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John Addington Symonds - Describes the annihilation of the Self
Identifier
013483
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
John Addington Symonds ( 5 October 1840 – 19 April 1893) was an English poet and literary critic. Although he married and had a family, he was an early advocate of male love relationships. He referred to it as l'amour de l'impossible (love of the impossible). A cultural historian, he was known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as numerous biographies about writers and artists. He also wrote much poetry inspired by his homosexual affairs.
He suffered from ill health throughout his life and had a nervous breakdown. His work was interrupted by serious illness on a number of occasions. He was feverishly active throughout his life. Considering his poor health, his productivity was remarkable. Two works, a volume of essays, In the Key of Blue, and a monograph on Walt Whitman, were published in the year of his death. His activity was unbroken to the last.
He had a passion for Italy and for many years resided during the autumn in the house of his friend, Horatio F Brown, on the Zattere, in Venice. Brown wrote a biography of him after his death. He died in Rome and was buried close to the grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
A description of the experience
J A Symonds, a biography – H F Brown 1895
[from The Varieties of Religious Experience – William James]
I cannot even now find words to render it intelligible. It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self. In proportion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity.
At last nothing remained but a pure absolute abstract Self.
The universe became without form and void of content. But Self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, feeling the poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find existence break as breaks a bubble round about it.