This is the last of the short columns, about nothing in particular, that I shall write for The Lamp. This is entirely my decision. Please let me explain. My wish to cease writing them was instinctive. I have only afterwards discovered what I think are the reasons for it. I felt I had gone as far as I could with a series of articles which were extremely personal. They may not always have looked that personal, but I promise you that they were. If I had been writing about politics, or books, or religion or justice, or foreign affairs I should not have stopped. These subjects are like a spring that never dries up. There is always something new or at worst something old presenting itself in a new way. But these articles here have been largely about what is left of my memory, in many cases of a world that has crumbled to dust in my own lifetime.

Some people have kindly suggested to me that I might like to write a memoir, which is what these articles partly amount to. And this appeals to my colossal vanity. But I will not do that because the past is full of dangers. I know for certain that my memory can be gravely inaccurate, about time and place. I also know that it can completely conceal things from me for many years, only to remind me of them, quite bitterly, when I least welcome the recollection. “The remembrance of them is grievous unto me. The burden of them is intolerable,” as the Prayer Book says. Memories of this sort are in any case finite, and the more I reach into them the more likely they are to distress me or, more important, someone else. So the number of such things I can safely lift out of the cupboard of the yesterdays is more limited than I had expected. I take them gingerly off the shelves, blow the dust off—and see danger or unhappiness as well as interest. I burned a lot of letters some years ago, for this reason. I am still both very sorry and very relieved that I found the resolve to do this. I also abandoned an attempted ghost story, meant for this magazine’s annual competition, because it began to frighten me, and grew so close to real and tragic events that I decided it was wiser to delete it and try to forget it (though of course I cannot).

I had also begun to check my latest articles to see if I was repeating myself. Now, it is all very well if you tell your friends and colleagues the same anecdote more than once. We have all done it (haven’t we?). But it is different when you are, as it were, appearing in public. There is a story about Winston Churchill, in his later years, reading the same page of a speech twice, before an admiring audience (I can find no actual record of this). But what would be worse? That you had done it in the first place? Or that everybody pretended not to notice, and they applauded dutifully anyway?

There is another thing. I have often read the regular columns of others, of the same personal sort, and muttered “Why doesn’t he stop? This is becoming jaded.” I’ve concluded that kindly editors have preferred to let such things run their natural course, or that less kindly editors have decided to wring the last drop of value from them. The same is terribly true of some authors, who continue to write long after they have lost their original delight. Surely I must be conscious of this danger.

But let me express some thanks—first to The Lamp, and its editor, Matthew, for asking me to write a series of articles I have much enjoyed and will treasure, secondly to Nic, who has so gently handled my words, thirdly to those who have read what I have written. And fourthly to my parents and brother, with whom I shared a mostly idyllic childhood from which so many of these ideas were drawn. I am the last of us four, and I would want to do them justice. I cannot thank the landscapes, in England, Scotland, and many other places which helped to form my thinking. But how fortunate I have been to live in and around raucous, risky cities such as Portsmouth and Moscow, and also amid the fair beauties of Oxford and York, and deep in the profound quiet of Devon before the motor car completely spoiled the world. Like music, the sense of place remains always in the mind and influences what we do, whether we know it or not. Perhaps above all these memories must be the day I married my wife, Eve, according to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England, the single most profound moment I shall ever live, in which I learned that words were not just cleverly arranged sounds or shapes, but that they could both bind us and release us, after which I “Stood ready to be loosed with all the power / That being changed can give.” And I understood that poetry, spoken in the service of eternal justice and truth, is stronger than any gun or bomb or human decree.