In the final pages of Richard Lewellyn`s rural Welsh masterpiece How Green Was My Valley, we get this beautiful passage on life, death, and loss, which should resonate with anyone who has ever felt a pang of nostalgia for days gone by:
“An age of goodness I knew, and badness too, mind, but more of good than bad, I will swear. At least we knew good food, and good work, and goodness in men and women. But you have gone now, all of you, that were so beautiful when you were quick with life. Yet not gone, for you are still a living truth inside my mind, So how are you dead, my brothers and sisters, and all of you, when you live with me as surely as I live myself?
Shall we say that the good Dr Johnson is dead, when his dear friend Mr. Boswell brings him to thunder and thump before your very eyes? Is Socrates dead, then, when I hear the gold of his voice?
Are my friends all dead, then, and their voices a glory in my ears? No, and I will stand to say no, and no again. In blood, I say no”.
What is it about this passage that makes it so enchanting? Perhaps it’s simply a matter of narrative context. Coming at the end of a 400+ page rollercoaster of passion, social struggle, familial love, and quasi-mythical pastoral bliss, Valley`s final pages have the power to move and take root as few others can.
A beloved father spending his last moments with his son whilst the weight of a collapsing coal mine crushes the life from his body. Aesthetically and artistically, the scene works wonders. The bittersweet impression to which tragedy lends its ancient weight is palpably felt in Huw Morgan`s final reflections, where he sees not just the death of a man – but the death of a place and a time.
Huw`s childhood world of rolling hills and lush green valleys, filled with the thunderous songs of soot-covered miners emerging from the pit to laugh and feast and make merry, is the true casualty of the collapse. Yet, save from being a moment of bleak and dreary nostalgia – a bottomless pit in its own right – the above passage offers a surprisingly positive perspective on the reality of death.
After all, Huw does not lapse into nihilism or despair, cursing God and the heavens for all he has lost. Instead, he seems genuinely grateful for all he was blessed with, and in response to their passing holds to his heart the memories of loved ones he will never see again.
Some might see this as an unhealthy tip towards simple nostalgia-wallowing, but I can’t help thinking this doesn’t do Valley`s ending justice. For me, the philosophical concept at play here is more practical and, perhaps surprisingly, far more optimistic. It can be summed up as this: Death does not, and can never, invalidate life.
Existence, in other words, is not rendered meaningless because one day it will end. People and places and events may disappear, lost to the abyss from which they emerged, but they will live on in memory and in how they shaped the world. Further, even if they are not remembered (as memory is faulty and records impermanent), or if all their effects are wiped away in a great cosmic cleaning of the slate, that does not change the fact that they existed – and will always have existed.
My apologies if it sounds like I am trying to bury my own fear of death in semantic trickery here. ‘Will always have existed’ sounds clunky and absurd – after all, who will be around to know that we once lived after our Final End?
And yet, it brings me an odd kind of comfort to know that the mere fact we are alive means we will always be an indelible part of the Universe – even if only of its past. For we mere mortals, the immutability of the past – either a wonderful or a terrible prospect depending on one`s own record – means that our lives are guaranteed against complete oblivion.
Nothing can rewrite what we did or said or thought, and we will always have had our time in the sun. We existed in a valley that was green and bright; a great garden in an infinite cosmos which teemed with insuppressible life. We lived and loved and felt pain. We got sick, recovered, worked, made love, waged war, brokered peace, and met a final, irrevocable end.
If we accept that death is irreversible – as most secularists now do – we must also accept that life`s existence is also irreversible. After all, the very fact of our existence proves that life is possible. And if life is possible in this universe – indeed, if the universe is itself possible – that means there is always a chance it could happen all over again. (Not our lives, maybe, but the repeating of the category itself: the eternal recurrence of life for life`s sake, a self-justifying process of renewal which miraculously arises out of entropy).
And that matters – not because the universe cares or because God decrees it – but because it means something to us; we cosmic ants who value and treasure our existence so completely that it belies logic.
Indeed, this kind of foundational faith, a perennial Amor Mundi contained in the self-preservation instinct, forms the basis of countless religious, artistic, and philosophical creeds. In essence, it is the conceptual opposite of the death-wish – as discussed in another article.
If God exists, the value of life is confirmed in His authority. If he doesn’t, it`s guaranteed instead by us – who, after all, are the only creatures capable of making such a value judgment. Only misguided nihilism could hope to overturn this truth – and even when those obsessive abyss-eaters get the upper hand, it is rarely for long.
Such is the tendency of life to thumb its nose at oblivion.
And at the root of Amor Mundi, or ‘life-wish’, or whatever New Age buzzword one might wish to use, is a very simple and profound recognition: the existence we have now is the greatest boon in the Universe, and now that we are here, we are ineradicable.
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Where the Hell did that come from?
Now, I imagine you may be thinking: how exactly did you get all that from the above passage? Unfortunately, that’s a question I can’t easily answer.
When discussing literature, a recurring problem is whether the meaning extracted from the printed page has been delivered directly from the mind of the author, or whether the reader – using art as proxy – is unconsciously projecting his own biases and yearnings onto the work of others.
I first read Lewellyn`s novel in the lonely locked-down days of June 2020. It is entirely possible that this context – with every headline for months reminding us of the virus` climbing death toll – triggered this ‘mini-epiphany’ about mortality.
But then I suppose that doesn’t matter that much anyway. For me, books have never been about simply downloading anyone else’s` thoughts or beliefs. Quite the opposite; true art offers insights which bring as much of the reader to the table as it does of the author. The author may have certain ideas to impart, but still the best of literature is never didactic; it has something to teach and say, but not to preach.
All this to say, the above rambling reflections may have as much to do with my own grappling with the reality of death as they are with Lewellyn`s prose.
Still, I like to think that that venerable author, long-dead himself. Would not have objected too strongly to my interpretation. Nor do I think he would have had much time for the opposite mindset – that perpetual gnashing of teeth and cursing of fate, which only serves to waste what precious little time we do have on this odd little rock.
I refuse to believe that the man who wrote the above passage would have been jaded and destroyed by the mere fact of death. In blood, I say no.