Ore stabit fortis arare placet ore stat.
One of her tutors gave Hannah the answer to the riddle; after months of attempting to decode the ‘Latin.’ Afterwards, on our walks, she’d fling a glance at the bench like a kick, when we passed it. In those days, the fear was of a lack of meaning in the world; you didn’t want your pregnant mystery reshuffled into something trite. Richard Dawkins railed against that, and so I railed against him.
Long walks through the woods by the Cherwell were essential to preserving what I was. The World, I thought, was a dead thing in conflict with the living Story. That was the fourth religion I’d made up in my childhood. It had grown out of the third one, where all things were true and we were trapped in a consensus reality by a failure of imagination; that was in my teens. I never did the 90s teen atheist rebellion; I never thought I wasn’t a Christian, but I never got taught theology and rarely understood how shocked the orthodox would be by my inventions. I understood that my Nonno disapproved when I told him that Nature was God, but I wasn’t really a pantheist; I knew nothing about those triggers and heresies. I’d modelled my first religion on Narnia; it was just a story where He had another name. I loved riddles, lions and myths so I loved Narnia. Nature, I decided, had a lion’s body; and he also had a Tyrannosaurus head - he wasn’t subtle. The devil was called Mechanization and was made out of skyscrapers. He’d rub his car-shaped hands and cackle over ludicrous schemes until bluff, booming Nature would storm in and conclusively sock him one with his tree-trunk arms and long red Therizinosaur claws. The devil never stood a chance; that was the point of the story.
Nature and Mechanization battled over the surface of the Earth, but already by my second religion, I’d moved the battleground to the human mind. There, I imagined there was some great question that could be answered, or bug that could be fixed. As a thing of the mind, Science became part of the devilish scheme; which then got a good deal more sinister. Nonetheless, I doggedly pursued science subjects at school, and went on to read biology at university, because I loved animals; I protested that there was no contradiction.
The sinister role of science only got worse in the third and fourth religions, where it became essential to the constraining consensus structure, to the undead and malignant World which the living Story sought to break from. If I met Creationists, I was happy to avoid the holy war that my fellow biologists seemed to have signed up to. I rebelled against 90s teenage atheism, just as I rebelled against everything else my peers were into. They were doing their best to live their truth, I was doing my best to live mine.
O rest a bit for tis a rare place to rest at.
Now the bench was overhung with hogweed and its inscription clogged with moss and now, maybe for the first time, I did exactly what it said. Just a few metres from the path, under thornbushes under willows, I sleep well on the forest floor, despite the mosquitoes. In the morning I go to the island, and to the galleries, and to the edge of the playing field where I look back at our old College - the newest college, as it was - lying long like a lion, belltower high, alert to the world. I won’t talk too much about the woods.
Only, when I start to widen my circles and risk being seen by punters, I start walking on Merton’s land, where the Metasequoias are, across the lesser channel of the Cherwell from Magdalen. Thoughts, or rather feelings I once had about thoughts, come up from decades ago. In this place, I watched mayflies dancing and was struck by being at precisely this place in the whole of Time: the end of the Holocene. I doubted then that the Holocene was a tenable concept, but that was not important; you’re on the same mountain, no matter where the national border runs. This particular ditch happens to mark the boundary between college and Parks land and, today, a truly horrific thing is standing here: a bright red MacDonald’s high chair with a zany, painted grin. Standing here in the woods, by the ditch just where a deer might stand, it looks absolutely demonic. It’s incredible to think that, in its native habitat, I might unthinkingly lift it out of its herd and strap Rowan into it, right in front of its face; and he’d think that face was funny. Even so, I don’t take it very seriously; students put it there to look creepy. Maybe if I’d been longer in the woods...1
And here, where the channel is cut straight and the water shallow, I can feel the shock of my mind reorienting around Zen. One day in my first year, I got suddenly very sick of my own constructed religions, of the dead malignant World and the wild and living Story, and I went to he Inner Bookshop at the east end of the city-as-students-know-it and bought three books, one of which was a collection of Zen sayings. Ironically because this stretch of river looks just the same as it did, it brought back to me the shock of Zen. The world where a book can be burned just because it’s a book. Specifically, I can remember the understanding that it wasn’t about the future; trying to open up every muscle in my body to the actual now; holding on for no justification, and no salvation, that would ever come.
It is a good place to talk about religious conversion, though. On the other side of the river is Addison’s walk, site of a celebrated conversation between the world’s most famous fantasists, and I’ve been thinking about this conversation, fairly gloomily, since April last year when I listened to a recording of Malcolm Guite in conversation with
, talking about a conversation between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien in which Tolkien suggested that myths could be more than just lies because Jesus of Nazareth forms the lonely point in which the world of myth steps into history.