I am grateful to Henry Miller for introducing me to the English writer, John Cowper Powys. As a result I was also acquainted with his talented writer brothers, Llewellyn and Theodore. In fact the whole extended family is interesting and is arguably an example of the refulgent flowering of an special epoch. For someone who lives through reading and imagination Powys can be a great culture-friend and kind of guru. His The Meaning of Culture could be a text for the humanistic imaginative life. Powys does not see culture as something primarily to learn about but something to live through and to seek and enlarge life though its many facets. By culture he would reference, philosophy, literature, arts, nature and natural religion. His philosophy is a sea to float one's raft of 'life-illusion'. By life-illusion he means the wishes and whims impractical or not which together form a self perception. You might worship Goethe as a self-model without equating with Goethe. On philosophy in culture he writes, 'To philosophize is not to read philosophy; it is to feel philosophy. The raw spikes and jagged edges, the sour-tasting dust and wind-blown debris of superficial read life have to be deliberately comprehended, or at least deliberately evaded, before the more secret rhythms, the more recondite patterns of Nature, her humours, her tragedies, her poetry, take shape in the mind.' Likewise to read good literature is to plunge into the imaginative world and emerge enlarged and richer. Sadly you cannot stand back and objectively look at these things as is the way of most education in the modern state. You cannot be afraid of losing proportion, getting things wrong or fostering some unwholesome prejudice. There is a kind of faith-like abandonment in the process. However there is a tether to reason to prevent loosing touch with reality. Nothing is ever really serious in the ideological sense.
I do not know anyone who writes like Powys; it is an expansive, spontaneous metaphor-rich embroidery of words which defies classification. He draws upon a vast reading and philosophising. He is universalistic in the way of the self-made Victorians who stood (in a deluded way) upon some promontory at the end of Time. Yet he is clearly a modern.
'What the ambitious man regards as thoroughly foolish and is prepared to denounce as self-indulgent, dreamy, absent-minded, as confession of personal failure, to a really cultured man, to an authentic stoic or epicurean (for these opposites amount to one and the same thing when they are contrasted with the values of the world) is the true purpose of life and an eternal fountain of abysmal pride.'
'Can it be said too often that 'the meaning of culture' is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.'
'Many lonely natures, if only they had the wit to realise it, are, by a kind of atavistic adoption, children of some long-past epoch of the human pilgrimage. They may live in some little wayside town in Iowa or Colorado, while in their most integral instincts they belong to Periclean Athens, Imperial Rome, the Florence of Medici, the London of Ben Jonson, the aristocratic salons of the Eighteenth Century, the revolutionary Europe of Heine, of Byron and Shelley! There must be little local Carnegie Libraries all over the United States full of bad mixes, odd fish, misfits, queer ones of every wounded sort of wing, who are taking refuge there in regions totally unknown to their neighbours, wonderful Elysian fields of escape, into which no exacting employer, no debase public opinion can ever pursue them.'
'What our true sophisticated culture shows itself is in our attitude to the unimportant, the negligible, the weak, the mean-spirited and pig-headed.'
JCP The Meaning of Culture
