The Death of the Imagination

Abstract

Elizabeth Sewell The Death of the Imagination In the NORTH SIDE aisle OF Hereford Cathedral there hangs that wonderful old document, the Mappa Mundi.Whenever you go there, turning into the cool nave from the long line ofrose- filled and swan-patrolled gardens down theWye (for each cathedral city seems to have its appropriate weather and for Hereford it is midsummer ), there is always a group of people to be found in front of Mappa Mundi, gazing at that work of the cartographer. Jerusalem stands there in the center of the earth, a little citadel surmounted by spire and cross, and one can amuse oneself by considering the very odd shape of Spain or Arabia, or the monsters lurking in the corners. If you look in the right place, not very far from Inde, you will find a territory labeled Paradise Terrestre, the Earthly Paradise. Reprinted from Thought 27 (1953): 413-445. © 1953 Fordham University Press, NewYork. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Fordham University Press. Logos 1:1 1997 The Death of the Imagination Anyone who knows about the mind knows that time and space inside it are quite different from time and space outside it, and the further into the mind one gets, the queerer do they become, as dreams will testify. For the thirteenth-century map maker, the Earthly Paradise was contemporary with himself. It was no relic of an ancient tale dating back to God knows when, but something existing at the same time as himself, though considerably removed in distance.We need for the present this same frame ofmind, for it is an imaginative one. This is our first step into the imagination, which is its own Mappa Mundi. There will be others to follow, for one can only study the imagination by consenting to it, in part at least. Reason will do what it can, but the only entry to this world is by affirmation ofits ways; and ifthis seem already to you like the death of reason, it has to be accepted in faith as no more than a sleep in a darkness which, after all goodnights, is not a final one but merely this world turning itself in its proper hemispheres of day and night. Without your consent, we can advance no further and Paradise will be Lost for good and all. What an image the Earthly Paradise gives the mind! There are those who claim to know what it is like. "Men say that Paradise terrestre is the highest lande in all the worlde, and it is so high that it toucheth nere to the cyrcle of the Mone...."1 That is Sir John Mandeville, but he adds, with a curious pathos in so noble and fullblooded a liar, "OfParadise can I not speake properly for I haue not bene there." Milton, too, is a rather odd mixture of sobriety—"A happy rural seat of various view"2—and subtropical exuberance. Each soul would image it for himself, one asking one thing and one another: a stretch of black and white squared marble tiUng, between box hedges and rose borders; water in small stone fountains ; wild rocky streams down open valleys full of tumbled boulders and birds sailing; sunflowers along the edge ofa wood.Yet we know this country when we meet it in others, "a most pleasant Mountainous Countrey, beautified withWoods,Vinyards, Fruits of 1S5 156 Logos all sorts, Flowers also, Springs and Fountains, very delectable to behold."3 All park and garden images, from the Song of Songs to Elizabethan emblem books and the rose garden in Alice in Wonderland, have this familiarity about them, as if we knew this place and had only to remember it with an effort ofconcentration. It is this too which makes the image ofthe defiled garden so powerful . A ragged wilderness where once was cultivation and abundance brings home to the imagination the vision of what Paradise might have grown into after Fall, as ifat the very moment Eve sank her teeth into the apple the weeds began to germinate and grow, as though the hair ofthe ground rose slightly, and now The rusted nails fell from die knots That held the...