Soul Measles

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Rupert Brooke on anti-pessimism and the capacity to support goodness:

I'm sorry I didn't write sooner, but I wanted to be able to write down a great attack on your pessimism in abundant and reasoned language, and such a thing takes time and thought. Also, I may agree with you.

What is pessimism? why do you say you are becoming a pessimist? What does it mean? He may (I say to myself) mean that he thinks that the Universe is bad a s a whole, or that it's bad just now, or that, more locally and importantly, things aren't going to get any better in our time and our country, no matter how much we preach Socialism and clean hearts at them.

Is it the last two? Are you telling us that the world is, after all, bad, and, what's more horrible, without enough seeds of good in it? I, writing poetry and reading books and living at Grantchester all day, feel rather doubtful and ignorant about 'the world' - about England, and men, and what they're like. Still, I see some, besides the University gang. I see all these queer provincials in this town, upper and middle and lower class, and God knows they're sterile enough.

But I feel a placid and healthy physician about it all (only I don't know what drugs to recommend). This is because I've such an overflowing (if intermittent) flood of anti-pessimism in me. I'm using the word now in what I expect is its most important sense, of a feeling rather than a reasoned belief. The horror is not in believing the Universe is bad - or even believing the world won't improve - on a reasoned and cool examination of all facts, tendencies and values, so much as in a sort of general feeling that there isn't much potentiality for good in this world, and that anyhow it's a fairly dreary business, - an absence of much appreciation and hope, and a somehow paralysed will for good. As this is a feeling, it may be caused by reason and experience, or more often by loneliness or soul-measles or indigestion or age or anything else. And it can equally be cured by other things than reason - by energy or weather or good people, as well as by a wider ethical grasp. At least, so I've found in the rather slight and temporary fits of depression I've had, in exile or otherwise, lately - or even in an enormous period of Youthful Tragedy with which I started at Cambridge. I have a remedy. It is a dangerous one, but I think very good on the whole; though it may lead to a sterile but ecstatic content, or even to the asylum. In practice, I find, it doesn't - or hasn't yet - make me inefficient. (I am addressing an Adult School on Sunday. I have started a group for studying the Minority Report here. I am going to Cambridge in a week to oversee, with the light of pure reason, the powerful energies of those who are setting forth the new Fabian Rooms, - and later, to put the rising generation, Fabian and otherwise, on the way of Light, all next term.)

The remedy is Mysticism or Life, I'm not sure which. Do not leap or turn pale at the word Mysticism, I do not mean any religious thing, or any form of belief. I still burn and torture Christians daily. It is merely the feeling - or a kindred one - which underlay the mysticism of the wicked mystics, only I refuse to be cheated by the feeling into any kind of belief. They were convinced by it that the world was very good, or that the Universe was one, or that God existed. I don't any the more believe the world to be good. Only I do get rid of the despair that it isn't - and I certainly seem to see additional possibilities of its getting better.

It consists in just looking at people and things as themselves - neither as useful nor moral nor ugly nor anything else; but just as being. At least, that's a philosophical description of it. What happens is that I suddenly feel the extraordinary value and importance of everybody I meet, and almost everything I see. In things I am moved in this way especially by some things; but in people by almost all people. That is, when the mood is on me. I roam about places - yesterday I did it even in Birmingham!- and sit in trains and see the essential glory and beauty of all the people I meet. I can watch a dirty middle-aged tradesman in a railway carriage for hours, and love every dirty greasy sulky wrinkle in his weak chin and every button on his spotted unclean waistcoat. I know their states of mind are bad. But I'm so much occupied with their being there at all, that I don't have time to think of that. I tell you that a Birmingham gouty Tariff Reform fifth-rate business man is splendid and immortal and desirable.

It's the same about the things of ordinary life. Half an hour's roaming about a street or village or railway-station shows so much beauty that it's impossible to be anything but wild with suppressed exhilaration. And it's not only beauty and beautiful things. in a flicker of sunlight on a blank wall, or a reach of muddy pavement, or smoke from an engine at night, there's a sudden significance and importance and inspiration that makes the breath stop with a gulp of certainty and happiness. It's not that the wall or the smoke seem important for anything, or suddenly reveal any general statement, or are rationally seen to be good or beautiful in themselves, - only that for you they're perfect and unique. It's like being in love with a person...one is extraordinarily excited that the person, exactly as he is, uniquely and splendidly just exists. It's a feeling, not a belief. Only it's a feeling that has amazing results. I suppose my occupation is being in love with the universe - or (for it's an important difference), with certain spots and moments and points of it.

I wish to God I could express myself. I have a vague notion that this is all very incoherent. but the upshot of it is that one's too happy to feel pessimistic; and too much impressed by the immense value and potentialities of everything to believe in pessimism - for the following reason, and in the following sense. Every action, one knows (as a good Determinist), has an eternal effect. And every action, therefore, which leads on the whole to good, is frightfully important. For the good mystic knows how jolly 'good' is. It is not a question of either getting to Utopia in the year 2000 or not. There'll be so much good then, and so much evil. And we can affect it. There - from the purely rational point of view - is the beginning and end of the whole matter. It oughtn't to make any difference to our efforts whether the good in 2000 AD will be a lot greater than it is now, or a little greater, or less. In any case, the amount of good we can cause by doing something, or can subtract by not doing it, remains about the same. And that is all that ought to matter....

The whole machinery of life, and the minds of every class and kind of man, change beyond recognition every generation. I don't know that 'Progress' is certain. All I know is that change is. These solid solemn provincials, and old maids, and business men, and all the immovable system of things I see round me, will vanish like smoke. All this present overwhelming reality will be as dead and odd and fantastic as crinolines or 'a dish of tay.' Something will be in its place, inevitably. And what that something will be, depends on me. With such superb work to do, and with the wild adventure of it all, and with the other minutes (too many of them) given to the enchantment of being even for a moment alive in a world of real matter (not that imitation, gilt, stuff one gets in Heaven) and actual people,- I have no time now to be a pessimist.

-- Rupert Brooke to F. H. Keeling, Sept 20th-23rd, 1910

Sermon

Soul Measles: Diagnosis and Treatment
or
The Importance of Being Earnest
or
The Secret of the Fountain of Youth

Rupert Brooke was one of Britain's generation that greased the grinding cogs in the engine of death that was World War I. He was part of a group of artists: musicians, composers, writers and poets - he was a poet, who joined up at the same time. Eddie Marsh, a close friend to all of them, was also cabinet minister Winston Churchill's secretary. Eddie got them all into the same regiment, one formed up to initiate a second front and come at the Germans from the rear. They were sent to Gallipolli, an infamously devastating defeat. All but one of his group of friends were killed there. Rupert predeceased them all, dying of septicemia en route. He was buried by his friends on the Greek island of Skyros in a spot where a few days before they had all spent an idyllic afternoon. Winston Churchill, who knew and admired him, wrote his eulogy in the London Times.

Rupert died early enough in the war that he is one of the few poets of his generation whose poetry did not move from idealism to condemnation of the uselessness, grief and inhumanity of the war. He is the poet well known for his nationalistic and tragically prophetic poem of 1914, The Soldier:

"If I should die, think only this of me: that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed; a dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, gave, once her flowers to love, her ways to roam, a body of England's, breathing English air, washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home."

Not all of Rupert's ideas or choices in life were compelling. In addition to his naive take on the war, he broke the hearts of a number of women he was simultaneously involved with by his death, which revealed them to each other. But his poetry has endured because of how deeply he perceived the beauty and preciousness of life. His poem The Soldier is just one of many which celebrate how place and people and traditions and nature nurture and shape us.

Yet with all the perception of beauty and grace that was in not only his poetry but also his personal reflections such as our reading, his struggles were not with war or even death - his struggle was with life. His poems also reveal how deeply wounded he was by the betrayals and strange impulses to hurt or reject that he felt in himself and others. These marked and tormented him. He believed in love but not in its endurance. He believed in loyalty above all; small betrayals by himself or others scarred him to the core. He was a social being: articulate, handsome, charming, funny, deeply and lastingly connected to childhood and school friends, who seemed only able to heal himself alone. Without solitude he could neither write nor abide the world.

He was a kindred spirit to we Unitarian Universalists in his belief in examining and re-examining life for meaning and a path to understand and living right. Poetry was his religion, and as in our own faith, revelation was never sealed. Though he could not live up to his own standards, indeed it is questionable whether anyone could, he never tired of seeking them, nor of aspiring towards them. He said once: "'There are only three things in the world....One is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry!" A Cambridge friend, Hugh Dalton, wrote in Rupert in a posthumous memoir:

"'... I remember his saying that at rare moments he had glimpses of what poetry really meant, how it solved all problems of conduct and settled all questions of values. Moreover, it kept men young, he thought. One night we were sitting at a high window overlooking King's Parade. We had been discussing some philosophical point about the nature of Beauty, when we saw and heard some drunken members of another college going home. 'Those fellows,' he said, 'would think us very old if they had been in this room tonight, but when they go down and sit on office stools, they will grow old quite suddenly, and many years hence we shall still be talking and thinking about these sorts of things, and we shall still be young.'" - Hugh Dalton on Rupert Brook in Memoir, p. xxxi

I first thought of preaching about Rupert and living poetry, in answer to an obnoxious article in the New York Times last summer. The article was a snide little piece on the cover of the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday paper the first weekend in August. It was called "How to tell a bad movie from a truly bad movie. In the opinion of the two authors, "plenty of films, such as They Saved Hitler's Brain, were crummy but fun. The worst were all alike: pompous, pretentious and preachy. Such film included Saving Private Ryan, anything with Juliette Binoche, any film directed by a woman and proud of it, any film positively reviewed by National Public Radio. The writers must've thought they were funny. More than they were funny, they were epitomizing the obnoxious, callous, take-nothing-seriously-and-take-no-prisoners style that seemed to suffuse much of contemporary journalism and commentary and humor lately in America. Nothing was too rude to say of anything or anyone, nothing deserved thoughful review, humor was more important than depth, and dismissive criticism was much more important that constructive suggestion.

Fed up, I planned to preach an attack on cynicism. The very tone of the nation seemed so cynical, self-satisfied and self-centered; nothing was more important than not being anybody's dupe. I was primed to lambast people, afflict the comfortable, especially those two writers and the attitude they represent. However we may feel about war itself, for most Americans, who well-remembered the losses of World War I, World War II was about self-sacrifice, rooted in a sense that there was something more important than oneself. Now to read people sneering at representations of that sacrifice...my notes from then include the sentence "we don't know how to believe in something when there really is something worth believing in."

Of course, I didn't preach that sermon. World events killed, or healed, or undermined simple cynicism. We learned or remembered what grief larger than only our own feels like, and heard stories of heroism and sacrifice and terrible choices that made cynicism superficial. Well, scratch a cynic and you find an idealist. Cynicism is, after all, our response to being hurt. We think of idealism as an immature, inexperienced element in people and society. But in fact, it may be cynicism that is immature. Being idealistic requires not naiveté but strength and commitment. Cynicism allows us to be self-serving and shallow, to be safe and static - as a child may be safe and self-oriented.

We don't need to concern ourselves about cynicism any more, at least not yet. But we do need to monitor compassion-fatigue in ourselves and our nation. World and local realities continue to challenge us, to require us to change and learn and it can be hard to maintain a sense of connection and commitment to people. Our own lives require our time and attention - how do we remember to love a stranger, to keep reaching out to understand those who are different, to retain our focus on what we are doing around the world and up the street by what we do or do not?

Though the history of the world shows us again and again the power of an idea or an individual to change things forever, we constantly lose our sense of that reality - the power of a person, of a value - in our own everyday lives. What can help us keep that focus outward as much as inward. What offers us the energy to keep caring? Well, community, this community, can renew that in us. That is an important part of what we do here in our programs and worship and religious education for all ages.

But re-reading Rupert's words recently reminded me that his vision was not just against the pessimism that can dominate a nation, but also the pessimism that can dominate a person. None of us is free of moments of fear or despair or even hatred. If none of us is free of such pettiness and prejudice, what hope is there? There is plenty of hope, and causes for hope. Among the many means to rejuvenate our sense of love and connection to each other, even strangers, in the world, this morning I commend to you the solution Rupert Brooke proposed. He was right. There is that within us, despite the pain and struggle and fear we each face in life, that joins us with the world and others around us and can renew in us a sense of wonder, even awe, even love and the courage to love, merely sitting across the way from a stranger on a train or bus or public bench.

Rupert Brooke is not just a historical character, he really lived. He really felt the things he wrote about. He wondered what the world would be like now. We hear his words or read them on a page, and we know the answer to his question, we know what the world is like now. We know that what he and others of his generation did before they died does affect us. And the gift he offers is not his death, nor even the war he died in, but his life and the earnestness of his soul. The beauty of Rupert's cure for soul-measles or pessimism is his earnestness, his persistent capacity to look beyond himself and see and love a thing or a person for itself and the inherent grace and dignity in every living thing. His vision is lucid and shining as any Christmas star. He is right, living poetry, enmeshing ourselves in life and its meaning, does keep us young. Cynics, though they may be immature in capacities, are old in spirit, world-weary. In our life of faith, which holds us to as much searching and sharing as we can stand, with Rupert and Hugh many years hence may we still be talking and thinking about these sorts of things, and thus may we still be young.