Archives and Documents

Sunday Evening – October 23rd 1955

On Being Whole

I am going to ask you a number of questions, but as this is not a classroom I shall not expect you to answer out loud. But I shall pause after each question to give you time to think what your answer would be if you had to give me it.

Why are you here? Why were you sent here? What [do] you expect to get from the school? What is the school trying to do for you or with you? What do I want for you – to happen to you? I wonder what you are thinking? Perhaps some of you are thinking that your answer as to why you are here should be “to be educated”. But that is really no answer at all. Anyone can mean what he likes by “being educated” – anything from being able to count money correctly to being able to appreciate ballet.

Well I’ll try to say what I want to happen in you. I want you to grow up whole. Whole? What do I mean by that? You look at yourselves: two eyes, two arms, two legs, nose, ears, stomach; nothing seems to be missing. Yet I say that many people who seem to have nothing missing outwardly are really only a quarter or half a human being. Few people are three-quarter or half a human being. Few people are three-quarters, and 7/8ths of a human being a rare phenomenon. Yes, people can look whole and yet be three-quarters dead.

I’ll describe some of these partial people. There is one who is a walking brain. He’s very clever; you can hear the synapses clicking faster in his brain than in anyone else’s. solves intellectual problems with great facility, he puts the rest of us to shame at times and makes us feel slow witted. But he carries around, suspended under his enormous brain, a neglected body. He can’t enjoy physical activity, the fresh air, the scents and colour of the countryside, because his body is no good and his eyes are not tuned to the things of beauty that others can see. Here is another man, a man with a great body and magnificent muscles – like those illustrated in the advertisements for the Charles Atlas system of physical culture. He can lift great weights, twist other men round his little finger and inflict great pain in a handshake. But supported on this great body is a little head, a brain that is never properly employed; a mind that can never get beyond sticks and stones and rocks, to the wonder and mystery of human life.

Both these are only fractions of men. Neither is wholly human.

There are some obvious ways in which we are trying to do more than some other school’s do, to make you whole. We give you more music; we think it important for some of you to be able to sit down at stand up in front of the school as several of you do in these meetings, playing music, enjoying it and feeling that it is significant, and for if possible, all of you to enjoy listening, learning the language of music, feeling your way into its meaning, so that ever after you will have this added richness in your lives.

We give you a great deal of handwork – so that you will enjoy the discipline of the hand, and be better able to appreciate all the wonderful work of men’s hands – all the work that has been done with loving care in [the] past and is being done by patient craftsmen today. So that you will not be defeated by practical problems in your own life, but when faced with a need or an emergency will be able to take a tool in your hands and competently and happily get on with what needs to be done.

We fill a coach with boys and girls and take them to the ballet. Why? To open yet another “eye of the mind” – to introduce you to a wonderful art, an amazing discipline of the body in the service of beauty and grace. For 3/3d you were able to see something that was the product of the vision of many artists and a world-wide tradition. What was in the minds of those who did not go? That this was a dull thing, a queer thing, an experience they could do without?

People spend enormous sums of money in the pursuit of pleasure and what they think will be satisfaction, but some of the most moving things – the things that give us the deepest enjoyment, can be had for a few shillings, and once the eye is opened to this beauty the new interest remains as a permanent enrichment of life – another fraction added towards this wholeness we try to create.

Much that we do in the school is designed to widen your enjoyment of the world around you. Can it ever be wisdom to think that you need not have this or that enjoyment? Isn’t it better to look into all the activities of mankind with sympathy and an attempt at understanding?

When I speak of enjoying the world I may seem at first to be disagreeing with what Brian said last week. As he put it in one part of his talk, it did seem at first that I had something to quarrel about. But when we discussed it we found we were agreed. We really meant the same thing. I do feel that the world is for us to enjoy, that we’re meant to enjoy it. But what Brian meant and what I wholly support, is that enjoyment is not [to] be secured by grasping at it. Enjoyment is not something that we get, but something that happens because we are fully alive and our approach to the world is right. If we do not enjoy life it is because there is something wrong in us, because we are only half-alive, because having eyes we see not, and having ears we hear not and because having feet we have no sense of direction to lead them. We do not enjoy the world because we want to enjoy it, but because we are so intensely alive that we cannot help enjoying it.

Now let’s turn to some of the things that all schools do – to some of the subjects we teach. Have they anything to do with making us whole. Why do you learn mathem English, or French, or History or Science. One of or two of you will immediately think of an answer: to pass examinations. That is utterly wrong. Nothing has done so much harm to people’s attitude to study as examinations. For countless people the content of a subject has no significance in itself, no real interest. The knowledge has to be amassed only to pass examinations and after that there is no reason why it should not be totally forgotton. Let us cast the thought of examinations right out of our minds; they have no importance at all in this process of becoming whole.

I won’t consider all subjects – just a few.

English: Why bother with it – you can make yourself understood to your companions. You can write a tolerable letter to your parents and perhaps one to your girl-friend that will convey tolerably clearly the state of your emotions. What need is there for anything more? A very great more! Do you know that at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science there was a unanimous outcry, from all the Scientists present, both eminent and not-so eminent, against the poor standard of ability in English among the young science graduates. Science is becoming exceedingly involved and subtle in its thought and it needs a great capacity for exact, clear – and perhaps I can use the word delicate – statement, both to pursue the thoughts to their conclusion and to express them to other people. Rough-and-ready statements, the clumsy use of words are bound to frustrate the exactness that is bound to be the aim in all scientific thinking.

But not only is exactness important; Science is throwing up mysteries, its theories are full of imaginative ideas very far removed from ordinary experience, so the imaginative use of words is becoming – indeed it has always been – of great importance in science – this ability to use words to create a picture that is fantastic in its newness and originality.

Now why English Literature and Poetry? What on earth is the use of the poet? This answer is brief. The poet gets there first: It is the poet who captures the fleeting thought or impression that most of us are too dim to recognise as important. The poet makes him-self especially sensitive to the words, to the impact of it, to what is happening around him. It is often he who feels where the world is going before others have begun to think about it. Often in ten lines he states what others, perhaps hundreds of years later, arrive at by cumbrous thought and state in many volumes. If you want to know the world, if you want to feel what is happening, especially in the spirit of man, you must learn to see the world at times through the eyes of the poet.

(As an example of the way in which the poet captures something that is moving and significant; yet which eludes most people – read Spender’s poem “The express” as an expression of the meaning of trains to me, when I was young and was fascinated by them).

Now consider Science; can you know and understand the world around you today if you know no science? Obviously not, Science feeds you, clothes you, carries you about, brings you entertainment and protects you from disease. If you would be a good artist or a good poet, you must know the world, and can you know the world if you do not know the nature of the human activity – the activity of scientists – that contribute so much to the world around you. The poet or artist, who knows nothing of the world of science is a poverty-stricken one; his work will inevitably be unread.

That brings me to art: Why bother to paint pictures or learn to appreciate works of art? The answer is – in order to open your own eyes. I began to try to paint landscapes when I was 21, after I had got my science degree. I began to paint ploughed fields brown and grassy fields green – just plain brown and plain green. The result was just plain horrible. Why? Because I had assumed that earth was always brown and grass was always green – in any circumstances. As a result of persevering in my attempt to paint I discovered countless subtleties in colour – blue and red in the brown, brown and pink and gold in the green. A distant wood on this skyline was no longer grey or black. The whole world of colour began to light up the richness and variety.

This week we have been thinking of Van Gogh, the poor tortured man who died in madness and poverty after cutting off his own ear and attempting suicide. Now his paintings are worth over £500,000. What does Van Gogh mean to you. Has he done anything for you? About five years ago I was motoring through France, and south of Rion, on the way to the Gorges du Tarn and Arles, we passed through this wild limestone country that Van Gogh loved to paint. There were massive boulders of limestone, rounded and shaped by the weather and everywhere cypress trees springing up out of a dry whitish soil covered with small plants exuding a resinous smell. The sun was burning down out of an intense blue sky. I cannot imagine how it would have seemed if I had never seen a picture by Van Gogh, but I do know that the landscape came at us with an intensity a peculiar intensity because his pictures helped me to see it. It vibrated as it vibrated for Vincent. The cypresses swirled upwards in a living pattern as they did for him. Every true artist helps to open our eyes and the more artists we know the more varied are the ways in which we can see the world.

History!? Oh dear how I hated history at school. When it came to the School Certificate exam, I could answer only one question – a question on the Industrial Revolution. I wrote a great deal on that and then walked out – of course I failed – it was the only subject in which I failed. But that was not the fault of history – it was the fault of the way in which it was taught. I have learnt a great deal of history since, beginning with the history of science and the spreading out into the great pattern of history in which Science began to find its place. But my total knowledge is too scrappy. I wish it were more complete. It is enough however to make certain experiences meaningful that would otherwise be empty of significance. If you go to Florence you will arrive at a very modern Railway Station; outside it, if you arrive at night, you will find a great space filled with all the advertisement signs and the glittering and glowing lights of tourist hotels. But you have only to walk a few hundred yards and you will be in the fifteenth century. Your steps may lead you to the Piazza della Signoria, and there under the great walls and tower of the Palazzio Vechio you will find a circular stone with some words and a name cut into it. To many sightseers the name is meaningless; only something to look up in a guide book and then quickly forget. But it was over that spot that Savonarola died, thrown into space with the halter round his neck after had died on his left and on his right. On that space the pyre was lit that consumed the bodies of the three “heretics and schismatics”. If you read Merejkovskis “The Forerunner” you will learn how a little earlier, in that same piazza, Leonardo da Vinci watched some of his pictures burn on this “Bonfire of Vanities” collected by followers of Savonarola – pictures that, were they in existence today, might be worth more than Van Gogh’s. Leaving the square in a quarter of an hour you can be in Savonarola’s cell in the monastery of S. Marco and you can see the hair shirt with which this Catholic puritan tortured his skin.

What must Florence be to the visitor who knows nothing of this history? If even to me whose historical knowledge is so fragmentary, the squares and narrow streets of Florence are peopled with ghosts, what must be their fascination to those that really know their history? If you are going to travel abroad, can you afford to be ignorant of history? Or even if you are to go only 12 miles from here – to York. Doesn’t York mean more to you if you imagine the way in which people’s thoughts gradually throughout the centuries modified the Latin Eboracum to sound as it does now? Doesn’t York mean more when you can see it as a centre of Roman colonisation and can see an emperor crowned there? Have you ever looked up at the keep? Did it seem anything nothing more to you than a frowning mass of stone or did you see swinging from the tower a man – Roger Aske – slowing dying as he hung in chains?

Do you look up at and imagine the great lantern placed there at night – the lantern that guided travellers to the city through the forest that surrounded it? How dull it must be if you can only stand there and see the mean modern houses and raw blatant garages and not the imagination and the knowledge to see it as it once was.

How dull yes. It is a crime to be dull – if you can possibly help it! By dull I don’t mean the opposite of clever. Some of the cleverest people are intensely dull – a bore to be with, whereas some quite humble folk are a joy to be with. Humble and ordinary folk can have life and have it abundantly. You will all of you have to go on living and working with other people. You will want to. You will work with other people, you will travel with them, be invited to meals and parties with them. All this will mean nothing to you if you have no contact with those others, if you have no knowledge and no interests in common, nothing you can share. People will respect you if you can do some one thing well, if you know your own subject thoroughly, but that is not enough. You must know enough about other people’s interests to enjoy hear them talking about their interests, to forget your own specialist knowledge and to enjoy learning what they can teach you.

I have always been something of a “jack-of-all trades” and perhaps as a result I am a master of none. But because I have sampled and enjoyed so many activities I have a great variety of views. I can enjoy the company of a writer, an artist, a musician, a politician, a doctor, a photographer, a gardener, a cabinet maker, an engineer (to name only some) and as well as fellow teachers or scientists and I can enjoy having them talk about their jobs because I know enough about their jobs to understand them.

There’s one other very important consideration – most of you will get married sooner or later. Just think what that will mean. The same person on the other side of the table, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade – 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, perhaps even to the year 2000! Whew! Always the same face. Whatever are you going to do about it? How will you be able to bear it? Many people don’t bear it. Falling in love is very thrilling, then two or three years of excitement. Then the excitement goes – inevitably it does. Often nothing is left. Nothing to talk about, no real interests to share, no more surprises - only the unchanging sameness. And the result is separation and divorce, a few years of excitement with a new partner.

If marriage is to be lasting and creative, both parties must be alive; they must be eager to know each others’ minds, understand and share each other’s interests, able to develop and stimulate in each other new interests and new activities, so that their life together is a continual opening up, a never ending process of discovery. If you want to be ready for marriage you will begin now, not only to enjoy the company of the opposite sex but also to open your eyes to all the interests and knowledge that the activities of the school provide.