F. W. H. Myers: Loss and the Obsessive Study of Survival

Abstract

The young boy sits on a wooden chair in a sparsely furnished rectory, his mother presiding over him. The boy looks up, bible in hand, and asks his mummy whether bad people go straight to hell. His mother purses her lips and looks away before telling him that evil people might be destroyed at death. His lip quivers as he asks whether they would have the same fate as the mole he had seen crushed by a cartwheel, and she reluctantly says perhaps. Tears well up and he staggers to his feet, as if reeling from shock. His mother’s forehead creases, but before she can respond he has darted out the French window to the garden. She calls out Freddie, but he takes no notice, instead running to his favorite spot, under a great clump and tangle of blush roses. There he sobs, and through his tears looks down on the black pool of Bassenthwaite Lake and then up towards Skiddaw mountain, its shoulders and peak cloaked by cloud. He becomes entranced by the clouds’ movements until the peak emerges, as high as heaven, and his tears subside.

“I know no man who seems to have lived more consistently in a sort of rapture of thought, without weary or discontented interludes, but in an impassioned ecstasy of sweetness. In this he was a mystic, and his joyful serenity of mind is just what one finds in the lives of mystics.”

A. C. Benson “Frederic Myers” 183

“The reader need not suppose that I expect his admiration. But if he on his part be psychologically minded, he will prefer that idiosyncrasy should not be concealed. If he is to be interested at all, it must be in the spectacle of a man of sensuous and emotional temperament, urged and driven by his own personal passion into undertaking a scientific enterprise, which aims at the common weal of men … what has been accomplished did in fact demand, — among many nobler qualities contributed by better men, — that importunate and overmastering impulse which none can more fiercely feel than I.”

Frederic Myers, introduction to “Fragments of Inner Life” 2