THE second summer ceases, the leaves splatter on the grass, the clocks go back. The world stands still. It is locked in concepts that no longer work. The international young speak another language into their phones. The politicians have theirs written for them — often over and over again to get it right. Which it rarely is.
The comedy of the party conference becomes less amusing. Voltaire’s world was crazy enough, heaven knows. Did his anti-hero advocate escapism when he told us to turn our backs on it and work in the garden? Far from it. He was telling us to do something useful, to be quiet, to think.
Meanwhile, Mammon is in confusion here and now, just as it was for Candide, who also said: “Optimism is a mania for maintaining that all is well when things are going badly.” The youthful encampments at the centre of capital cities are far ahead of anything the speechwriters can produce. I think of Jesus on the road.
And I am not cut off from thought when I bring the tender plants inside; for the warmth has gone and a crispness is in the air. I retire them to the brick-lined larder, where ropes of onions dangle from hooks and where, through a north window, they can watch the valley.
This year’s plum jam shines on the shelf. Generations of preserves have come and gone, but have left their smell. It is both sumptuous and deathly. Friends breathe it in; for it is not something you will find in today’s fridge, but Proustian in its power to return the past. Apples lie in regimental rows. Some will rot; some will last.
Family heirlooms, such as Mother’s scales, sit on a droopy shelf. The white cat prances aloft on whitewashed beams — not, I trust, smelling a mouse. Spiders are about. I think of the tent statement being made on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, the intelligent tent-dwellers, the eloquence of what is being said without speaking. To misquote what Wren’s son said of his father: “If you would see what men have done to the economy, look around.”
A tented encampment in the City — all the great cities — the accusing young faces. What a sight! One to take home with you on the train. And as for all those wildly extravagant ministerial trips, might not the business be done on the screen? What we have been witnessing seems less wicked than ridiculous, a kind of theatre of the absurd.
Last Sunday, I went to Selwyn College, Cambridge, to preach on the Saxon saints at choral evensong. Utterly beautiful. I talked about the Fens’ being our “desert”, and about Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel The Corner That Held Them, in which three medieval women escape the attentions of illiterate knights to found a cell — as in the seventh century had St Etheldreda, who chose a slight eminence called the Isle of Eels.
The choir sang a Bruckner introit, and we sang “Christ is made the sure foundation”, and I imagined the youthful George Selwyn sailing to New Zealand to take the Church of England to the Maoris, and learning their language en route.
My point was to underline the reality of their patron saint to the young worshippers; for Saxon women with somehow vague names have a way of retreating into the shadows. If you would see her monument, look at Ely Cathedral.