The Inmost Light

EARLIER this week, I was visited by an old school friend. We hadn’t seen one another for an incredible forty-four years. Having first met in 1976, at a time when I was being punished by a teacher for throwing water out of a top floor window, it was as though we had carried on exactly where we had left off. For two whole days we walked and talked, incessantly and without pause, swapping memories and anecdotes as though we had never been apart. It was completely surreal, two individuals who had gone their separate ways in 1981 but somehow managed to strike up the same intense rapport they had first shared as young teenagers.

This experience led me to question how much we actually evolve over time. Physically, at least, you might say that we change in the way that a painting has been restored to such an incredible extent that you would no longer expect that which is recognisable in a purely visual perspective to be the same in a more rudimentary sense. First, the dirt and grime is erased from the painting with soft brushes or cleaning agents; second, the old varnish is removed with solvents in a way that won’t damage the underlying layers of paint; third, patches of discoloration or spotting are carefully concealed with watercolors and restorative paints; and fourth, a new coat of varnish is applied to protect the work of art itself.

Clearly, therefore, at this point one might well ask how much of the original remains or whether the piece in question may even be perceived in the same manner. If not, then at what point did it cease to be? If so, then we must accept that the very essence of the painting has survived the entire process and continued to endure. My friend had acquired new customs, experiences, desires, pleasures, pains and opinions, yet his nucleus - or soul - was clearly still apparent.

Friendship, like love, is centred on a form of metaphysical chemistry. It is not simply a matter of flesh and blood, as the materialists would have us believe, but concerns something that lies beyond this realm and which unites us all at the moment of death. In fact life, from the very outset, is already complete to the degree that it seems to predetermine the eventual trajectory of human existence. The earthly bodies that we borrow temporarily and which are relinquished at the moment of death, cannot mask the fundamental substance that either attracts or repels us during the course of our lives. As far as I am concerned, this is one of the great mysteries of the universe.