🔰 Where's the Godhead Within? | Rudyard Kipling

So we'll make a start. So good morning, I'm Nicholas De Matos. I'm a tutor and a student in the School of Philosophy and Economic Science. I'm going to talk to you this morning about Rudyard Kipling part two, because I gave you part one in the summer. And in that time, I'll just actually bring up a picture of our good friend. There he is, Rudyard Kipling. So during the summer, I told you about Rudyard Kipling's early life, his childhood and bachelorhood. I told you about his well-to-do family in India, his rather fearsome existence at a boarding house in England, probably as much to do with his own recalcitrance as the rigid discipline of the redoubtable Captain Holloway. I spoke about his almost maniacal work ethic, but also about his irrepressible sense of humour. We left him at the end of part one, having recently suffered a nervous breakdown from overwork and being advised to travel. The sudden death of his literary collaborator, the American Walcott, Balestier, summoned him back again from his travels, not least because of Carrie, Balestier's sister, to whom he had sent a telegram proposing marriage. He and Carrie settled in the US, and after the bank where they held their savings failed, they lived simply and happily in their house called Bliss Cottage, where their first child, Josephine, was born. There, not in India, you'll note, while the snow lay feet thick outside, Kipling started The Jungle Book. He says, after blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and the animals. The Kiplings received visitors at Bliss Cottage, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought his golf clubs and gave Kipling lessons. Subsequently, Kipling and the local Congregational Minister used to play together, even in the winter, when they used a red ball in the snow. However, winter golf wasn't, not altogether, he says, a success, because a ball might skid two miles down the long slope to the Connecticut River. In 1896, Elsie was born, but a combination of things made Kipling decide to leave the US. Funny enough, given fairly recent events in the Essequibo area of Guyana, one of these was a dispute between Britain and Venezuela. They were in a border dispute about what was then British Guyana. The Americans offered and then insisted that they arbitrate, and Britain refused. This caused anti-British feeling in America. Another thing was a family dispute. Cara's relationship with her brother, Beatty, had become strained, sorry, here's Beatty, because of his drinking and insolvency. Once, Beatty, in a drunken state, had accosted Kipling in the street and had threatened him, which led to Beatty's arrest. The subsequent court case shattered the Kipling's privacy, and they left the US before the adjourned case resumed. They moved to a house in Torquay, where their son John was born. From Torquay, they moved to Rottingdean in Sussex. In 1899, during a trip to the US, Josephine, the girl on the left here, died from pneumonia, which she and her father had both contracted. This caused the family great grief, but three years after, they had, I think three years after they'd returned, they'd bought Bateman's, the 17th century manor house in Burwash. He was now famous, and he became more and more involved in political writing and speeches. Maybe this is why the poem If seems so much from the point of view of a man of some power and influence. In 1900, the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, made a speech during, sorry, urging German troops sent to China to put down the Boxer Rebellion, to behave like Huns and take no prisoners. In 1902, Kipling published a poem called The Rowers, attacking the Kaiser as a threat to Britain, and first used the word Hun as an anti-German insult. In 1907, Kipling became the first English language recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, started in 1901. The citation praised both Kipling and three centuries of English literature, so rich in manifold glories. In World War I, Kipling was prolific in his writing, supporting the war against Germany, but in 1915, in the Battle of Luce, his son John was killed. Oops, missed the turn. Now, because of his bad eyesight, John had only got into the army because his father was friends with Lord Roberts, the former commander-in-chief. Kipling was broken-hearted, was only relieved by reading Jane Austen aloud to Carrie and Elsie. In 1935, Kipling gave a speech to the Royal Society of St George, warning of the danger to Britain of Nazi Germany, just as he had against the Kaiser in 1902, 12 years before World War I. A year later, on the night of the 12th of January, 1936, Kipling suffered a haemorrhage of the small intestine, had surgery in Middlesex Hospital, but died a week later at the age of 70. It's a mark of his perennial sense of humour that, during that week, he wrote to a magazine saying, I've just read that I'm dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers. Now, I'm going to read you something now. He wrote a really short story called The Thing Hid Inside a Man, and I'm going to read that to you now. Once upon a time, or rather at the birth of time, when the gods were so new that they had no names, and man was still damp from the clay of the pit whence he'd been digged, man claimed that he too was in some sort of god. The gods weighed his evidence and decided that man's claim was good. Having conceded man's claim, the legend goes that they came by stealth and stole away this godhead with intent to hide it where man should never find it again. But this was not so easy. If they hid it anywhere on the earth, the gods foresaw that man would leave no stone unturned until he'd recovered it. If they concealed it amongst themselves, they feared man might battle his way up to the skies. And while they were thus at a stand, the wisest of the gods said, I know, give it to me. And I'm going to put this quote in chat now. He closed his hand upon the tiny unstable light of man's stone godhead. And when that great hand opened again, the light was gone. And here's what he said. All is well, he said. I've hidden it where man will never dream of looking for it. I have hidden it inside man himself. So I don't think this is so far from our experience as we think. Have you ever wondered how it was that you knew something would happen in advance? Or how you had knowledge of what to do in a critical situation which was crucial to its favourable outcome? Or maybe sometimes ignoring knowledge and afterwards wishing you had listened to yourself. My own experience of this is rather dramatic. I was saved by death or serious injury on a couple of occasions, both on two wheels. So this is when I was a student. I was cycling up the inside of the traffic as cyclists tend to do fast. And right in front of me, this van started turning left without signalling. And I went bang into his wing. And I felt myself catapulted high in the air. And I heard this woman scream. But I knew and everything was in slow motion. I knew that when I hit the ground, I had to roll. And so that's what happened. I rolled and I sat up and looked back and the front wheel of the van had gone over my bicycle. So that was one occasion. Another occasion was when I was this time on a motor scooter. And I was travelling along the road, and I was approaching a bend in the other direction, there was a car coming. And I suddenly realised that, that actually the road was quite wet. And I was travelling too fast to be able to negotiate the bend. So I knew the exact point where I had to park company with the motorbike. And so I did so. And I went sliding down the left hand side of the car. And the motorbike went underneath the car. So there was there was something, some sort of knowledge within as to what to do, how to basically preserve life or serious injury. So, well, lesson for today, perhaps. Listen to that still small voice of calm, as it says in him, telling us what to do, or sometimes what not to do. Socrates himself said that, in his case, it was mainly the latter voice, what not to do, that got him and his companions out of a fatal situation more than once. So if you've enjoyed this, then please like it and share it. And just to say that this is the last broadcast of this season, last Philosophy Live broadcast. And the next one will be on the same time on the 24th, Friday the 24th of January. So have a good day and farewell.