Another colloquy between Shadian critic and editor Prof. Charles
Kinbote and poet Prof. John Shade, here in the footnote to line 549:
Line 549: While snubbing gods including the big G
Here indeed is the
Gist of the matter. And this, I think, not only the institute (see line 517)
but our poet himself missed. For a Christian, no Beyond is acceptable or imaginable
without the participation of God in our eternal destiny, and this in turn implies
a condign punishment far every sin, great and small. My little diary happens to
contain a few jottings referring to a conversation the poet and I had on June
23 “on my terrace after a game of chess, a draw.” I transcribe them here only
because they cast a fascinating light on his attitude toward the subject.
I had mentioned - I do
not recall in what connection - certain differences between my Church and his.
It should be noted that our Zemblan brand of Protestantism is rather closely
related to the “higher” churches of the Anglican Communion, but has some
magnificent peculiarities of its own. The Reformation with us had been headed
by a composer of genius; our liturgy is penetrated with rich music; our boy choirs
are the sweetest in the world. Sybil Shade came from a Catholic family but since
early girlhood developed, as she told me herself, “a religion of her own” - which
is generally synonymous, at the best, with a half-hearted attachment to some half-heathen
sect or, at the worst, with tepid atheism. She had weaned her husband not only
from the Episcopal Church of his fathers, but from all forms of sacramental worship.
We happened to start
speaking of the general present-day nebulation of the notion of “sin,” of its
confusion with the much more carnally colored ideal of “crime,” and I alluded
briefly to my childhood contacts with certain rituals of our church. Confession
with us is auricular and is conducted in a richly ornamented recess, the confessionist
holding a lighted taper and standing with it beside the priest's highbacked seat
which is shaped almost exactly as the coronation chair of a Scottish king.
Little polite boy that I was, I always feared to stain his purple-black sleeve with
the scalding tears of wax that kept dripping onto my knuckles, forming there tight
little crusts, and I was fascinated by the illumed concavity of his ear resembling
a seashell or a glossy orchid, a convoluted receptacle that seemed much too
large for the disposal of my peccadilloes.
SHADE: All the seven
deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust and Sloth,
poetry might never have been born.
KINBOTE: Is it fair to
base objections upon obsolete terminology?
SHADE: All religions
are based upon obsolete terminology.
KINBOTE: What we term
Original Sin can never grow obsolete.
SHADE: I know nothing
about that. In fact when I was small I thought it meant Cain killing Abel.
Personally, I am with the old snuff-takers: L'homme est né bon.
KINBOTE: Yet
disobeying the Divine Will is a fundamental definition of Sin.
SHADE: I cannot
disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right
to deny.
KINBOTE: Tut-tut. Do
you also deny that there are sins?
SHADE: I can name only
two: murder, and the deliberate infliction of pain.
KINBOTE: Then a man
spending his life in absolute solitude could not be a sinner?
SHADE: He could
torture animals. He could poison the springs on his island. He could denounce
an innocent man in a posthumous manifesto.
KINBOTE: And so the
password is -?
SHADE: Pity.
KINBOTE: But who
instilled it in us, John? Who is the Judge of life, and the Designer of death?
SHADE: Life is a great
surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
KINBOTE: Now I have
caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and
administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably
dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation, Throughout
eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no
appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote's ghost,
poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere
- oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial
rule in the preposterous game of nature - if there be any rules.
SHADE: There are rules
in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance.
KINBOTE: I had in mind
diabolical rules likely to be broken by the other party as soon as we come to
understand them. That is why goetic magic does not always work. The demons in
their prismatic malice betray the agreement between us and them, and we are
again in the chaos of chance. Even if we temper Chance with Necessity and allow
godless determinism, the mechanism of cause and effect, to provide our souls
after death with the dubious solace of metastatistics, we still have to reckon
with the individual mishap, the thousand and second highway accident of those
scheduled for independence Day in Hades. No-no, if we want to be serious about
the hereafter let us not begin by degrading it to the level of a
science-fiction yarn or a spiritualistic case history. The ideal of one's soul
plunging into limitless and chaotic afterlife with no Providence to direct her –
SHADE: There is always
a psychopompos around the corner, isn't there?
KINBOTE: Not around that corner,
John. With no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the
experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling
childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting
mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars. Such an idea is not to be
entertained one instant by the religious mind. How much more intelligent it is
- even from a proud infidel's point of view! - to accept God's Presence - a
faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and
a dazzling radiance after it? I too, I too, my dear John, have been assailed in
my time by religious doubts. The church helped me to fight them off. It also
helped me not to ask too much, not to demand too clear an image of what is
unimaginable. St. Augustine said –
SHADE: Why must one always quote
St. Augustine to me?
KINBOTE: As St.
Augustine said, “One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is.” I
think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the
earth in one's rattling throat, not the black hum in one's ears fading to nothing
in nothing. I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and
that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In
trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute,
or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority.
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