Like many Englishmen of my generation, I entered grammar school with the sense that I was taking my first step toward a scientific career. Neither I nor my parents had a clear notion of what this involved, but it had been established in our minds that the future lay with science. Accordingly, I was set to work at differential calculus, the theory of heat, light, and sound, and the chemistry of carbon. Everything was settled and no questions asked.
One day--I must have been fifteen at the time--I came across a volume of Rilke's letters. I read them with a feeling of astonished recognition, a sense of being myself the author of the words before me. I was dumbfounded, my whole body shaken, and my senses alert as though in the presence of an unknown danger. I had been granted a vision. I had no words for it, except that it concerned a knowledge beyond science, beyond calculation, beyond our attempts to gain mastery over the future. The very concept of the future had no place in this other knowledge. Yet its mysterious content was such as to justify every effort on the part of the one who pursues it, as Rilke had pursued it through the written word, and Rodin, through those restless, titanic forms that illustrated the book. This knowledge also came, I conjectured, through music and through the asceticism that sets itself apart from things, and knows them through the Word alone.
That day saw a change in my plans. I continued with my studies, but with a sense that it was only some dead and dutiful part of me that engaged in them. The real me existed in those hours when literature and philosophy passed through my hands, as yet uncomprehended. And because I understood nothing, every word was invested with enormous power--a power of destiny, as though my life now ran in channels marked out for it by authors long since dead. An air of holiness, a reckless disregard for the world and its requirements, seemed to radiate from those mysterious pages. They referred me to a place where justification was no longer needed and where it was sufficient just to be.
At the same time, a sadness grew in me, a sense that something was wrong with the world. Science and progress and money had prevented people from observing this thing; I too had been blind to its existence, so lost had I been in the world's concerns. But my feeling testified to its reality. Sadness looked out at me from art and literature, like the pitying face of a painted saint. I encountered it in the words of Eliot, I saw it in the mad paintings of van Gogh, and I heard it in the infinite, still spaces of Beethoven's last quartets--spaces made through sound, in which however, there reigns a greater silence than can be heard in any desert.
Discovering Spengler
When I was sixteen, another decisive experience occurred. I discovered that my school contained others like myself--boys who had stumbled across the world of art and philosophy, or who (not being confined as I was to the science laboratories) had been gently guided there by some enlightened master. Friendships sprang up; we exchanged notes, books, and arguments. I even ventured to express the feeling that had weighted on me; the feeling of catastrophe, of a falling away from some never-to-be recovered state of serenity. The boy who received my confidence was younger than I and had the reputation of being a kind of genius--which he was, by our standards, for he could play the Bartok piano sonata (the object of
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