Best line of the week came on Monday from the composer John Tavener, and was given added poignancy by the announcement the following day that Tavener had died. He told us, ‘Life is a creeping tragedy; that’s why I must be cheerful.’ It’s a sankalpa, or inner resolution, he held on to especially in his last years as he endured an illness that stopped his heart four times and once kept him in intensive care for six months. For a while the experience of near-death shut down his creativity completely. He had, he told us, ‘no sense of that other life which until then had enriched him’.
Tavener was talking on Start the Week, which on Monday welcomed back Andrew Marr after his remarkable recovery from catastrophic illness. Marr chose as his theme for this first programme the poems of George Herbert and the way that Herbert abandoned the life of status and ambition and devoted himself instead to making sense of his religious faith and of his inner life, his soul.
If you’re over a certain age, you’ll know Herbert’s work through lines like ‘Teach me, my God and King’ or ‘Let all the world in every corner sing’ taken from the English hymnal and once sung in school assemblies the land over. Those who are young enough to have missed out on this kind of linguistic education should look him up on Google. As Marr vividly encapsulated, Herbert’s way with words is like Shakespeare but rinsed and rinsed thoroughly until only a few pebbles remain.
Marr himself claims not to be a man of faith but since his illness he has found in Herbert’s poetry a solace, a calming of the restless mind. Herbert was writing almost 400 years ago but we can find in him surprising connections because he was writing not about the external world within which he lived, but rather about those inner quandaries and doubts that still pester and plague us.
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