Sweet Desire

Then John began once more. "And yet..." he said, "and yet, Father, I am terribly afraid. I am afraid that the things the Landlord really intends for me may be utterly unlike the things he has taught me to desire."

"They will be very unlike the things you imagine. But you already know that the objects which your desire imagines are always inadequate to that desire. Until you have it, you will not know what you wanted."

"I remember that Wisdom said that too. And I understand that. Perhaps what troubles me is a fear that my desires, after all you have said, do not really come from the Landlord - that there is some older and rival beauty in the world which the Landlord will not allow me to get. How can we prove that the Island comes from Him? Angular would say it did not."

"You have proved it for yourself. You have lived the proof. Has not every object which fancy and sense suggested for the desire proved a failure, confessed itself after trial, not to be what you wanted? Have you not found by elimination that this desire is the perilous siege in which only One can sit?"

"But then," said John, "the very quality of it is so - so unlike what we think of the Landlord. I will confess to you what I had hoped to keep secret. It has been with me almost a bodily desire. There have been times... I have felt the sweetness flow over from the soul into the body... pass through me head to foot. Its quite true, what the Clevers say. It is a thrill - a physical sensation."

"That is an old story. You must fear thrills but you must not fear then too much. It is only a foretaste of that which the real Desirable will be when you found it. I remember well what an old friend of mine in Medium Aevum once said to me - "Out of the soul's bliss, " he said, "there shall be flowing over into the flesh."

..."The visions," (John replied) "ever since the first one, have grown rarer, the desires fainter. I have been talking as if I still craved it, but I do not think I can find craving in my heart now at all.'

The old man sat still, nodding a little as before.

Suddenly John spoke again.
"Why should it wear out if it is from the Landlord? It doesn't last, you know? Isn't that which gives away the whole case?"

"Have you not heard men say, or have you forgotten, that it is like human love?" asked the hermit.

"What has that to do with it?"

"You would not ask if you had been married, or even if you had studied generations among the beasts. Do you not know how it is with love? First comes delight: then pain: then fruit. And then there is joy of the fruit but that is different again from the first delight. And mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step: for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair. You must not try to keep the raptures: they have done their work. Manna kept, is worms. But you are full of sleep and we had better talk no more."

...And at the very borders of sleep, John heard him begin to sing and this was the song:

My heart is empty. All the fountain that should run
With longing, are in me
Dried up. In all my countryside there is not one
That drips to find the sea.
I have no care for anything thy love can grant
Except the moment's vain
And hardly noticed filling of the moment's want
And to be free from pain.
Oh, thou that are unwearying, that dost neither sleep
Nor slumber, who didst take
All care for Lazarus in the careless tomb, oh keep
Watch for me till I wake.
If thou think of me what I cannot think, if thou
Desire for me what I
Cannot desire, my soul's interior Form, though now
Deep-buried, will not die
- No more than the insensible dropp'd seed which grows
Through winter ripe for birth
Because, while it forgets, the heaven remembering throws
Sweet influence still on earth,
- Because the heaven, moved moth-like by thy beauty, goes
Still turning round the earth


The Pilgrim's Regress: Archetype and Ectype