This splendid world that God has given us, and the furniture of it as the writer of Genesis saw it in his vision, has in it the material of happiness in labour and in the true end of labour. "For the true end of all creation is completion; and the true end of all completion is contemplation."
CHAPTER XXXII
Last Days
DOROTHY TOLD ME one day in 1935 that Gilbert had written the beginning of an autobiography some years before but had laid it aside. She had, she said, a superstitious feeling about urging him to get on with it—as though the survey of his life and the end of his life would somehow be tied together. I urged her to get over this feeling because of all the book would mean to the world. After this talk she got out the manuscript and laid it on Gilbert's desk. He read what he had written and immediately set about dictating the rest of the book.
Early in 1936 he told a group of friends that the book was finished. One of them said "Nunc dimittis" and Edward Macdonald, who was present, commented: "The words were chilling, though he seemed to be in fairly good health. But certainly he was tired. . . ."
The book showed no sign of fatigue. High-spirited and intensely amusing, it seemed to promise many more—for into almost old age he had carried the imagination and energy in which as a very young man we saw his resemblance to the youthful Dickens.
Reviewing his life with the thread of thanksgiving that had been his clue throughout, he looked back on it as "indefensibly happy" and it was in truth a rich and full human existence. Yet Father Vincent, who knew him intimately, speaks of him in these last years as heartbroken by public events, as suffering with the pains of creation. "He was crucified to his thought. Like St. Thomas he was never away from his thought. A fellow friar had to care for Thomas, to feed him 'sicut nutrix' because of his absorption in his thought." Thus Father Vincent saw Frances cherishing Gilbert both mind and body.
A friend, protesting vehemently against the phrase "crucified to his thought" says, "It was his life-long beatitude to observe and ponder and conclude."
Of his own so-called paradoxes Gilbert was wont to maintain that it was God not he, who made them, and here we have surely one of the paradoxes of human life. Intense vitality, joy in living, vigor of creative thought bring to their owners immense happiness and acute suffering.
Is it not a part of the most fundamental of all antinomies—the greatness and the littleness of man? Created for eternity and prisoned in time, we have no perfect joy in this world, and the reaching upward and outward of the mind is at once the keenest joy and the fiercest pain—rather as we talk of growing pains. Only Gilbert loved to grow so much that he would not think of the pain. "You must never pity me," he said to Lady Fisher, and all through his life he was saying and meaning "You must never pity me."