This Ever Diverse Pair

"Barfield is another figure who has been very influential to me. I did a PhD on Plato , and while I got the PhD I felt I hadn’t really got to grips with what Plato was saying. Then I read one of Barfield’s other books, in which he said A modern European can read Plato and Aristotle through from end to end, he can even write books expounding their philosophy, and all without understanding a single sentence. Barfield’s point is that the same words carry very, very different resonances and meaning over centuries of change. A ‘theory’ now means a proposition that you put to the test, whereas theory for Plato meant a horizon that you approach and contemplate, in order to receive something from over the horizon. This book by Barfield, This Ever Diverse Pair , frequently mentions Blake. In fact, in the denouement of the book, one of the characters is offered a kind of prescription that involves reading William Blake. So it’s always intrigued me quite what Barfield saw in Blake. Apart from these references, I wasn’t clear on what Barfield loved about Blake until recently, when another Barfield scholar sent me an as-yet-unpublished paper by Barfield, explicitly on Blake and what Barfield felt in Blake’s work—a bringing back of an older consciousness into the present. Blake is not nostalgic. He’s definitely modern. But he does carry an enchantment, that we feel the modern world has otherwise taken from us. So I think that combination of energies is what Barfield sensed in Blake, and this novel wrestles with how we can receive that vitality once again. Hence it is on the list. Yes. Blake in his lyricism inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge when they wrote the lyrical ballads—that appeal of a freer verse that uses simple, transparent words and so communicates without the sense of being performative or mannered. Blake can be very hard to read, because he was, I think, deeply in touch with what we normal human beings can easily overlook, which is that our minds are constantly shifting and changing and picking up different reflections and resonances. Reading Blake can be a bit like entering a dream, perhaps because it is only in dreams that full vitality comes back to many people, because of the bright light of modern rationalism, and the way our egos are required to be in control and getting on with things and delivering and so on—as the modern world demands. Blake will say: I heard The Word, the voice of the Divine speaking this mild song to me. He never holds back from wanting to write inspired work, by which he means not just startling or lovely, but breathing in, inspiring, the spirit of God. Hence this theme of eternity."