Relief Work

Abstract

This chapter explores the work of Walter Pater. It shows that he wanted more from life. His essays raise the question of what this more might be, and where it might come from. They ask how we might become both more at home in and more penetrable by the vivid world. In an early essay, “Diaphaneitè” (1864), Pater rather mysteriously proposed: “He who is ever looking for the breaking of a light he knows not whence about him, notes with a strange heedfulness the faintest paleness in the sky.” All of Pater's subjects seem engaged in this strangely heedful notation, as if on the lookout for a particular quality of life. “The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit” says Pater, glossing a statement by Novalis, “is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.” Pater's writing thus speculates at the boundary point of a “quickened sense of life.”