This solemn tenderness for life

I am sitting outdoors with coffee and a book, but I have set the book aside for now and am reading the sky instead. Rain is forecast and I want to see it in. The distant fells are spilling over with mist and looking gloomy, but just here the sky retains a soft, hopeful glow. Time passes, seems to slow. I’m wondering if the rain will pass us by. But then the woodland, up the hill, raises a sigh as the wind comes down the valley. The temperature falls, the leaves show silver, and the rain comes on.

For a moment, before I gather my things and move indoors, there is a feeling of connection. It is a deepening, an expansiveness, a feeling I am no longer this small creature, this accident of evolution. There is a part of me that makes up a mysterious whole with the universe. Except, it’s more than that, more than a feeling I mean. It’s a certainty. It passes, of course, as these things do, but I am left for a time at peace with our crazy world. It is what the writer JB Priestley, who knew this valley long before my time, once called a solemn tenderness for life.

Anyone who has spent time in the countryside, in nature, has felt the same thing. It’s why we do it. It is one of the gentler of those moments of participation that are so hard to put into words. A sunset will do it, or a walk across the tops with a cloud inversion at our feet. A walk through an upland hay meadow, aglow with buttercups, or even a drive to work on a fresh spring morning, if our head’s in the right place. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s not automatic. We seem to have to bring something of ourselves to the moment as well. We have to relax into it, or at least have the heart to let it in when it comes calling.

Such moments stand in contrast to the times, of course. I don’t know if things are truly any worse than in times past, or if it just feels that way. But the stories the world is telling me now definitely speak the language of defeat. We are in decline. Our economics, politics, even the fabric of our societies are worn so thin we seem in danger of falling through into a despair that not even our great-grandparents knew. And it has been like this for decades – these vexed narratives telling us how much we have lost. It offends our sensibilities because our instincts, as people, are to grow, to ripen, to harvest the fruits of a life, not to wither on the vine.

Our opinions regarding what it is that thwarts our human and humane ambitions will vary depending on our politics. But what we seem to have in common is a growing bewilderment that there is little we can do and no truly wise men coming to our rescue. As for the nature of our being and the meaning of our lives, there things are even worse. Certain stories told in the name of science suggest we are little more than our genes, that consciousness itself is an illusion, and that meaning is something we invent to help us get by. Likewise, much contemporary philosophy appears content merely to acknowledge how difficult life is, and that we make our way as best we can. And if that is all there is, then fair enough, our defeat is complete. We are routed, body and soul.

But can this be right?

From a purely materialist perspective, we have not a lot going for us. And I know these moments of participation can be explained away as nothing more than the activity of the brain. But my own feeling is that we cannot so easily discount a thing as wholly positive as that, just because it seems to serve no clear evolutionary purpose. By my rules, the experience points the way to a more wholesome future, if we can only find a way to engage with it. But we also need to be careful.

The Romantics of the nineteenth century came this way, and they asked what it would be like to live in a world where, instead of all the life-shrinking rhetoric, and the encroach of the material and the profane, everyone could feel like that all the time. These sublime moments of participation, I mean. But we must remember many a Romantic has paid dearly for those visions, falling into despair when the old grey world fought back and laughed at what they took so seriously.

So I’m not talking about losing our minds to it. Aldous Huxley had a point when he cautioned us that while there would be no more wars, there would be no civilisation either. And yes, he was talking about LSD trips, but the same principle applies. We do not want to blow the doors of perception off their hinges. We only want to open them a crack – let some more of the light inside, illuminate the darkness a little, and see how we go.

Exploring the question a little deeper, then, we might ask whether we really are living in an age of defeat, or whether we are simply not yet human enough to prevent ourselves from drowning in the complexity of our own civilisation, and our own growing self-awareness. The danger lies in misinterpreting the direction these moments of participation are pointing. They are not inviting us to disengage from the materiality of life in exchange for a purer metaphysics of the mind. Because to dwell there among the fairy dust, we disappear from life, where we are of no use to our benighted fellows.

Then, the opposite is also true. There is an equal comfort to be had from not engaging with these ideas at all. Better to go on living with the volume of ourselves turned down, forever distracted by the discordant jangle of everydayness, than to heed the call of these moments. And yet it seems the door to a greater engagement with the world – this solemn tenderness for life – is already open. It is just that we refuse to enter.

The rain comes on heavier now, rattles against the glass, looks bleak. It speaks once more of the age of defeat, when only moments ago it was hinting at something very different, the only difference between then and now being something in myself. If only I could remember what it was. But like a dream it slips away on waking. And, like the Cheshire Cat, only the smile remains.