A Prison, a Paradise: Suicide

“Is life worth living?” French atheist Albert Camus and the American philosopher William James had little in common, but they agreed that this was the fundamental question.

Loren Hurnscot was the pseudonym of a woman named Gay Taylor. She published her memoir, A Prison, A Paradise in 1959, focusing on the history of a destructive love triangle that entangled her life for many years. Its aftermath was suicidal despair and a desperate search for peace of mind and truth. In this passage she is about to commit suicide by drugs and drowning in a river; mystical experiences followed, as we see here and in the next installments.

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Just at dusk, I was there on the rock by the river. I had to wait in the woods for people to go. There was silence at last. I burned a card–the nine of diamonds–that I had seen in a street in Bloomsbury and picked up, out of some queer whim, wondering why it was not the nine of spades. The subcurrents of lunacy had been swaying through me for a long time.

The sheer evil of the place was growing. The water was still and oily below the spume. “If a man fell in there by sheer accident, he’d be damned for a thousand years,” I thought. I felt the presence of past suicides, evil and despairing, all round me. “Is that the company I’m going to keep?”

The last light died out on the grey-green woods. I sat on, on the rocks. It was time. Was it time? And suddenly I knew that if I did this thing, I should be making an unbreakable link between myself and all the evil in the world. It came over me, blindingly, for the first time in my life, that suicide was a wrong act, was indeed “mortal sin.” In that moment, God stopped me. I did not want my life, but I knew I was suddenly forbidden by something outside myself to let it go.

I cried hopelessly for a long while. I looked again at the water, and thought of the Dial in my bag, that I’d meant to swallow to deaden consciousness. A tremendous “NO” rose—within me?—outside me? I don’t know. “I can’t do it—I’m held back—I know beyond all doubt that it is absolutely wrong.”

Some blind instinct made me pull off my “disguise.” It began to rain. There were seven shillings in my bag, dark was falling, and I was two hundred miles from home. I walked back to the village in the darkness, sobbing and talking to God. There was no earthly help for me any where, but I knew I was no longer alone; that God was there. It had always been pride that had held me off from Him. Now it was broken the obstacle was gone. One is never simple enough, while things go well.

“I’m in your hands,” I kept whispering. “You stopped me. You must show me what to do….”

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Through Mine Own Eyes

From Katharine Trevelyan’s above-named autobiography. This is an example of a mystical experience that transforms nature itself. “Seeing face to face at last” is likely a reference to the Bible’s I Corinthians 13, Paul’s famous chapter on love: “For now we see only a reflection as if in a cloudy mirror; then, we shall see face to face.” More from this experience of Trevelyan will be published next time.

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When I knew myself as nothing but a prize fool in love, I took my pain and foolishness in both hands and quite simply offered them to God, whom I recognized through this last anguish to be the backcloth of my life and my eternal love.

What followed was beyond me to understand.

Whether it was predestined or whether the Heavens had been waiting with an open question to hear an uncomplaining acceptance of this last sorrow, I cannot say.

It felt as though an infinitely complex machine had in all its parts, between one moment and the next, clicked silently into gear and started to work with inexorable power.

I saw face to face at last.

Light streamed down from the sky such as I have never beheld. The sun shone with a new light, as though translucent gold were at its heart. I saw not only the physical sun, but the spiritual sun also, which poured down on me as I walked in the garden at Coombe.

The wonder was beyond anything I have ever read or imagined or heard men speak about. I was Adam walking alone in the first Paradise. That it was a garden near the outskirts of London in the twentieth century made no difference, for time was not, or had come round again in a full circle. Though I was Adam, I had no need for Eve, for both combined within me. Marriage and maternity fulfilled and surpassed, I had run beyond womanhood and become a human being.

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Photo by Mehdi-Thomas BOUTDARINE on Unsplash

The Third Glimpse

Lewis completes this part of his memoir. Note again the role of literature in this mystical experience–but also that its role is tangential, almost accidental. We can speculate that the piercing juxtaposition of “the beautiful” with “is dead” foreshadowed Lewis’s acceptance of Absolute Goodness himself dying on a cross—just as the snippet from Tegner’s Drapa represents all the pagan myths showing the longing for the death of someone so good to be meaningful, redemptive. Be that as it may, one reason Lewis belongs here at the beginning of this blog is that his ability to both describe the indescribable and reflect upon its nature may be unsurpassed. Note that this Joy was a beacon throughout his life: “in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else.” (Same for me.)

The third glimpse came through poetry. I had become fond of Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf: fond of it in a casual, shallow way for its story and its vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from such pleasures, and like a voice from far more distant regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner’s Drapa and read

I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead—-

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.

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The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.
–-C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1955. @ C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.

For more on C. S. Lewis see Into the Wardrobe as well as “The official” website.

See also Fellowship of the Performing Arts for their wonderful dramatizations of Lewis’s life and works.

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