Music For Yoga And Other Joys Book Pdf PORTABLE

This book is written partly in answer to requests that I would tell howI passed from Atheism to Christianity and partly to correct one or twofalse notions that seem to have got about. How far the story matters toanyone but myself depends on the degree to which others have experiencedwhat I call "joy". If it is at all common, a more detailed treatment ofit than has (I believe) been attempted before may be of some use. I havebeen emboldened to write of it because I notice that a man seldommentions what he had supposed to be his most idiosyncratic sensationswithout receiving from at least one (often more) of those present thereply, "What! Have you felt that too? I always thought I was the onlyone."

The story is, I fear, suffocatingly subjective; the kind of thing I havenever written before and shall probably never write again. I have triedso to write the first chapter that those who can't bear such a storywill see at once what they are in for and close the book with the leastwaste of time.C. S. L.ContentsI. The First YearsII. Concentration CampIII. Mountbracken and CampbellIV. I Broaden my MindV. RenaissanceVI. BlooderyVII. Light and ShadeVIII. ReleaseIX. The Great KnockX. Fortune's SmileXI. CheckXII. Guns and Good CompanyXIII. The New LookXIV. CheckmateXV. The BeginningI. The First YearsHappy, but for so happy ill secured. MILTONI was born in the winter of 1898 at Belfast, the son of a solicitor andof a clergyman's daughter. My parents had only two children, both sons,and I was the younger by about three years. Two very different strainshad gone to our making. My father belonged to the first generation ofhis family that reached professional station. His grandfather had been aWelsh farmer; his father, a self-made man, had begun life as a workman,emigrated to Ireland, and ended as a partner in the firm of Macilwaineand Lewis, "Boiler-makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders". My motherwas a Hamilton with many generations of clergymen, lawyers, sailors, andthe like behind her; on her mother's side, through the Warrens, theblood went back to a Norman knight whose bones lie at Battle Abbey. Thetwo families from which I spring were as different in temperament as inorigin. My father's people were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate,and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men wholaughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent forhappiness. The Hamiltons were a cooler race. Their minds were criticaland ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree--wentstraight for it as experienced travellers go for the best seat in atrain. From my earliest years I was aware of the vivid contrast betweenmy mother's cheerful and tranquil affection and the ups and downs of myfather's emotional life, and this bred in me long before I was oldenough to give it a name a certain distrust or dislike of emotion assomething uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous.

Both my parents, by the standards of that time and place, were bookishor "clever" people. My mother had been a promising mathematician in heryouth and a B.A. of Queen's College, Belfast, and before her death wasable to start me both in French and Latin. She was a voracious reader ofgood novels, and I think the Merediths and Tolstoys which I haveinherited were bought for her. My father's tastes were quite different.He was fond of oratory and had himself spoken on political platforms inEngland as a young man; if he had had independent means he wouldcertainly have aimed at a political career. In this, unless his sense ofhonour, which was fine to the point of being Quixotic, had made himunmanageable, he might well have succeeded, for he had many of the giftsonce needed by a Parliamentarian--a fine presence, a resonant voice,great quickness of mind, eloquence, and memory. Trollope's politicalnovels were very dear to him; in following the career of Phineas Finn hewas, as I now suppose, vicariously gratifying his own desires. He wasfond of poetry provided it had elements of rhetoric or pathos, or both;I think Othello was his favourite Shakespearian play. He greatlyenjoyed nearly all humorous authors, from Dickens to W. W. Jacobs, andwas himself, almost without rival, the best raconteur I have everheard; the best, that is, of his own type, the type that acts all thecharacters in turn with a free use of grimace, gesture, and pantomime.He was never happier than when closeted for an hour or so with one ortwo of my uncles exchanging "wheezes" (as anecdotes were oddly called inour family). What neither he nor my mother had the least taste for wasthat kind of literature to which my allegiance was given the moment Icould choose books for myself. Neither had ever listened for the hornsof elfland. There was no copy either of Keats or Shelley in the house,and the copy of Coleridge was never (to my knowledge) opened. If I am aromantic my parents bear no responsibility for it. Tennyson, indeed, myfather liked, but it was the Tennyson of In Memoriam and LocksleyHall. I never heard from him of the Lotus Eaters or the Morted'Arthur. My mother, I have been told, cared for no poetry at all.

If aesthetic experiences were rare, religious experiences did not occurat all. Some people have got the impression from my books that I wasbrought up in strict and vivid Puritanism, but this is quite untrue. Iwas taught the usual things and made to say my prayers and in due timetaken to church. I naturally accepted what I was told but I cannotremember feeling much interest in it. My father, far from beingspecially Puritanical, was, by nineteenth-century and Church of Irelandstandards, rather "high", and his approach to religion, as toliterature, was at the opposite pole from what later became my own. Thecharm of tradition and the verbal beauty of Bible and Prayer Book (allof them for me late and acquired tastes) were his natural delight, andit would have been hard to find an equally intelligent man who cared solittle for metaphysics. Of my mother's religion I can say almost nothingfrom my own memory. My childhood, at all events, was not in the leastother-worldly. Except for the toy garden and the Green Hills it was noteven imaginative; it lives in my memory mainly as a period of humdrum,prosaic happiness and awakes none of the poignant nostalgia with which Ilook back on my much less happy boyhood. It is not settled happiness butmomentary joy that glorifies the past.

I am afraid the psychologists will not be content to explain my insectfears by what a simpler generation would diagnose as their cause--acertain detestable picture in one of my nursery books. In it a midgetchild, a sort of Tom Thumb, stood on a toadstool and was threatened frombelow by a stag-beetle very much larger than himself. This was badenough; but there is worse to come. The horns of the beetle were stripsof cardboard separate from the plate and working on a pivot. By moving adevilish contraption on the verso you could make them open and shutlike pincers: snip-snap--snip-snap--I can see it while I write. How awoman ordinarily so wise as my mother could have allowed thisabomination into the nursery is difficult to understand. Unless, indeed(for now a doubt assails me), unless that picture itself is a product ofnightmare. But I think not.

The second glimpse came through Squirrel Nutkin; through it only,though I loved all the Beatrix Potter books. But the rest of them weremerely entertaining; it administered the shock, it was a trouble. Ittroubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. Itsounds fantastic to say that one can be enamoured of a season, but thatis something like what happened; and, as before, the experience was oneof intense desire. And one went back to the book, not to gratify thedesire (that was impossible--how can one possess Autumn?) but tore-awake it. And in this experience also there was the same surprise andthe same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quitedifferent from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something,as they would now say, "in another dimension".

The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read thisbook no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is aboutnothing else. For those who are still disposed to proceed I will onlyunderline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of anunsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any othersatisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must besharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in mysense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them;the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apartfrom that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equallywell be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it isa kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, ifboth were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

But I have not yet mentioned the most important thing that befell me atOldie's. There first I became an effective believer. As far as I know,the instrument was the church to which we were taken twice every Sunday.This was high "Anglo-Catholic". On the conscious level I reactedstrongly against its peculiarities--was I not an Ulster Protestant, andwere not these unfamiliar rituals an essential part of the hated Englishatmosphere? Unconsciously, I suspect, the candles and incense, thevestments and the hymns sung on our knees, may have had a considerable,and opposite, effect on me. But I do not think they were the importantthing. What really mattered was that I here heard the doctrines ofChristianity (as distinct from general "uplift") taught by men whoobviously believed them. As I had no scepticism, the effect was to bringto life what I would already have said that I believed. In thisexperience there was a great deal of fear. I do not think there was morethan was wholesome or even necessary; but if in my books I have spokentoo much of Hell, and if critics want a historical explanation of thefact, they must seek it not in the supposed Puritanism of my Ulsterchildhood but in the Anglo-Catholicism of the church at Belsen. I fearedfor my soul; especially on certain blazing moonlit nights in thatcurtainless dormitory--how the sound of other boys breathing in theirsleep comes back! The effect, so far as I can judge, was entirely good.I began seriously to pray and to read my Bible and to attempt to obey myconscience. Religion was among the subjects which we often discussed;discussed, if my memory serves me, in an entirely healthy and profitableway, with great gravity and without hysteria, and without theshamefacedness of older boys. How I went back from this beginning youshall hear later. 2b1af7f3a8