Review of 'The World Within' in 'The Literary Review for July 2025
The World Within: why writers and artists and thinkers retreat
Guy Stagg
Scribner (Simon and Schuster)
978-1-3985-3350-9
Why do people withdraw from life, sometimes for quite long periods? Why do people, including now many secular people, go on retreat? Guy Stagg asks these questions in relation to three of the most arresting people of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who shifted our whole understanding of philosophy, David Jones, at once a remarkable poet and painter, and Simone Weil, the French intellectual and mystic.
In this intriguing book Stagg brings out a number of different reasons why these three led such radically different lives from most of us, some more easy to understand than others. One is the reason for solitude in order to concentrate on essential work. So Wittgenstein went to a remote area of Norway in order to write the Tractatus Logico- Positivus and David Jones spent the last years of his life in a dishevelled hotel bedroom totally given over to his painting and lettering. Then a person might be solitary by nature. All three of those discussed were essentially loners.
More startling are some of the motives that drove this apartness from normal human activity. With Simone Weil it was a desire to fully identify with human suffering. This was what led her first to join the republican cause in Spain, then to work for a year on a conveyer belt in a factory despite being nearly crippled with migraine. When the war came she could have stayed safely in the USA but came back to Europe to support the resistance but refusing to eat more than what she judged the poorest ate, she in effect starved herself to death. With Wittgenstein the reason is more difficult to grasp. During World War I he had deliberately put himself in the position of most danger. He separated himself from the huge wealth of his family to live on his earnings. Leaving academic life he worked for a period as a gardener in a monastery, then trained as a teacher and taught in remote mountain schools for years. It seems as though he was troubled about his own character and wanted to put himself through the most difficult trials both to test himself and to grow morally as a person.
Where this book comes to its most crucial focus, however, is in the relation between the life style of these three and their understanding of suffering. All three of them suffered terribly. Three of Wittgenstein’s siblings died young probably from suicide and suicide was never far from his own thoughts. He was homosexual at a time when this was illegal and he deeply grieved the death a friend in early life whom he deeply loved. Unlike Wittgenstein David Jones did not have a need to suffer. In his long poem In Parenthesis, written from the standpoint of ‘Dai Greatcoat, which Auden called the best book to come out of World War I the tone is almost jaunty. But as a result of writing it Jones clearly suffered what we now know as PTSD and for three years he could do absolutely nothing. Most startling of all is Simone Weil. Her thought is always fresh, confident and arresting-and deeply disturbing- because for her suffering was not just an inevitable part of having a creation, it existed in the very heart of God, and the only true way to this God was to enter fully into the affliction of his absence. About the cry of dereliction on the cross she said it was there that we had true proof Christ was divine.
Stagg writes ‘Misery is no guarantee of genius, and, in the case of these three, their achievements came in spite rather than because of their suffering’ (p.180). The first part of this sentence is clearly true, the second is more open to question. In the case of Wittgenstein and Weil, though not David Jones, the uncompromising nature of their personalities, with which their genius is so integrally linked, made some form of suffering inevitable.
All three figures were deeply religious, but they understood religion differently. Jones converted to Catholicism as a result of seeing Mass and came to see all life in sacramental terms and his work as sign making. Wittgenstein was also converted to Catholicism but for him what mattered was the ethical endeavour, the struggle to be a different person, about the rest one had to be silent. Weil had an overpowering religious experience. Reading George Herbert’s poem ‘Love’ she said that Christ took possession of her soul yet she refused to be baptised for fear of cutting herself off from wider humanity with whom she felt in solidarity.
This book is not only about these three figures, it is a very personal quest of the author himself. In a relaxed and informative way he visits and takes the reader to all the places and religious houses associated with his three subjects wondering at the back to his mind what there might be in withdrawal and retreat for his own life. But there is a fundamental difficulty here. He visits as a spectator, and as he is a close, attentive observer we get some excellent writing about the places and people, with no false romantism, indeed some quite astringent realism. But this means that as an observer he can never quite fully enter into the experience and is sometimes bored by the place or the religious services. The result however is that he has given us a readable book in which the biggest questions of human life are wrestled with by three people prepared to put aside the usual compromises to live with total commitment at the extreme edge both of life and their human spirit.
Richard Harries
He is the author of Haunted by Christ: modern writers and the struggle for faith (SPCK)