For Arthur Kemelman
‘To find the right road out of this despair [the pain of those who walk through the night blindly] civilized man must enlarge his heart as he has enlarged his mind. He must learn to transcend self, and in so doing to acquire the freedom of the Universe’. THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS, Bertrand Russell, 1930
The village post office in Penrhyndeudraeth,
Merioneth, was very busy
during the Cuban Missile Crisis
with telegrams to Kennedy and Kruschev
from Bertrand, 3rd Earl Russell – philosopher,
logician; mathematician, author;
moralist, socialist, pacifist.
He lived nearby, down a lane, in a late
seventeenth, early eighteenth century house
with a veranda that commanded views
of the Glaslyn estuary, Porthmadog,
Traeth Mawr, and, south east – if the earth were not
almost round – beyond the tip of Ireland
the Americas. There he had been
labelled – “a believer in free love…
a free thinker…a commie”. ‘Americans,’
he believed, ‘are terrified of thought’.
Below, on the promontory, hidden
by deciduous woods is Portmeirion,
the fantasy village, where Russell once stayed –
an invited guest with Noel Coward,
H.G. Wells and King Zog of Albania –
and laid the foundation stone of the Dome,
a modest homage to Brunelleschi.
Perhaps one bright afternoon in ’66 –
on the veranda in his cane chair,
observing the sun over the Atlantic,
smoking a pipe of his favourite
Friborg & Treyer’s Golden Mixture –
he thought he heard, vivid as in a dream,
someone declare, ‘I am not a number…’
By David Selzer