The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys

end of his life, he wrote ‘It is because, in our determination not to be fooled by words and their cunning tricks, we have taken the word “happiness” by surprise and exposed its little games and know now that it comes and goes at its own airy and unpredictable will, and has nothing in it or about it, or over it, or under it on which you can depend, that we have engraved on our philosophic headstone, not happiness but enjoyment.*® For ‘it is imperative,’ he says, ‘that our feeling about life should be in our own hands.’4° And even if science could prove conclusively that every single event or situation in our lives was occasioned by fate and was thus totally outside our control, there would still remain our attitude to these events or situations.

This is the secret of Powys’s word ‘enjoyment’. It is not equivalent to ‘pleasure’. To force yourself to enjoy does not mean to run after pleasurable sensations, because we cannot always be sure of getting them, and if we get them we may lose them again equally quickly through circumstances beyond our control. To ‘enjoy’ in Powys’s sense is not a passive experience but an extremely demanding activity. It demands considerable self-discipline and imagination. Powys says it is possible for everyone, even the simplest and least clever person. And that is true, because self discipline and imagination are possible for everyone.

To enjoy means in Powys’s own words ‘to approach, to grasp, to seize upon, to embrace something or other’,*? but that something need not be pleasant, it may indeed be very unpleasant. Nevertheless one can enjoy it. ‘A convert to the “Philosophy of In Spite” can,’ he says, ‘enjoy the process of doing a thing that in itself, in its essence, he doesn’t like at all.’42 And the same applies to any experience or situation or event with which he may be faced. He will deliberately and consciously set about to enjoy it.

How do we learn this art of enjoyment?

First we have to clear our selves out of the way. And what, you may ask, does he mean by this since it is exactly our ‘selves’ which we are supposed to be creating? Most teachers tell us to integrate ourselves or to realise ourselves or to develop our personality, our uniqueness or some other faculty, but Powys is concerned with none of these. How to lose ourselves is what Powys is concerned with, but not in worship of God, or love of others or good works

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