First things

Since this is to be a blog about the writings of Owen Barfield, I thought I might as well begin with an explanation of how my own long-lasting admiration for Barfield’s work first began. I would be very much interested to hear how, and why, others came to study his philosophy.

Wandering back through the past, my mind halts at a moment some six or seven years ago. This must have been the summer of 2006 since I was nineteen years old and on vacation in France with my parents. While I sat outside in the blazing sun and read Saving the Appearances, I suddenly felt a profound sense of liberation. For many years, I should explain, I had lived in two separate worlds: the world of solid fact, of trees and clouds, school and friends, on the one hand, and, on the other, the more ephemeral world of the imagination, of literature and music, myths and poetry.

I remember vividly how, as a boy of eight or nine years old – perhaps the teacher had just taught us about geology or ancient history – I lay awake at night and thought of the endless years of blank nothingness that passed before my birth, and then of the equally incomprehensible void stretching away beyond my brief life. I was utterly terrified, unable to bear this view of reality that was thrust upon me. With hindsight, it seems to me that all my later love of literature, of mythology and philosophy has really been one long attempt to escape from this terrifying vision of black nothingness and futility.

Growing up, I soon discovered that many stories, myths and poems offer a strikingly different view of life. Here I found heroes fighting for meaningful causes, carrying a sacred flame through the generations. Here I found men changing into streams or trees, and Gods guiding them in the shape of sea-gulls or stars. Here also, I discovered stories of the beginning of time, of the creation of man – and of the final war that it is to end it all.

Yet all the time I also felt a vague sense of betrayal, that my escape into this Other World was somehow wrong, that I should live my life in the world of solid fact.

Now it was in this summer in 2006, that I felt a first intimation that there  might be a bridge between these two realities. Reading Barfield’s Saving the Appearances, and in particular the rainbow analogy he begins with, for a moment the two worlds seemed suddenly to merge, like two long-sundered streams that finally meet. For I realized that, if Barfield is right, the world of ‘dry’ facts is as much the (co-)creation of our (unconscious) imagination as a poet’s or myth-maker’s wildest dream.

I recognized also that the present world may not the unchangeable reality we make it out to be; that, in fact the trees bending over me in the summer breeze, a butterfly flitting by, the rushing of waves in the distance, would have appeared rather differently to the consciousness of an earlier age. In short, I felt with a shock that the present, scientific, disenchanted world-view may not be the ultimate dead end it seems, but only a passing stage, a necessary intermediate between the old warm world that is still alive in myths and ancient stories, and an altogether new world that is only yet coming into being.

While I have since learned much more from Barfield’s many books, it is this liberating perspective on our apparently meaningless existence in this modern age, that I have been most grateful for. Barfield first showed me that the modern sunderance of inner and outer, dream and reality, fiction and fact – which to me is a biographical as well as historical issue – may be only be a temporary phase, and that their re-union might pave the way to a new vision of life’s deeper meaning and purpose.