I had a contemporary at Christ Church who had real skill

in writing verse and who was, moreover, in accord with the

spirit of the age, and he therefore became famous as a poet.
That was W.H.Auden. I knew him by sight but do not recollect
ever speaking to him.
Writer or not, Oxford was not my destiny. It would have
been as great a tragedy, as much the waste of a lifetime, if the
circle had closed there as if it had closed earlier on a Yorkshire
farm. It was an intuitive recognition that it would have been
evading the fight of whose existence I did not yet know and
accepting instead an easy establishment. However, I could not
explain this to any one at the time because I did not know
it myself.
To say that some ones destiny is not in a certain port does
not absolve him from responsibility for the navigation. In spiritual
things, statements which appear contradictory can both be true,
expressing different aspects or levels of truth. For instance, Christ
could say, from one standpoint, that evil must needs come, but
he could immediately follow it up from another with a
denunciation of those through whom it comeswhich would
be illogical and unjust if both statements were made from the
same standpoint. Similarly, the Quran states that evil-doers can
act as they do only by the divine will, and yet in another place itdenounces them for putting
forward this very plea in their own
defence. The former viewpoint is cosmic and the latter individual,
and each are valid on its own plane. (Actually, there is also a third
standpoint, higher than either, the metaphysical; but from that
the question of responsibility does not arise). To revert to a symbol
used earlier in this book, the former is like viewing a landscape
from the air, when the entire course of the river exists
simultaneously in the eternal present, the timeless now; the latter
is like a man in a boat, for whom the part of the river already
navigated is past and that ahead is future. The course that lies
ahead of him may be already marked on the map, but he has not
access to the map and does not know what it is; also it is not
drawn by any arbitrary whim but is due to the lie of the land, the
force of the current and the obstacles interposed to its flow.