Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

In my View [1]

In my View [1]

Not so long ago I was talking with an old priest in a country place not far from Auckland. I cannot recall the exact topic of our conversation. Perhaps it was beekeeping; for he had a great love for bees. But I remember one remark he made. ‘The young are meant to be vivid and passionate,’ he said. ‘It is what God intended for them.’

His comment has haunted me ever since. For he knew what he was talking about. And then at another meeting he said something else. ‘Everything changes,’ he said, ‘Everything fades. The only thing that matters is human beings. Human beings are immortal. That is why I love them so much.’

His first remark concerned passion. His second remark concerned page 584 mutability, the great enemy of passion. But he had not retreated into a Buddhist calm. Instead he gave the impression of a profound fertility, as if not only the people but also the very trees and hills and timber-clogged gullies of his parish were a part of him, as much himself as his lungs and heart and liver. That is the kind of old man I would like to become.

I see the necessary conflict of human life as a wavering tension between the opposite poles of passion and compassion. It is a pity if either wins the day completely. Passion is perhaps the soil out of which a strong compassion can grow. If passion is destroyed at birth, how can it in its turn give birth to compassion? In this country many of the young are vivid and passionate. What valuable answer do we have to give to their unspoken questions? Our gift to them is the Pill. And if a boy wears his hair long at school (because he needs it long, as part of the virile plumage he and his companions wear to dances) we suspend him from school until he goes to the barber and gets it shorn. We do not care whether he is brave or a coward. We do not even care much whether he has any brains. But we will make sure that he resembles as little as possible a creature of passion.

Among us, as among the English, passion is the property of eccentrics. Sometimes, walking the back streets of a New Zealand township, drawing into my nostrils the odour of chronic boredom that rises from every back-yard and kitchen and dairy and milk-bar, I have the sense of being unwillingly in the presence of the still-born soul of a nation. Here political passion degenerates into the politics of the pay packet; here sexual passion is strangled by barren propinquity; here religious passion becomes the lukewarm mercy of a cup of tea drunk in an Old Ladies’ Home. And the poems I write carry the weight of a solitary rage that this should be so.

We have to encounter the slow death of passion in our individual lives. And if that death is to lead us to a region of fertile compassion, we have to know what is happening to us. Otherwise we lie down early to sleep in our own graves.

1968 (516)