{Emptiness of the Spirit}[4th September 1988]

[Redbook5:336-341][19880904:2022]{Emptiness of the Spirit}[4th September 1988]

.2022

Interestingly, after the week (or thereabouts) off,* the result has not, except patchily, been depression, as it has often been in the past, but emptiness** – exactly what I have been writing about in the booklet draft (temporarily left a week ago last Friday, I think). I surmise that this is a mark of my beginning to overcome, or leave, the shadow of the intervening years – the second quarter-cycle of my life, and perhaps some previous experiences.

I speculate that the Emptiness – which I recall*** from the first Quarter-cycle [sic], and perhaps a little later – is filled according to the disposition of the Individual: if resentment**** is near to the surface, it fills the Emptiness with depression.# This is, if my recollection is correct, all that I have known to fill the Emptiness for many years.

But before that the Emptiness was filled with a purer quality, a kind of longing which is, I think, very close to Love; can easily fix itself on another, in Love; was expressed for me just now by [Rudyard] Kipling’s poem ‘Merrow Down’,#** which I assume was written after the death of his own young daughter#*** – if not, it was tragically prophetic (and did Tolkien read it?);#**** and is I believe most purely manifested as the longing of the Spirit of God in Man for God the Spirit: the Love of the Spirit. That knowledge, that awareness of Unity instantly transforms the Emptiness: without the Knowledge,## the Emptiness is torture; with (and in) the Knowledge, the Emptiness is blessed. And I am blessed to have rediscovered it, under layers of Separation.

*[ie away from writing &c.; see [Redbook5:335][19880904:1210]{Intuition}[4th September 1988]]

**{cf II. [[Redbook2:129-132][19780829:2025d]{Publication [continued]}[29^th August 1978]] 131 ‘Vacant Force’}

***[[Redbook1:206][19710612]{Vacant Possession}[12th June 1971]; & cf

[Redbook1:196A][19710206][Emptiness][6th February 1971], &

[Redbook2:129-132][19780829:2025d]{Publication [continued (5)]}[29^th August 1978]]

****(or a similar emotion)

#*But see VI.[] ….

#**I found it by chance after looking up ‘Rahere’ [[[Redbook5:345][19880904:2022g]{Emptiness of the Spirit (2)}[continued (3)][5th September 1988]]]

{(See [[Redbook5:340-341][19880904:2022g]{Emptiness of the Spirit}[continued (7)][4th September 1988]] p340-41)} [for text & further notes]

#***Probably XnotX {[–]wrong} – it is in ‘Just So Stories’, which seems to have been reprinted unamended since the First Edition in 1902 <880905>

(Kipling was married in 1892 and settled in Sussex in 1902.)

Josephine his eldest daughter died of pneumonia in New York in 1899: ‘the little girl who was “all the world to me” (cf [] 341) as he had been writing to his old friend Stalky … only the day before he was struck down.’ (T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement] 19901221-27:1368) <901225> SEE [[[Redbook5:340-341][19880904:2022g]{Emptiness of the Spirit}[continued (7)][4th September 1988] &fn on p]341 [for more on this].

[Joseph Rudyard Kipling; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He was born in India, which inspired much of his work….. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known." In 1907, at the age of 41, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize and its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, both of which he declined. Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century. (Wikipedia)]

#****(Tolkien is riddled with this longing for the past, particularly for the enchanted spirits who belong to it; and often in similar metre and imagery.)
{(}cf also AE Housman, ‘A Shropshire Lad’: ‘On Wenlock Edge….’{)}

[

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;

His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger

When Uricon the city stood:

'Tis the old wind in the old anger,

But then it threshed another wood.

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman

At yonder heaving hill would stare:

The blood that warms an English yeoman,

The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,

Through him the gale of life blew high;

The tree of man was never quiet:

Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:

To-day the Roman and his trouble

Are ashes under Uricon.

]

[Alfred Edward Housman; 26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936), usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside. Their beauty, simplicity and distinctive imagery appealed strongly to Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers both before and after the First World War. Through their song-settings, the poems became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself. Housman was one of the foremost classicists of his age and has been ranked as one of the greatest scholars who ever lived. He established his reputation publishing as a private scholar and, on the strength and quality of his work, was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and then at the University of Cambridge. His editions of Juvenal, Manilius and Lucan are still considered authoritative. (Wikipedia)]

[John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE FRSL; (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor who is best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was at one time a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.(Wikipedia)]

##[cf [Redbook5:335][19880904:1210]{Intuition}[4th September 1988]]

[Not to be confused with The Knowledge required of licensed London black-cab drivers, of the road-atlas of London]

[continues]

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