Extract from the book by Marion Milner
An experiment in leisure
But if man’s salvation depended on his capacity to see the facts, both about himself and the outside world, and if the poets were the pioneers in this, what were the conditions under which poetry could grow? For a long time I had been puzzled by the continual recurrence of images from the Bible in my thinking. Then I find this note in my diary: Just supposing this is what the Gospel story is partly about? All this year it’s been growing in my mind, the possibility that the Gospel story is concerned, not with morals at all, not with what one OUGHT to do, because someone (God, father). expects it of you, but with practical rules for creative thinking, a handbook for the process of perceiving the facts of one’s own experience – and, of course, in this sense, with ‘salvation’, for it is ignorance and blindness which lead to the City of Destruction. And the central truth, is it that only by a repeated giving up of every kind of purpose, plunging into the void, voluntary dying upon the cross, can the human spirit grow, and achieve those progressive fusings of isolated bits of experience which we call wisdom, truth?
How my heart sings 