‘What will survive of us is love’: Philip Larkin and the meaning of life
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It is human to find meaning in everything that befalls us, even pestilence. Many of us, struggling to keep going in the limbo of lockdown, turn to literature and art, music and philosophy. But religion is the ultimate spiritual resource, symbolised by the churches, chapels and cathedrals that are among the greatest glories of our land.
Their closure — along with synagogues, mosques and temples — has been less remarked upon than other deprivations. Yet it is a grave loss for all of us: not only for believers of all denominations, but for those who have never set foot in a place of worship, or even refuse to do so on principle. The latter benefit indirectly too — and not merely because the role played in every community by the Christian clergy and laity, or by their counterparts in other faiths, is so essential. The very fact that humanity looks, and has always looked, for guidance and salvation to a being beyond time and space confers meaning on our activities and indeed our existence. We are blessed, whether we know it or not, whether we believe it or not, and whether or not we care.
At a time like this it helps, though, to be reminded that what we do or don’t do still matters, as we say, “in the greater scheme of things”. In the limbo of lockdown, it is too easy to slip into the gloomy, despairing frame of mind that was expressed with incomparable eloquence in Hamlet’s first soliloquy: “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!” Life without meaning does indeed resemble an unweeded garden, / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely.”
Some people instinctively reject the meaning that is offered by a religious view of life as the intellectual equivalent of comfort food. Such an aversion was articulated here by Patrick Maxwell last week. The author, who claims to speak for “devout” atheists, sees the “half-hearted” responses of both Anglican and Catholic Churches to the pandemic as evidence of “the defeatism that has confined the Church to its current desolate position”.
This is not the time or place to debate “the God question”, let alone ecclesiastical politics, though it is surely unjust to dismiss the inexhaustible liturgical and sacramental gifts that the Church, warts and all, still represents as no better than “a mindfulness programme”. It is more fruitful to consider the alternative meaning that an irreligious view of life can offer.
Not a few readers may still recall the sadness when, some 35 years ago, the death was announced of Philip Larkin. He was just 63 and had recently turned down an offer to become Poet Laureate. His last major poem, “Aubade”, had appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977; those who read it at the time still recall the thrill, but also the utter despair that it embodied. The poem takes head-on the fear of death, and takes a memorable side-swipe at religion too:
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die.
Yet for all Larkin’s embittered antipathy to the consolations of philosophy and faith — “Death is no different whined at than withstood” — his mortal dread had been transformed into some of the finest verse in the English language. If anyone was a “devout” atheist, it was he. Yet his poetry is suffused with the “immortal longings” he did not share but could not banish. Larkin’s England is still a Christian country and its rituals provide his hinterland.
“What will survive of us is love.” Perhaps Larkin’s most frequently quoted line comes from “An Arundel Tomb”, in the volume of verse that made him famous, The Whitsun Weddings (1964). The poem evokes the tomb of an earl and countess and celebrates their “faithfulness in effigy”. Larkin’s tribute to love is not exclusively Christian in spirit, but it was inspired by a Christian tomb in Chichester and in that sense it would have been unthinkable without the Church. Many years later, in 1981, Larkin was asked whether he felt sceptical about that faithfulness. He replied: “No. I was very moved by it… I think what survives of us is love, whether in the simple biological sense or just in terms of responding to life, making it happier, even if it’s only making a joke.”
Even those who reject the notion of life having a meaning cannot live without love. In this taxing time, we do well to remember that the churches that nestle at the heart of our villages, the cathedrals that tower over our cities, were built and have been preserved for us by the love of millions who have gone before us. They have survived many plagues and pandemics; they remind us that we too will survive our present troubles. The love of which Larkin speaks, the love that makes us happier, that will survive us, and gives meaning to all our lives — that is the love that will sustain us though the coronavirus.
