The Meaning of Culture (some extracts from)

"Culture is what is left over after you have forgotten all you have definitely set out to learn"

To philosophize with the real wisdom of the serpent and the real harmlessness of the dove it is not necessary to exhaust one's brain upon riddles which are likely enough eternally insoluble.What is necessary, is to experiment with ordinary life; to adjust one's appreciative and analytical powers to all the natural human sensations which are evoked by the recurrences of the seasons, by birth and death, by good and evil, by all those little diurnal happenings which make up our life upon Earth.

To philosophize is not to read philosophy; it is to feel philosophy.The raw spikes and jagged edges, the sour-tasting dust and wind-blown debris of superficial real life have to be deliberately comprehended, or at leats evaded, before the more secret rhythms, the more recondite patterns of Nature, her humours, her tragedies, her poetry take shape in the mind.

Culture and happiness

Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life.

What real culture can do for personal happiness is to simplify existence down to bed-rock, to heighten in fact those great permanent sensations which belong, as Wordsworth puts it, to "the pleasure there is in life itself".

The cultured man is the man whose interior consciousness is forever obstinately writing down, in the immaterial diary of his psyche's sense of life, every chance aspect of every new day that he is lucky enough to live to behold!

Obstacles to culture

It remains one of the saddest of human spectacles when natures, obviously predestined to a delicate and exquisite appreciation of the imaginative life, are betrayed, year after year, by their unselfish warmth of heart, into frittering away the unreturning hours listening to the egoistic confessions of others, in giving to others their nervous sympathy, their emotional energy, their very life force.Why! The holy saints themselves always insisted upon some moments of their own in which to "enjoy God", independently of their acts of social kindness.

And yet it remains that if once one acquires the trick of taking all the material and practical necessities with a certain lightness and a certain detachment, the habit of enjoying the sensation of life itself will gradually absorb one's consciousness and make an unassailable ship's keel if only one holds fast to the rudder, from the deck of which the eternal elements can be watched and wondered at as the vessel steers by its pole-star.

Culture and nature

There can be no doubt that the primary satisfaction in regard to Nature is sensual.People ought to cultivate sensuality where scenery is concerned.One ought to touch it, to taste it, to embrace it, to eat it, to drink it, to make love to it...It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature.And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all.One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.

The real Nature-lover does not think primarily about the beauty of Nature;he thinks about her life.Beauty of course he does find in her, and a thousand suggestions for art too;but what attracts him, what he worships, is herself, her peculiar identity.Whether at the particular moment she is looking lovely or sinister, cheerful or sorrowful, peaceful or tragic, he loves her for herself.Her winds may be bitter, her rains cold, her frosts keen, her mud deep, her swamps miasmic, her uplands barren; to her constant lover it is enough that she is what she is.

The feelings that can be roused in us by innumerable little physical impressions, coming and going upon the wind, lost in the air, are feelings that bind our years together in a deep secretive piety...The blurred edge of that sandy bank,here a grass blade, there an empty snail-shell,the grey spikes of that thistle, the texture of that dock leaf, gather to themselves a symbolic value as you stare at them.They become representative of the whole mysterious face of the earth, held up in that November greyness, haggard and tragic, to that curved dome of grey vapour which is all you can see of the overarching sky....What you will come to feel is a singular identity between your own inner being and the inner being of thes things.

The love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature's ways; and, as everyone knows who has looked into the eyes of snakes, birds, toads, geese, and sea-gulls, there is an upwelling from the heart of Nature of a resolute will to be happy in spite of all, which is stronger than any creed, deeper than any philosophy, and more potent than any renunciation.

The world is full of gods! From every plant and from every stone there emanates a presence that disturbs us with a sense of the multitudinousness of god-like powers, strong and feeble, great and little, moving between heaven and earth upon their secret purposes.

Culture and the art of reading

Not the wretchedest man or woman but has a deep secretive mythology with which to wrestle with the material world and to overcome it and pass beyond it.Not the wretchedest human being but has his share in the creative energy that builds the world.We are all creators.We all create a mythological world of our own out of certain shapeless materials.

Wordsworth, more than anyone, if we acquire the trick of putting completely aside his pieties and his moralizings, has the power of initiating us into those aspects of Nature that are not what we call beautiful at all; but are nevertheless full of the breathing life of the earth; the life of grass-roots and moss-spores, of lichen-scales and puff-ball dust, of frost marks and the creaking and groaning of withered thorn trees as the wailing wind sweeps over the uplands.

What culture demands of us in our reading is simply a heightened sense of the grandeur of the epic of human life upon earth....Thus the maddest obscurities of Joyce's latest work, just because there is something in the surge and sweep of that wild philosophic dithyramb which releases the cosmic dance of our blood, have a certain value for us, even though we understand this cosmopolitan "Olla Podrida" of erudition and obscene slang no better than if it were the gibberish of madmen.

After the great poets and novelists -- after Homer, Shakespeare,Dostoievsky,Proust,Henry James -- it would almost seem as though works of history --memoirs,chronicles,biograhpies,legends, folklore, studies in the growth of religions and religious heresies -- were the most fecund in the sort of imaginative interest which brings the best grist to culture's mill....The petals of  life's mysterious flower must always carry upon them the bloom of inexplicable paradox.
-------from"The Meaning of Culture" London:Village Press,1974

Authors J.C.Powys has written about

1.Suspended Judgements [1916]London:Village Press,1975 looks at these writers:

Montaigne         Pascal         Voltaire         Rousseau         Balzac         Hugo
deMaupassant   A.France     Verlaine        de Gourmont     Blake          E.Bronte
J.Conrad           H.James      O.Wilde

2.The Pleasures of Literature [1938] London:Village Press,1975 includes:

Homer's Odyssey                Dostoievsky    Rabelais          Dickens       Greek tragedy
Dante          Shakespeare    Montaigne       Worsdworth    Milton          M.Arnold
Whitman      Cervantes       Melville & Poe  Nietzsche       Goethe        Thomas Hardy
Proust

3.Visions and Revisions [1915]London:Village Press,1975 considers:

Rabelais         Dante         Shakespeare         Milton         Charles Lamb
Dickens         Goethe        M.Arnold              Shelley        Keats
Nietzsche       Hardy         Pater                    Dostoievsky  Edgar Allan Poe

J.C.Powys wrote  books Rabelais,Keats and Dostoievsky, and booklets on William Blake, Dorothy Richardson, and James Joyce's Ulysses.He read widely himself, as testified by the range of writers mentioned in his various letters.He usually says Wordsworth was his favourite poet, but he also liked Tennyson and Longfellow (Letters to Nicholas Ross(1971)letter Oct. 9,1954)

Letters to Nicholas Ross (London:Bertram Rota,1971)

The REALITY that the earth, the sky, the air, the water, the sun, the moon, and all the multitiude of stars, with every pond that is dug and every fire that is lit, are full of LIVING THINGS, full of entities, presences, consciousnesses, and spiritual souls;and that these 'souls', souls of animals, birds, fishes, reptiles, minerals, are like the souls of very young children, angelically and wickedly and pitifully innocent.(p.89)

I shall...NEVER see any Television.I think these Televisions have done more harm to human intelligence than any other invention.(p.145)