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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

In my View [10]

In my View [10]

The Kiwi is indeed a stranger in paradise. Many reams of paper have flowed off the presses since the day when Ursula Bethell looked up from spadework in her Christchurch garden and noticed that the hills were paradisal judges. Paul Powell has expressed the same view in his book Men Aspiring:

We stood on the edge of a huge rim of hanging ice sweeping in a sunlit curve high above the deep green bowl of the Waiatoto River. I had a strange feeling of empathy with Fastness, Aspiring and Stargazer – Keepers of this Sanctum – a sensing of timelessness, and a vague perception that one day these mountains might be my judges . . .

I think the judgment is not to be found in the future. It is always present. Mountaineers and prospectors are in a sense our experiential theologians, solitary Adams (as Ursula Bethell was a solitary Eve) relearning the nature of the Fall by gazing at the beautiful forbidden face of the earthly paradise, which we can indeed enter, but never possess, because we are alienated from it and from ourselves.

Sometimes the paradise is not solitary. In a hundred novels and a thousand poems New Zealand writers construct it in memory and people it with a fictitious unfallen couple. The properties may vary; but not much. The cliffs. The bay. The marram grass growing where nothing else grows. The hut behind the dunes. The smell of wood-smoke. The muttering of a creek full of rain water from the hills. The bottle of wine and the mattress on the floor. The face of the lost Eve (for a man) or the lost Adam (for a woman) demonstrating by a single paradisal look that the broken mosaic of Man and Nature has been reconstructed, that the flesh and the spirit have joined hands at last, that death and evil have gone away and will not return again.

I think the Garden of Eden did not vanish. We live in it all the time. It is this world. But we are no longer Adam and Eve. The Fall is and was an inward metaphysical event that robbed us at one blow of God, ourselves and a sacred relation to the rest of the creation. It is this knowledge, more than any other, that turns us into Christians; for the words that come to us from the Cross are not ‘Nevermore’, but ‘Not yet’. The patience of the Christian is the patience of a man waiting – aware of death, tormented by evil – for the Fall to be reversed and the broken relation to be restored.

We are no doubt fortunate to live in a country which is so obviously a page 48 paradise. We cannot escape some knowledge of its presence and condemnation, however dull we make ourselves. The commonest escape route is to become Utopians. Utopias are man-made constructions, imagined heavens which always turn out to be new jails. The earthly paradise, on the other hand, was made by God for man to live in; and however often we try to wreck it for narrow utilitarian ends, or refer to it absurdly as a ‘scenic wonderland’, some of us – and especially the young – become aware of its true nature and suffer its condemnation and begin a lifelong revolt against the horror of expected Utopia. The paradise is real, though we are not fit to inhabit it; and this is the cause equally of our sorrow and our joy.

1969 (582)