The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys

or in the pursuit of truth. No! in an exquisite enjoyment of life. How to enjoy our existence in spite of our selves!

Powys is as hard to grasp with the intellect as that other great exponent of the Third Revelation who wrote about a hundred years before him, namely Max Stirner. And there are many similarities in what they are saying. Both are agreed that the purpose of life is to enjoy, and both are agreed that we have in order to enjoy life to clear out of the way any thing that might become so fixed in us as to deceive us into thinking that it is a part of ourselves. Both Stirner and Powys advise us to travel light, to strip our ego of all its trappings. For Stirner to enjoy means to use up, to consume, not to save and possess. ‘Enjoyment of life,’ he says, ‘is using life up like a candle which one can only use in burning.’

What then have we to get out of the way so that we may enjoy? Basically four kinds of things: That dependence on comparing ourselves with others which we may call Pride; that dependence on certain ideas or ideals or objects of reverence and worship, which we may call Belief; that dependence on possessions or familiar circumstances which we may call Security; and allowing our lives to be conditioned by what we think we ought to think, feel and do, which we may call Morality. These cannot be wholly separated from one another because, for instance, much of our morality is really related to what others think of us and may thus be brought under the heading of pride; and much of our security is not material or even emotional, but mental security in having certain fixed ideas and beliefs which we take as a protection against the uncertainties of our actual life experience.

The greatest hindrance of all to our selfhood, Powys finds in pride or conceit, which is usually the result of comparing ourselves with other people and hoping to find ourselves cleverer or better or more spiritual than they. For it is only when we can escape from comparing ourselves with others or depending on the opinion held of us by others that we are really free to enjoy the actual experience of the moment ‘unbothered’ as he says ‘by the “hell” of other people’s admiration, suspicion, envy, contempt, attraction, repulsion.’ And to achieve this enjoyment Powys considers it necessary to annihilate, together with pride and conceit, all that

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