This reminded me of what you do with your blog,” he writes. “I think of Anecdotal Evidence as a resource, like a public utility.” Damn. That has never been my intent, but once you’ve written something people make of it what they wish. Here are Murdoch’s words as transcribed by my reader: 

“We are turning here to an inexhaustible and familiar field of human resources. Every individual has a collection of such things which might be indicated by various names and images. I have already used some: refuges, lights, visions, deep sources, pure sources, protections, strongholds, footholds, icons, starting points, sacraments, pearls of great price. Our moral consciousness is full of such imagery, kinaesthetic, visual, literary, traditional, verbal and non-verbal, and is full too of images of darkness, of stumbling, falling, sinking, drowning.”

 

That’s close to how I think of literature and the role it plays in the lives of serious readers. I’m reminded of this passage from Geoffrey Hill’s The Triumph of Love (1998), section CXLVIII, narrated in the tongue-in-cheek voice of Hill the schoolmaster: 

                                                “I ask you:

what are poems for? They are to console us

with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.

Let us commit that to our dust. What

ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad

and angry consolation. What is

the poem? What figures? Say,

a sad and angry consolation. That’s

beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry

consolation.”