The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of Childhood

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

32–33

text excerpt

On the cottage shelves were the works of medieval mystics, such as The Cloud of Unknowing, and later writers such as William Blake and Thomas Traherne and Richard Jefferies. 

I remember listening to a radio performance of Gerald Finzi’s Dies Natalis with my father when I was eleven or twelve.  He put on the table in front of me Traherne’s burning words: 

I was a stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with unnumerable joys; my knowledge was Divine … Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I … The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reap’d nor was ever sown.  I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.*

 Although I didn’t fully comprehend them, these words scorched me.  They branded me.  I knew then there are truths deeper than logic or understanding, deeper than words, and my father knew that I knew.

*Finzi’s free adaptation of the opening of Traherne’s Third Century of Meditations.

excerpt from 'The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of Childhood' pp. 32–33 (177 words)

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1546623314556