Brideshead Revisited Revisited
The first time I read Brideshead Revisited, I was practically illiterate. When Martin handed the book to me, I looked at the author's name and asked, "What else has she written?" The author, Evelyn Waugh, was a man—and not to be confused with his first wife, named Evelyn. After Martin had previously recommended Middlemarch by George Eliot, a profoundly gifted writer whose birth name is Mary Ann Evans, I began to suspect that Martin, like his father, got some amusement out of seeing how poorly educated college students are.1
Admittedly, I remember very little of my first time reading Brideshead. I recall telling Martin that it was probably my favorite book of all time, but that merely meant it was the most recent thing I had read, since in those days every new thought felt vibrant, and the latest one always shone most brightly.
In a few successive seasons I had been enamored with Spinoza's determinism, Nietzsche's will to power, and Kant's categorical imperative. Kurt Vonnegut had given way to John Updike; Updike to Franzen; Franzen to Williams; and Williams to Wallace, whose big book was easy enough to move from apartment to apartment without reading, influencing my thought and manner through aura or osmosis rather than—you know—reading.
What could I have understood reading Brideshead? The book evokes a time so clearly lost that it hardly seems to have been possible that it ever existed, even tenuously—a truth echoed in the title of the first chapter, Et in Arcadia Ego, the name of a painting that portrays the transience of earthly life and the dim perfections we enjoy.
In a letter to his publisher about the book, the charming snob Waugh wrote, "I should not think six Americans will understand it," and I do not count myself among the six then or now. But re-reading the book recently has brought me closer to understanding, as with many difficult ideas that one can only approach but never quite grasp: those intellectual asymptotes—like the incarnation and the resurrection—that lie in the fuzzy penumbra of faith in reason's shadow.
The book hadn't changed in the time since I'd read it, but I had. That's an obvious truth, but take a moment to consider the rare reflection that re-reading affords us.
We are not strangers to ourselves. We are not our distant grandmothers who see us a few years later and remark on our growth, wistfully remembering how we were just yesterday crawling around and biting Uncle Dave's ankles. We see ourselves grow by accretion—the gradual shifts in manner and habit, mind and mood, faith and fancy through many moments, minute and magnificent. We don't clearly see the slow-growing lines on our faces until we look at our picture in the high school yearbook. The story arc of a life lived long bends slowly, not like the neatly packaged plot points of a two-hour film but much more like dropping grains of sand one by one: after a while you'll have a beach, but you'll hardly notice the tipping point.
Reading Brideshead again, I saw clearly how I had changed in the past ten years. Like the protagonist, Charles Ryder, I had moved away from a life of aesthetic indulgence and hedonism to one tempered by virtue—or at least attempts at virtue. In my first reading of the book, I had hardly noticed the novel's Catholicism—if anything, it felt like a necessary literary device to propel aspects of the romantic plot. That I could have missed that now seems to absurd to me: The book is singularly focused on faith and conversion. But I changed.
Curiously, I was just a year from converting to Catholicism when I read Brideshead, but I didn't know that then. What I am left with after re-reading the book is a sense of my own continued conversion.
When I was received into the Catholic Church, I was prepared to enter, but I was still standing in the doorway. The spiritual life has its own accretion, and it is only with careful reflection that we see our soul formed and reformed through prayer and practice, failure and forgiveness, inspiration and insight.
Over the past decade, I have walked slowly past the pews toward the altar—and turning back I can see the life I left behind, sitting on the stairs outside in sin and sorrow, panicking on the night of anointing as the truth wrestled with desire ("O God, make me good, but not yet.")—eyes fixed firmly on the the cross, approaching ("Troubled on every side, yet not distressed"), approaching ("Perplexed, but not in despair"), approaching ("Persecuted, but not forsaken"), approaching ("Cast down, but not destroyed"), approaching ("Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body."), always approaching, until: Death and resurrection.
For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you.
Brideshead Revisited naturally includes Evelyn Waugh's thought on this same subject: "The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed."