The Swan in the Evening by Rosamond Lehmann

Author:Rosamond Lehmann [Lehmann, Rosamond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Family & Relationships, Death; Grief; Bereavement, Literary Figures
ISBN: 9781504003124
Google: Xw7GCQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-07-21T04:07:21+00:00

Part Four

Letter to Anna

My dearest Anna,

I have long promised you that I would dedicate my next book to you: and here it is. Perhaps it’s not quite the sort of book that you expected; but I hope you won’t be disappointed. If you don’t quite understand some of it now, one day you will. The only question that you will really feel like asking is: ‘Is it a true story?’ – and I promise you it is true.

This subject of life and death and of survival of death is terribly controversial, as you will discover; but I think you have had a better grounding than I had; and with a bit of luck you won’t have so many set-backs. I believe, myself, that in another – well, perhaps fifty to a hundred years, it may well be proved that survival of death is a scientific fact; that the proof seekers will have proof of it, once and for all; but I also suspect that when it is there, at last, under their very eyes and ears, they will refuse to accept it. One of the things I have discovered is that many people have such a rigidly built-in resistance to the idea of ‘going on’, that nothing and no one will ever overcome it. So that if you imagine that you are bringing them tidings of comfort and joy by offering to share with them your own experiences, or perhaps the enlightening books that you have read, you will be in for a rude shock: you will be coldly or nervously or contemptuously or even ferociously repelled. You may be told in so many words – or if not, it is all too easy to get the message – that, too weak to keep a stiff upper lip, too undisciplined to ‘assimilate your grief’ and carry on as usual, you have retired into a world of tinsel and marshmallow fantasy. Apart from their intellectual distaste – which is understandable considering the amount of silliness, sensationalism, vulgarity, credulity that muddies and clogs up the lower reaches of spiritualism, fortune-telling, astrology and the like – many people are violently prejudiced against the notion of surviving death: even those (and I know a few) who have had enjoyable and interesting and privileged lives. ‘It may be so, I suppose,’ they say grudgingly, ‘but I don’t fancy it. I don’t want to hear about it.’ There is no answer to this! None of us wants to dwell on distasteful subjects; and here I am reminded of a story I read somewhere about F. W. H. Myers. Finding himself alone one day in a railway carriage with one fellow-traveller, he managed to steer the conversation towards his favourite subject, namely the possibility of our surviving death. But the stranger’s replies became ever more curt, exasperated and discouraging. However, nothing daunted, Mr. Myers continued to press for a straightforward answer: and finally received it. ‘Well! – we enter into the joy of the Lord, I suppose.

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