"When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey moist of early morning. ...
Here love had died between me an the army. ...
Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. ...
Here my last love died. ...
So, on the morning of our move, I was entirely indifferent as to our destination. ...
I slept until my servant called me, rose wearily, dressed and shaved in silence. It was not till I reached the door that I asked the second-in-command, 'What's this place called?'
He told me and, on the instant, it was though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long-forgotten sounds - for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight."
These fragments are from the Prologue to Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and they describe his unexpected return to, or rather stumbling-upon, the place where, and around which, he had lived the highest peaks of his life: from the dizzy Spring of youth with Sebastian, to the high Summer and early Fall lived with Julia.
And yet those days are all past, now; and Sebastian, and Lady Marchmain, and (notably) Lord Marchmain - and also, and in different ways, Cordelia - and, finally, Julia - are all gone; if not gone as persons, then gone from Charles's life. Gone - and, as explained in the beginning, his life itself seemed to have ended; his last ersatz love, of duty, of the army, dying just before the "rediscovery" of Brideshead Castle.
And yet that "death" only constitutes the prologue to the book. What follows is a recalling of those highest peaks of life, all connected in one way or another, with Brideshead. And what will follow after those lengthy recollections, will be a return to the present and...
But where does one go, when one has died, inside? When one's life - those eagerly-climbed peaks, and honeyed meadows - seem to have passed? When the things, the places, the people one has loved have passed - if not from life, than maybe from one's life? Can there be life, after late November - and thereafter, a future?
Sebastian was gone, seemingly lost - but one evening, while all were despairing of the situation, Lady Marchmain read to them from a Father Brown story (from G.K. Chesterton); in it,
"Father Brown said something like 'I caught him... with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."
And Lord Marchmain's passing became something completely different, from what could or should have been expected; and Julia's decision thereafter was sober and clear, even under all the confusion of those moments; and her life now was sober and dutiful, but probably on a path of clarity (albeit without the glamour so sought-after before). All these ends were not really "ends," were they?
So, is there life, and of what kind - after what seems like the end of one's life?
If there is, certainly it is no longer the life of naïve enthusiasm (as in that early youth), nor of high passion (as in that early adulthood). If there is hope, it is not childish - but something more mature - perhaps more sober, more dutiful, yet possessed of a deep (but on the surface invisible) clarity.
So, back in the present, and back at Brideshead, Charles Ryder walks by the beautiful fountain (now deserted, and protected by wire), and to the RC chapel. In the chapel, notwithstanding all the brutal changes and the war (and the destruction, and the passing of the world), he still finds - he yet finds -
"a small red flame
- a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; ...
burning anew among the old stones."
The hope of youth and of early adulthood is the hope of transience, of the world; the hope that follows and surpasses the end of life is related to eternity.
And thus the hope and joy of Christmas, while celebrating with earthly joy the Birth of a child, also include in themselves the Death that is the purpose of this Birth - and also, and inevitably, and victoriously, the eternalized joy of the Resurrection that will conquer that Death - i.e. of the final victory of (eternal) life over (worldly) end of life.
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