The Evening Papers Do Not Say . . .

by David Wemyss (November 2014)
 

      

Here in the UK, the celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recently gave us a series of pleasant but inconsequential television programmes exploring the Scandinavian way of life. As you would expect, cooking featured quite a lot, but so did lightweight cultural commentary about the familiar idea of ‘the Nordic welfare states.’

I watched the programme on Denmark with particular interest. Living in the happiest country in the world, Danes welcome high taxes in return for social cohesion, good schools and universities, high-quality hospitals, cradle-to-grave welfare, green sensibilities, strong and transparent democracy, and a markedly tolerant culture. They really do seem to have been ‘educated for citizenship.’

             

Life is darker than they think, but it’s also richer. You know it is.’  Roy talked of our communist friends. ‘They’re shallow. They can’t feel anything except moral indignation. They’re not human, Lewis. I can’t get on with them anymore.

Now I have to say at this juncture that using the expression ‘sick with God’ immediately narrows the breadth of nuance here. These things are not simply the same thing showing itself in different ways in the febrile imaginations of over-heated literary types. I prefer to say (pace Wittgenstein) that we’re looking at family resemblances between different things, and that, although Roy Calvert was an exciting (fictional) character for me to find, he certainly didn’t catch all the psychological nuances that had made me look out for such types in the first place.

I like to call this a kind of transcendental solitude. It may be what Virginia Woolf had in mind when she talked about ‘the loneliness that is the truth about things.’  But we’re just sending messages in a bottle in a world when fewer and fewer people are finding things on the shore.

You could say that, in the end, the different messages show that the salvific is what human depth desires. The self needs to come to rest in the power grounding it, but, if that power can no longer be believed in, human depth has nowhere to go, and is its own irreducible mystery.

Too often we think a mystery is only a mystery if we already believe it’s been half-solved.

Of course some will say that ‘transcendental solitude’ is just an aggrandisement of (what should be) the discovery of the small child that he or she just is. I suppose I’m not writing for them any more than I would have been writing for Professor Corbett.

But I am writing for those who ‘sort of’ know what I mean. Apposite to this, in his History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger observes that ‘whenever a phenomenological concept is drawn from primordial sources there is a possibility that it may degenerate if communicated in the form of an assertion. It gets understood in an empty way and is passed on accordingly, losing its indigenous character.’

But I can’t say that, although I just did.

_________________________________

David Wemyss graduated in law from the University of Aberdeen in 1977 and worked in local government in that city until he retired in 2011 at the age of 56. He continues to live there with his wife and son. Having been published in a number of journals and magazines over the years, his essays are usually drawn from a mix of middlebrow and highbrow literary interests.

 

To comment on this essay, please click here.

To help New English Review continue to publish interesting essays such as this one, please click here.

If you have enjoyed this essay and want to read more by David Wemyss, please click here.