“Beware of muddle”

“Passion is sanity” says Mr. Emerson in E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View. I was reminded of that scene in Star Wars where the spirit of Obi Wan Kenobe tells Luke Skywalker to shut off his X Wing fighter’s instrumentation panel and “trust his feelings” to find the precise moment to launch the missile that will destroy the Death Star and Save the Resistance from annihilation. “I forbid you to consult the Baedeker. You should consult your feelings here” Lucy Honeychurch is advised in A Room With a View, and the advice Lucy is given throughout the novel is consistent with that simple injunction, though with the understanding that “Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”

Forster keeps returning to the use of the word “muddled” as he brings his main character, Lucy, through the stormy sea of late adolescence and early adulthood. She is sent to Italy with a chaperone and the clear instruction to find a perfect Victorian husband with whom to live a perfect Victorian life and yet she discovers that Italy and the people that she meets there muddle everything. Her feelings don’t follow the channels that her society has dug for her to run into. Everyone, it seems, has a different idea about how she gets muddled, but they all know that she is getting so. Here are just a few examples.

“It isn't possible to love and to part. You will ... wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal” (19.42).

“[…] let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, ... if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them” (2.43).

“And she spoke so seriously that the risk became a certainty, and he, lifting his eyes, said: “You are leaving him? You are leaving the man you love?”
I—I had to.
“why, Miss Honeychurch, why?”
Terror came over her, and she lied again. She made the long, convincing speech that she had made to Mr. Beebe, and intended to make to the world when she announced that her engagement was no more. He heard her in silence, and then said: “My dear, I am worried about you. It seems to me” — dreamily; she was not alarmed — “that you are in a muddle.
She shook her head.
“Take an old man's word; there’s nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. lt is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror — on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.”

What clearly needs to happen before Lucy Honeychurch starts making decisions and promises that affect other people is this. She needs to figure out, in the abstract, what weights she will place on the various influences that affect her decisions. Will her feelings weigh 50%, her familiy’s opinions weigh 30% and her reason weigh 20%? Or will she construct some other recipe more like 30-30-30? “This solitude oppressed her;” the character, Lucy observes. “She was accustomed to have her ... thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.”

And there is the rub, Lucy. There is no weighting of influences that will provide you with a right answer every time. So in matters of the heart, where no retreat from the decision is possible, aim to have your head, your heart, and your family all at a 100% agreement. And have a good reason why not if that can’t be the case.

In the end, E.M. Forster speaks through Mr. Emerson (a slightly veiled allusion to Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote the Bible of the transcendental self making decisions in his essay Self Reliance), the essential thing is to know that you love and are loved:

“When I think what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”

Or as the book of Song of Solomon puts it “I am my beloved’s and he is mine” … It seems like that is the sort of love that even God cannot help but celebrate. And I guess He should weigh more than anyone.

Think, feel, pray, listen … do all these things. Just don’t pretend.

“It did not do to think, nor, for the matter ... of that to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue […] Lucy entered this army when she pretended to George that she did not love him, and pretended to Cecil that she loved no one. The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before (17.54-5).

One must assume that on the way to truth there will be muddlement. We must bear with it long enough to be allowed to see. To be allowed to grow up. Which is really simply the act of coming to see. Like learning to wait before walking after getting dizzy.

“Lucy cried aloud: “It isn't true. It can't all be true. I want not to be muddled. I want to grow older quickly.”

In response to the advice “beware of muddle” I think I would say “was there ever a different way to finding the truth?” As Oscar Wilde says “Only the shallow know themselves.” Muddled? Welcome to class.

Question for comment: We all get muddled sometimes. Do you tend to remain so longer than most? Why?