My Soul Can Reach
Chapter One: Digory
"I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the Ends of Being and ideal Grace."
~ Sonnets from the Portuguese, XLIII, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
When Digory Kirke was a young man, he traveled. He visited India where his father had served in the army. The sun tanned his face and lightened his hair, and the heat left him constantly parched, even though the air was heavy with moisture. Digory thought of being lost in a heart of a flame that burned without destroying and was glad for it. He climbed peaks to look down on eagle eyries and strained to draw in too thin air and told his baffled companions that he'd missed the feeling. He studied Shakespeare at Oxford and Plato in Athens and the Nyayasutras in Calcutta.
When he was a little older, but not old, or even quite middle-aged, he played cards on his stomach in trenches of earth with a rifle alongside him and listened to stories of 'going over the wall' with fellow soldiers whose eyes testified that they had only just begun to learn of grief. Digory thought of those who sought destruction and found it and of the hard choice of going forward when none back home would ever know the truth of what was sacrificed and what was saved, and warmed himself at a golden fire that no one else could see.
Before the war, Digory studied. After the war, he taught of discovering truth outside of Plato's cave and the necessity of not allowing assumptions to overrule experience or perception to blind one to reality. "'There are more things in heaven and earth,' Richard," he told a favorite student, "than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'"