Soul School

(This is an installment of CommonSensical.)

The odds were against John Keats from the beginning. Orphaned as a small child, he grew up in poverty, had a scattershot education, nurtured an ill-fated love for a woman he couldn’t win, was savaged by critics in his native England, and died unknown to the world at age twenty-five.

But Keats left behind a slim body of poetry that includes some of the most beautiful lyrical works in the English language. His poetic mastery is often cited as being second only to Shakespeare.

Keats’s correspondence is full of riches as well. In May 1819, eighteen months before fatally succumbing to tuberculosis, the twenty-four-year-old poet sent his brother an astonishing letter outlining his philosophy about the human soul. I first read this letter more than a decade ago and have revisited it a few times a year ever since. Keats’s life-affirming perspective always touches me.

The letter seems a natural thing to share on a blog about the soul, for Keats is talking here about the big themes that all of us, by virtue of being alive, must explore: the meaning of life and death; of joy and sorrow; the conflict between fate and freewill; and the nature of identity. In short, he’s talking about the quest of existence itself.

Call the world, if you please, “The Vale of Soul-Making.” Then you find out the use of the world… I say “Soul-Making” — Soul as distinguished from Intelligence. There may be Intelligence, or sparks of the divinity, in millions, but they are not Souls till they acquire Identities, till each one is personally itself.

…How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks…to have Identity given to them, so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it is a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion, or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation.

Now Keats takes up a vivid analogy to explore how a unique soul comes to be formed in a world where one is often at the mercy of uncontrollable circumstance.

It’s particularly moving to reflect that the young man writing these words has led a very difficult life, has long been haunted by the conviction that he will die young — and yet, rather than say “no” to life, has opened himself to the troubles and wonders of the heart, and seeks to create art of lasting beauty.

… I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the Horn Book used in that school. [Note: a Horn Book was a child's primer, often covered with a sheet of transparent horn]. And I will call the child able to read the Soul made from that School and its Horn Book. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the heart a Horn Book, it is the mind’s Bible, it is the mind’s experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its Identity. As various as the lives of men are, so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls [i.e. each possessing identity] of the sparks of his own essence.

This appears to me a faint sketch of a system which does not affront our reason and humanity. I am convinced that many difficulties which Christians labor under would vanish before it.

Keats is saying here what Rilke, another favorite poet of mine, put another way in 1904: “Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”

And noticing that Keats describes a Soul as Intelligence that has acquired an Identity of its own, I think of certain inspiring people I’ve been privileged to know in my life — and of inspiring artists whose works never cease to amaze me. These people, and these artists, have a kind of indescribable soulfulness that sets them apart. Unique, wise, humble, and generous, they enrich my life beyond measure. Keats would suggest that these people have such life-enhancing soulfulness to share because they have experienced the world openheartedly.

Now the poet sums up:

Man was formed by circumstances, and what are circumstances but touchstones of his heart? And what are touchstones but provings of his heart? And what are provings of his heart but fortifiers or alterers of his nature? And what is his altered nature but his Soul? And what was his Soul before it came into the world and had these provings and alterations and perfectionings? An Intelligence, without Identity. And how is this Identity to be made? Through the medium of the heart. And how is the heart to become this medium but in a world of circumstances?

Fate is fickle, life unpredictable, but one is here now, and there’s lots of living to be done.

You might also enjoy:

“The Heroic Journey”

“Time for Everything”

“Opting Out of the Deferred Life Plan“