William James by Robert D. Richardson

1841-1910

We may be in a universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.


Henry James Senior had a stinging and life-long sense of evil. It formed the subject of some of his most vivid writing, and his sense of the reality of evil was communicated in one way or another to all of his children. “ Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens,’ he wrote in 1863, ‘begins to suspect this; begins to suspect that life is no farce, that it is not genteel comedy either; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths, the depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged .  .  . the natural inheritance of everyone capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and every obscene bird of night chatters.’ Evil was for him and daily and practical matter. The one great evil in the universe was, he thought, ‘ the principle of selfhood, the principle of independence in man.’ He was told his youngest son Bob that ‘to seek our own private pleasure, this precisely is our concept of the devil.’

One can see a strong thread of Calvinism in Henry’s odyssey. It is perhaps most helpfully thought of as a personal; Calvinism, meaning no clergy, no churches, no liturgy, just the always inadequate individual living in a meaningless and vicious chaos called Nature. That was one side; the unknowable God was on the other side.

William’s mother Mary ran the household, which in 1850 consisted of a least thirteen people: the five children, herself, her husband, her sister Catharine – Aunt Kate- and five Irish servant girls between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. Her husband was against the women’s movement. He thought that a woman should serve as ‘man’s patient and un-repining drudge, his beast of burden, his toilsome ox, his dejected ass.’  He had a utopian’s dislike of all institutions. He indulged in high-minded – one might say over-theorized- denunciations of marriage, yet he himself stayed comfortably, parasitically, sybaritically within a relationship from which, if he ever thought seriously of leaving, no trace of that thought has survived.

Mary tolerated it all. She was the emotional and workaday center of the family, the rock that made it all possible. And whatever her irrepressible husband wrote or said, he was, like the children – like the other children, one wishes to say – utterly dependent on her. Alice found in her ‘the essence of divine maternity, from which I was to learn great things, give all but ask nothing.’ In this way Mary made herself indispensable and, as Jean Strouse observed, put everybody permanently in her debt.

At the age of sixteen, his friend Tom Perry recalled, William obtained a copy of Schopenhouer’s  The World as Will and Idea and read ‘amusing specimens of his delightful pessimism.’ It is perfectly  characteristic of the volatile William James that he later came to loathe Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which he looked on as equivalent to determinism, and twenty-five years later compared him to ‘a dog who would rather see the world ten times worse than it is rather than lose his chance of barking at it.’

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The early months of 1870 mark the low point of William James early life. His back gave out in January on his twenty-eighth birthday, bringing with it what he called a ‘moral collapse’. James said his own case had ‘the merit of extreme simplicity’. In layman’s language, he called it an incident of ‘sudden fear’; it was probably what would now be called a panic attack. In the medical language of the time, James called it an ‘acute neurasthenic attack with phobia.’ Neurasthenia, also called nervous exhaustion or nervous prostration, was a new diagnosis in 1870. It was the specialty of Dr. George Beard, who wrote an article on it, published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal on April 29, 1869, well before his widely noticed book American Nervousness appeared in 1881.

Beard understood neurasthenia to be ‘a large family of functional nervous disorders that are increasingly frequent among the indoor classes of civilized countries, and that are especially frequent in the northern and eastern parts of the U.S.’ Beard thought neurasthenia to be most prevalent in ‘brain-working households,’ he thought it was transmittable, and considered it to be an essentially American disease. Since the main symptom was understood to be the depletion of a person’s nervous energy, which was then widely assumed to be finite, the generally prescribed treatment was rest and a proper diet. William James suffered from chronic neurasthenia for years- his fear episode was an example of the acute form of the disease – with the added problem that his eyes were affected (as his father’s had been after his experience), making it impossible for for years at a time to read for more than three or four hours a day.

[ James’ ‘failures of nerve’ were not only occasioned by the uniqueness of his upbringing but  also undoubtedly connected in a broader sociological sense to the whole generation that experienced the Civil War- the feelings of loss and futility that engendered- as well as the rapid industrialization and urbanization of American life during that period in American history. Perhaps no American in that period responded to ‘the crisis’ with greater creative urgency and broad-mindedness.]

James’s interest in people like Benjamin Paul Blood –figures from the intellectual underworld –exasperated his professional colleagues even as it moved them, sometimes, to admiration. James’s judgment, said one, was ‘corrupted by kindness.” George Santayana, first a student of James, then a colleague and a rival, and finally a eulogist, said James ‘kept  his mind and heart wide open to all that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in religion and philosophy. He gave a sincerely respectful hearing to sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and imposters . . . he thought, with his usual modesty, that any of these might have something to teach  him . . . Thus,’ Santayana concluded, ‘William James became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous, half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry individuals of which America is full.’

Twenty years after James died, a medium named Jane Revere Burke published a book she said had been written, though her, by William James. It was called Let us In; its main idea was that the world, our world, is crowded with the spirits of the dead, the ‘discarnate, ‘ who vastly out-numbered the incarnate – the living- and who are always pressing and pleading with us to allow them into our minds. We feel compelled to smile, of course, but there is at least a metaphorical truth here. James’s willingness to listen, his risking of ridicule, his spiritually democratic openness, still moves us to let them all in, just as he let into his life a parade –like the finale of a Fellini film – of healers, reformers, and visionaries. He let in Horace Fletcher, the diet guru and messiah of munching; Annie Payson Call, the currently invisible author of still useful books on therapeutic relaxation; Tom Davidson, the ebullient philosophy teacher and apostle of the working man; S. H. Hadley, whose conversion in a New York waterfront mission prefigures Bill Watson and Alcoholics Anonymous; Clifford Beers, who fashioned his own harrowing story of mental illness into a biting and effective call to reform; Elwood Worcester, the co-founder of the Emmanuel movement and popularizer of Gustav Fechner; Fechner himself, the German psychophysicist who, after a serious illness, woke to see the entire universe as alive; and Bill Bray, the working-class English evangelist whose vision has the reality of a summer morning and whose feet walked the road while his head swam in heaven.

William James let into his life all these and many, many more whose brash originality, looping idiosyncrasies, and private languages effectively shut out most communication with others. They are not mad, but they are not mainstream. They are strong, roiling back eddies along the edges of the great river of mind, but they are a much a part of the river as the main channel, and William James knew it.


Vivid, pointed, written on the spur of the moment, The Hidden Self has not been widely read. It begins with an extended plea to pay attention to ‘wild facts,’ irregular phenomena, strange experiences, facts that fit no stall or pigeonhole, events often labeled mystical. The opening demonstrates acute awareness of just whom he is writing for – in this case the educated lay person. ‘The great field for new discoveries,’ he begins, ‘is always the Unclassified Residuum.’ The essay is largely a presentation of Pierre Janet’s  ideas about ‘unconscious mental life. Alice James read it and it struck a deep chord, especially the part about abandoning parts of oneself, and in a long, thoughtful diary entry she described her own life as one lived on just that brink of abandonment. ‘Conceive,’ she wrote, ‘of never being without a sense that if you let yourself go for a moment your mechanism will fall into pie and that at some given you must abandon it all, let all the dykes break and the flood sweep in.’ Henry too was affected by The Hidden Self, in 1906 he wrote a story called ‘The Jolly Corner’ in which his narrator encounters his own  hidden self. [As William said, in a phrase that became famous, he was always ‘a native of the James’ family and has no other country.’]


In this year James finally finished his seminal The Principles of Psychology. He put the final touches of the 2,970 page long manuscript at 2 AM on May 22, then went to bed. When he got up about ten in the morning, he felt, he said, a ‘great feeling of weariness’ come over him. He took down a volume of Tennyson; it was a habit to reach for poetry at low moments. He wrote to his wife; he would order the lawnmower tomorrow. Insuring the manuscript for a thousand dollars, James flung it into the mail to Holt with this spasm of self-excoriation: ‘No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book. No subject is worth being treated of in 1,000 pages. Had I ten years more, I could rewrite  it in 500, but as it stands it is this or nothing – a loathsome, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to but two  facts; 1^st that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2^nd that WJ is an incapable.’ Then he recovered himself enough to close, ‘Yours provided you hurry things up, Wm James.’

For some readers – and not just those interested in psychology – The Principles of Psychology is William James’ great book. For Jacques Barzun, who has written the finest general assessment to date of Principles, the book is ‘an American masterpiece which, quite like Moby Dick, ought to be read from beginning to end at least once by every person professing to be educated. It is a masterpiece in the classic and total sense- no need of a descriptive or limiting word before or after.’ George Santayana, writing in 1920 and taking the largest possible view, said that Principles was James’ best book because of its author’s ‘gift for evoking vividly the very life of the mind.’ Even for those who have concluded that The Varieties of Religious Experience or A Pluralistic Universe or Radical Empiricism is a greater individual achievement, The Principles of Psychology remains the acknowledged ramp from which all the later achievements took off.


By the end of 1891, fifteen months after publication, the book was in its third printing and a total of 1,800 copies had been distributed though congratulatory notes from friends did not always come without reservations. Tom Davidson wished that James had turned his attention more to Aristotle, as he himself had been doing. Shadworth Hodgson, who considered himself to be in James’s camp- the ‘experiential as distinguished from the empiricist’ – was fretful that James’s book had put a spoke into the chariot wheel of Hodgson’s own work.

Charles Peirce wrote a review for The Nation in which he called James ‘materialist to the core,’ and accused him of ‘tricks of language’, of ‘uncritical acceptance of data,’ and of making ‘a complete rupture with accepted methods of psychology and of science in general.’ One really expects better of a man who had himself such a gift for rupture, innovation, and linguistic razzle-dazzle. The anonymous reviewer for Science – possibly James M. Baldwin- found James’ book ‘too personal, unsystematic, etc.,’ too ‘unlike the ordinary textbook to be valuable for students.’


G. Stanley Hall, speaking for the hard-line experimental psychology, for the Wundtian, positivistic laboratory psychology, committed to psycho-physics, brass instruments, and precise measurements, said James lacked the experimental spirit, yearned for the old-fashioned idea of soul, and had written an impressionistic book. Hall was flatly unable to see that for modern psychology, as for French painting, impressionism was a breakthrough. ‘The author,’ Hall wrote, ‘is a veritable storm-bird, fascinated by problems most impossible of solution, and surest where specialists and experts in his field are most in doubt, and finding it very hard to get up interests in the most important matters, if settled and agreed to, even to state them well.’

James Sully, reviewing Principles for Mind, conceded James had done ‘the big thing,’ but had so many reservations that John Dewey could satirically sum up Sully’s verdict on Principles as ‘a good book, but too lively to make a corpse, and every scientific book ought to be a corpse.’ James’s work was received fairly well in Germany. His friends Stumpf, Mach, and Paulsen admired it, but Paulsen complained that he had seen articles making fun of the book. Even so, there were soon four separate requests to translate it into German.


The Principles of Psychology has endured, and even gained grounds, as a classic in its field. Writing in 1969, a group of distinguished psychologists, including E.G. Boring, author of the most influential  history of experimental psychology, collectively claimed that “James’s Principles is without question the most literate, most provocative, and at the same time the most intelligent book on psychology that has ever appeared in English or in any other language.’ Principles also had an impact, right from the start, on philosophy and was also recognized as a specifically literary achievement. James’s friend Josiah Royce saw clearly that James did not belong to the metaphysical, the associationist, or the neurological school; Royce called him a ‘naturalist who adopts moments of consciousness as the fundamental units of psychological description. Royce also noted the considerable implications for ethics of James’s ‘analysis of volition as an act of attention.’ James’s Principles jolted John Dewey out of his neo-Kantian slumber; it is reported that Dewey regarded the book –especially the chapters on conception. discrimination and comparison and reasoning – and not James’s later Pragmatism, as the best introduction to the pragmatic theory of knowledge.

Edmund Husserl, usually regarded as the originator of modern phenomenology, began intensive reading of Principles soon after it was published. The existential philosopher John Wild has noted this and has also noted that Gordon Allport (the modern psychologist best known for his work on personality) thought Principles, ‘if properly understood might have inaugurated a native phenomenological movement in  the U.S.  Wild’s 1969 book, The Radical Empiricism of William James, does for James what Stanley Cavell has done for Emerson and Thoreau and what George Kateb has done for Whitman. Wild hold up James as the founder (in this case, of phenomenology), a figure at the center – perhaps one should say at several centers- of modern thought. Wild and Allport here remind us why Alfred North Whitehead considered James one of ‘the four great thinkers whose services to civilized thought rest largely upon their achievements in philosophical assemblage.’

Santayana put his finger on what has so irritated some of James’s readers and pleased others. Whatever G. Stanley Hall and others like him wished to believe, James’s book showed, said Santayana, that there is no body of doctrines, held by all competent men, that can be set down in a book and called Psychology. Santayana described Principles as a ‘work of imagination’ and pointed specifically to James’s ‘lively style.’

This claim has been made repeatedly, if a little hesitantly, as if we are afraid that calling it literary will detract from its standing as science or knowledge or thought. But James’s work is literary in the broad, eighteenth-century meaning of the word, which included, along with poems, plays, and novels, Johnson’s journalism, Burke’s political speeches, and Gibbon’s history of Rome. James himself said that anything considered historically should be considered part of the humanities. It was Rebecca West who first observed, in 1916, that one of the James brothers grew up to write fiction as though it were philosophy, and the other to write philosophy as though it were fiction.


But the idea that James’s work has a real, substantial literary claim goes further back. Writing in 1907, William Allen Nielson, of thee Harvard English department, called William James’s literary style better than Robert Louis Stevenson’s, and he added, as a sort of note of local interest, ‘It has been one of the glories of the Harvard Department of Philosophy that it contained more men who write with distinction than any other department of the University.’

[The Principles of Psychology was and is interestingly written book. ‘Literature is news that stays news’, as Ezra Pound reminds us.] It is a partly un-weeded garden, but it is a garden, and James’s style is everywhere at work. He writes concretely, with attention to physical detail. His fondness for poetry shows up frequently. Whenever there is to be a test of memory or of attention, the content of the experiment is often lines of verse. He coined words and gave new life to old ones. He was the first to use ‘hegelism’, ‘time-line,’ and ‘pluralism.’ He had a gift for phrases that stick in the mind; ‘the bitch-goddess of success,’ ‘stream of consciousness,’ ‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion,’ ‘the moral equivalent of war,’ ‘healthy-minded,’ and ‘live option’. He used examples, anecdotes, jokes, anything to impart narrative dash and energy to the page. And there are many places where, standing on the arid plain of experimental data, James turns his face to the reader, reaching outward though his own experience to us, in prose that can stand comparison to anyone’s.

‘We measure ourselves by many standards,’ he writes toward the end of the ninety-five – page chapter on will. ‘Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and makes us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth .  .  .He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero.’

Lest we think this is an easy uplift, James circles back to consider how hard and how dark the challenge often is. Effort, for James, is linked to acceptance now, not to resistance or denial, but acceptance even of calamity and disaster. ‘The deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of the will and the tightening of our heart-strings as we say, ‘Yes, I will even have it so!’ When a dreadful object is presented, or when life as a whole turns up its dark abysses to our view,’ this is when effort becomes so difficult and so necessary. Even for the heroic mind, James says, ‘the objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for- things.’ But the heroic mind, he insists, ‘can stand this universe .  .  . He can still find zest in it, not by ‘ostrich-like forgetfulness,’ but by a pure inward willingness to take the world with those deterrent objects there.’

James leans his whole weight on the argument; by consenting to take the world as it is, by accepting the risks and running with them, a person becomes, he says, ‘one of the maters and the lords of life.’ It is a phrase from Emerson. Such a person, James writes, ‘must be counted with henceforth; he forms part of human destiny. Neither in the theoretic nor in the practical sphere to we care for, or go for help to, those who have no head for risks or sense of living on the perilous edge.’

This is where Principles peak ( though there are two more chapters to follow), as James connects attention to will, will to effort, and effort to our basic, irreducible consent or non-consent to the world we confront. Nowhere is the full literary-humanistic aspect of James’s work clearer than in his final paragraph on this personally urgent issue. “Thus not only or morality, but our religion, so far as the latter is deliberate, depend on the effort which we can make. ‘Will you or won’t you have it so? is the most probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most  practical, things .  .  .We answer,’ James goes on, ‘by consents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the effort demanded by them be the measure of our worth as men! What wonder if the amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the world!’

Antonio Pigafetta by Laurence Bergreen

Just before departure, in August, 1519, the officers and crew of the five ships commanded by Ferdinand Magellan attended a mass at Santa Maria de la Victoria, located in Triana, the sailors’ district in Seville. Among those in attendance that day was a Venetian scholar named Antonio Pigafetta who had spent long years in the service of Andrea Chiericati, an emissary of Pope Leo X. When the pope appointed Chiericati ambassador to King Charles, Pigafetta, who was about thirty years old at the time, followed the diplomat to Spain. By his own description, Pigafetta was a man of learning (he boasted of having ‘read many books) and religious conviction, but he also had a thirst for adventure, or, as he put it, ‘a craving for adventure and glory.’

Learning of Magellan’s expedition to the Spice Islands, he felt destiny calling, and excused himself from the diplomatic circles to seek out the renown navigator, arriving in Seville in May 1519, in the midst of feverish preparations for the expedition. During the next several months, he helped to gather navigational instruments and ingratiated himself into Magellan’s trust. Pigafetta quickly came to idolize the Captain General, despite their different nationalities, and was awestricken by the ambitiousness and danger of the mission. Nevertheless, Pigafetta decided he had to go along. Although he lacked experience at sea, he did have funds and impeccable papal credentials to recommend him. Accepting a salary of just 1,000 maravedis, her joined the roster as a sobrasaliente, a supernumerary, receiving four months of his modest pay in advance.

Magellan, who left nothing to accident, had an assignment for Pigafetta; the young Italian diplomat was to keep a record of the voyage, not the dry, factual pilot’s log, but a more personal, anecdotal, and free-flowing account in the tradition of other popular travel works of the day; these included books by Magellan’s brother-in-law, Duarte Barbosa; Ludovico di Varthema, another Italian visitor to the Indies; and Marco Polo, the most celebrated Italian traveler of them all. Making no secret of his ambition to take his place in letters beside them, Pigafetta accepted the assignment. His loyalties belonged to Magellan alone, not to Cartagena or to any other officers. For Pigafetta, the Armada de Molucca was the tangible result of Magellan’s daring, and if the expedition succeeded, it would be a result of Magellan’s skill and God’s will – of that Pigafetta was quite certain.


[This was a typical ‘Conquistador’ operation. Though formally under a single command, authorized by the King, it was composed of numerous factions with family connections, or individuals from the same towns, regions or nations, former ‘comrades in arms’ or patrimonial associations, led by ambitious men eager to grab the glory and spoils of risk and adventure for themselves. When the few survivors returned to Seville after three years of hardship and toil- much of their time and energy was consumed in finding the food, water and fuel which allowed them to continue- they still had to face an inquisition in the interests of those patrons whose expectations of profit and glory had been disappointed and often languished in jail until their cases were settled.

The Chinese had been trading peacefully in the eastern pacific archipelago for four centuries before the arrival of the Portuguese and Spanish. Even when this trading was for a brief time a state enterprise, the Chinese never embroiled themselves in local contests, evangelized their religions or attempted to conquer. Magellan’s mandate from the King did not include conversion of natives or conquest; that Magellan ignored his instructions and attempted both was his downfall. He was cut to pieces in the surf on the island Mactan in the Philippines for his efforts. His body was never recovered but the spot where he was killed has a monument and an annual celebration of his demise. The majority of survivors- 22 out of 260- were ordinary seamen with no special claim to distinction and were allowed to keep whatever modest personal spoil that they managed to accumulate.]

From the moment the fleet left Seville, Pigafetta kept a diary of events that gradually evolved from a routine account of life at sea to a shockingly graphic and candid diary that serves as the best record of the voyage. He took his role as the expedition’s official chronicler seriously, and his account is bursting with botanical, linguistic, and anthropological detail. It was also a humane and compassionate record written in a distinctive voice, naïve yet cultivated, pious yet bawdy. Of the handful of genuine chronicles of foreign lands available at the time, only Pigafetta’s preserved moments of self-depreciation and humor; only his betrayed the realistic fears, joys and ambivalence felt by  the crew. His narrative anticipates a modern sensibility, in which self-doubt and revelation play roles. If Magellan was the expedition’s hero, its Don Quixote, a knight wandering in the world in a foolish, vain, yet magnificent quest, Pigafetta can be considered its antihero, its Sancho Panza, steadfastly loyal to his master while casting a skeptical, mordant eye on the proceedings. His hunger for experience makes it possible to experience Magellan’s voyage as the sailors themselves experienced it, and to catch this extraordinary navigator straining against the limits of knowledge, his men’s loyalty, and his own stubborn nature. . . .

After arriving back in Seville, Pigafetta headed directly for Valladolid, where he present the young King of Spain with ‘neither gold nor silver, but the things very highly esteemed by such a sovereign Among other things, I gave him a book, written by my hand, concerning all that had occurred day to day during our voyage.’ Pigafetta’s diplomatic background served him well, because he then succeeded in giving his account to sovereigns who were often bitter enemies of one another: ‘After this I left for Portugal, where I gave an account to King Joao of all that I had seen. Passing again through Spain, I also went to present some rare objects from the other hemisphere to the very Christian King Francois. Finally, I went to Italy, to the very industrious lord, Philippe Villiers de l’Isle- Adam, a worthy grandmaster of Rhodes, and placed at his disposal my person and services of which I would be capable.’ Pigafetta’s thorough and even-handed distribution of his account ensured Magellans’s leadership role in the adventure for posterity – and, not so incidentally, his own. ‘I made the voyage and saw with my eyes the things hereafter written,’ Pigafetta vowed, ‘that I might win a famous name.’

After traveling across Europe, Pigafetta arrived in Venice, his home, and immediately caused astir. ‘There came into the college a Venetian who had been appointed a knight errant, the brother of the Order of Rhodes, who had been three years in India,’ wrote Marin Sanudo on November 7, 1523, of Pigafetta’s visit. ‘And all the college listened to him with great attention, and he told half of his voyage . . .and after dinner also he was with the doge, and related those things in detail, so that his Serenity and all who heard him were rendered speechless over the things of India.’

In August of the following year, Pigafetta, by this time settled in Venice, requested that the doge and the city council allow him to print his sensational account. His request met with a favorable response, and he was granted the privilege that ‘no other except himself be allowed to have it printed for twenty years.


The first copies of Pigafetta’s ‘relation,’ the ones he brought with him to the courts of Europe, were lavish handwritten manuscripts illustrated with maps of his own devising, items literally fit for a king. It is believed that Pigafetta wrote his ‘relation’’ in the Venetian dialect, mixed with Italian and Spanish, but the original has been lost. Instead, four early versions produced by expert scribes have come down over the centuries, one in Italian and three in French. By general agreement the most handsome, complete, and extravagantly illustrated resides today in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. To read his memoir, and to turn its ancient vellum pages, is to be transported instantly five hundred years into the past. Although Pigafetta tells his story more or less in chronological order, he has not constructed a linear narrative; rather, it is a compilation of events, illustrations, translations of foreign tongues, prayers, descriptions, epiphanies, and bawdy asides, all of them heavily- cross-referenced and color coded in brilliant inks of black, blue and red. Yet it is also a personal document, unusual for that time, when the idea of an individual consciousness was just beginning to take root. The reader of Pigafetta’s chronicle hears his voice, alternatively bold, astonished, devastated, fascinated, and, in the end, amazed to be alive in the cruelly beautiful world of his time.

The Funeral by Halldor Laxness

We shall only touch lightly here upon the lengthy arguments that were used on pastor Jon Primus right up to the last moment, so reluctant was the pastor to conduct this ceremony, or rather, so difficult was it to nag him into it. He said he had a sore foot and had caught a chill- something in that. Hadn’t had time to sleep for three days and nights because of onerous official duties - arguable. No paper to be found in the house on which to write funeral sermons, and no time for writing, and besides he had forgotten how to write- pretexts.

The undersigned pointed out that nothing was required of a pastor except that he intimate in church at the dead man’s bier his date of birth and date of death and thereafter say some little prayer or other, even if it were only the Lord’s prayer; and finally sprinkle the State’s three spadefuls of earth with the statutory innocent phrases, Earth to Earth, etc., as is the custom.

Pastor Jon Primus: That’s not so innocent as it looks. It derives from the scholastics. They were always doing their utmost to falsify Aristotle, though he was quite bad enough already. They tried to feed the fables with yet more fables, such as that the primary elements of matter first disintegrate and then reassemble again in order resurrect. They lied so fast in the Middle Ages they hadn’t even time to hiccup.

Embi ( The Bishops Emissary): In the Middle Ages it was also the custom to write down a formula on a piece of paper and lay it against a sore, and then it healed. For internal ailments a mixture was prepared and given to a dog belonging to the man who was sick, and then he would recover. When I was a little boy I cured a wart I had by sticking a tongue-bone into a wall.

Pastor Jon Primus: Cold  water for me.
Embi: But sometimes also nice and hot, with plenty of coffee in it.

Now pastor Jon Primus laughed. Philosophy and theology have no effect on him, much less plain common sense. Impossible to convince this man by arguments. But humor he always listens to, even though it be ill humor. A typical Icelander, perhaps. Sometimes your emissary would have given a lot, however, to be able to see the world from the standpoint of pastor Jon Primus.

Embi, when pastor Jon has stopped laughing: There will be no one else there except foreign and home officials, and their business is to make a report. If they don’t see a pastor, there will be no report – no funeral, no nothing, and everything ending up in fuss and bother, diplomatic action, and international complications all over the world. You and I would both be put in jail, perhaps.

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Dignified gentlemen stood stiffly around the coffin in the middle of the church and had begun to wait. The choristers on the other hand had been allotted seats on account of their age, and told not to stand up until they were given the signal to start singing. Pastor Jon entered the church at 1113 hours. He did not close the door behind him, and the church stood open. Birds flew past the door. A yellow-striped cat sat on a grave and longed for breakfast, but the breakfast sang its trilling song up on the church gable. There was a fog along the mountain ridges, but the weather passed for dry down here.

The pastor’s cassock must originally have been made for a much smaller clergyman than pastor Jon Primus – lost property – or else excessively shrunk: it was far too tight for him. This cassock was multi-colored, as if it had lain out in the open for a few years, for the most part under snow; and full of holes as if insects had been at work there, perhaps also mice. The pastor walked nonchalantly straight to the coffin, completely unaffected by the presence of solemn mourners, and halted at the left side of the head of the coffin. That is not where a pastor ought to stand, but perhaps pastor Jon thought he was going to shoe a horse. He stood for a while and looked straight out the open door, a little pensive, and raised his hand to his wolf-grey mane and scratched his head, and tried to remember something; then he wiped his face hard as if he were squeezing a rubber mask. Finally he produced his manual from his cassock pocket, but then he had forgotten his spectacles.

He lifted the book to his nose and squinted at it, but had difficulty in finding anything suitable to read. He became a little anxious as he hunted through the book. Until now  I had thought that pastor Jon was the last man to get flustered. But it hardly escaped those present that this parish pastor didn’t feel at home in the cassock. I myself felt I was now seeing pastor Jon  Primus for the first time not at play. The British Consul leaned across to the undersigned and asked in a whisper on behalf of her Majesty if it were quite definite that this man believed in God

Embi: Yes.

Now pastor Jon finds near the back of the book the formulas that are prescribed for the burial of so-called ‘adult persons’ who do not get a special funeral sermon: this normally refers to paupers and thieves or else drownings and bodies that have been washed ashore from shipwrecks. There you find, inter alia, the words: Lord, thou makest man return to dust. But pastor Jon shakes his head and skips over that as well. When he has dipped into various places and tasted the occasional word here and there, he finally reaches a passage and stops; he had no doubt forgotten it; he now starts examining this passage, and weighs and assesses each word to himself, though everyone could easily hear him, and then he reads out loud; ‘Because no one of us lives for himself and no one dies for himself. For if we live, then we live for the Lord; and if we die, then we die for the Lord. Therefore whether we live or die we belong to the Lord.’

Pastor Jon Primus to himself: That’s rather good.

With that he thrust the manual into his cassock pocket, turned towards the coffin and said:

That was the formula, Mundi. I was trying to get you to understand it, but it didn’t work out; actually it did not matter. We  cannot get round this formula anyway. It’s easy to prove the formula is wrong, but it is at least so right that the world came into existence. But it is a waste of words to try to impute to the creator democratic ideas or social virtues; or to think that one can move Him with weeping and wailing, and persuade Him with logic and legal quibbles. Nothing is so pointless as words. The late pastor Jens of  Setberg knew all this and more besides. But he also knew that the formula is kept in a locker. The rest comes by itself, the Creation, which includes you and me, we are in the formula, this very formula I have just been reading; and there is no way out of it. Because no one lives for himself and so on; and whether we live or die, we and so on.

You are annoyed that demons should govern the world and that consequently there is only one virtue that is taken seriously by the newspapers: killings.

You said they had discovered a machine to destroy everything that draws breathe on earth; they are now trying to agree on a method of accomplishing this task quickly and cleanly; preferably while having a cocktail. They are trying to break out of the formula, poor wretches. Who can blame them for that? Who has never wanted to do that?

Many consider the human being to be the most useless animal on earth or even the lowest stage of evolution in all the universe put together, and that  it is more than high time to wipe this creature out, like the mammoth in the tundra. We once knew war maiden, you and I. There was only one word ever found for her: Ua. So wonderful was this creation that it’s no exaggeration to say that she was completely unbearable; indeed I think that we two helped one another to destroy her, and yet perhaps she is still alive. There was never anything like her.

Like all great rationalists you believed in things that were twice as incredible as theology. I bid you welcome to this poor parish at Glacier to be united with the power-generator of the Creation and the intelligences that dwell on the planets of the galaxies. It was a good idea to summon to your assistance people who have the law of determinants in their power and thereby communion with life-giving beings in infinite space. I can well understand that such people do not enter such a poor church as mine. I bow my head before your honorable mourners, my dear Mundi, who have come here from distant places to take part in a requiem service.

In conclusion I, as the local pastor, thank you for having participated in carrying the Creation on your shoulders alongside me. This parish at Glacier is actually a good living, but it is a little difficult sometimes, especially for horses. I am always trying to wring out some hay-sweepings here and there to feed them in hard weather. And yet horses out in the open are always full of pranks and start kicking their heels and boxing and uttering mating cries, however badly they are being treated: and one never knows whether they are in earnest or not; yes, one can learn from these creatures in a horse-torturing society such as this. Of the snow bunting I have nothing to add to what I said the other day to a young man who was looking for the truth: if there is an Almighty in the heavens, it is to be found in the snow bunting. Whatever happens, the snow bunting survives; no sooner have the blizzards abated than it has started courting. And the lilies of the field, they toil not; neither do they spin. I might also mention the brightly colored small birds of the South Sea islands. One thing is certain; we need have nothing to fear, honorable mourners, because whether we live or die, it so happens that we have the same God as the Mohammedans in the desert – and of him pastor Jens of Setberg said: Allah  is great.

 (Tape-recorded.)