THINKER AND WRITER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 218, 27 August 1943, Page 10

THINKER AND WRITER

THE WAITING HILLS: By M. H. Holcrott. Progressive Publishing Society, Wellington HE DEEPENING STREAM made Mr. Holcroft our foremost-I would myself say ‘our first and only-literary philosopher. The Waiting Hills makes his position more secure. It is vigorous thinking and distinguished writing, though I do not always find it easy to follow. Sometimes I do not understand it at all, and I feel more strongly with the second essay than with the first that while Mr. Holcroft now writes with ease he still thinks with difficulty. It is not that I expect him to bring abstruse preblems in every case within my own grasp; to think down or write down, He does neither, and I hope he never will. But he gives me the impression of a man under strain. Over and over again I feel that if he is not reaching beyond his grasp he is clinging to his holds with a kind of trembling desperation; an uncomfortable situation for the reader as well as for the author. On the other hand, who else but Professor Sinclairewho refuses to take himself seriouslycan fill page after page with prose like this: "New Zealand has few of the scars which mark the graves of vanished cultures. There is no Troy, no Babylon to be excavated from our silent plains. No Stonehenge poses its enigma on a tussock ridge among the foothills. There is no work here for archeologists. While the Roman Empire was reaching out actoss Europe and North Africa, these islands were still undisturbed in the fruitful dream of the Kainozoic age; only geologic time had left its ruins and ciphers among the rocks. In the sense that the world is not created for man until its physical vibrations are sifted through an interpreting brain, New Zealand was in the state of chaos." There is in fact, not a page in this whole book, and very few paragraphs, that could be buried in any other New Zealand book and not shine through. I take two illustrations. Chapter III. runs to 17 pages, and just escapes being a moral attack on gambling. If he could drop to complete ordinariness anywhere it would be here. But in the middle of it you find yourself reading lines like these: "The workers are enclosed more than ever in small areas of specialised effort. It cannot be surprising, therefore, if they think of pleasure as an escape from too much complexity. They feel dimly that life is precarious, that happiness is fragile, and that possessions are like sand in the fingers of a child playing on the beach. Yet if you tell them that simple pleasures are the best, you must be ready to meet the objection that simplicity is a challenge which tired or bewildered men are not equipped to meet. One of the most satisfying of all pleasures, for instance, is con. versation; and in New Zealand this is an art lost many years ago when the first generation of colonists settled down to a tired old age -on the properties they had shaped from virgin soil, or went home to England for a last look at the landmarks of youth and family." Chapter V. is very short-scarcely 12 pages-but before you know where you are, you are marching to music: "This, then, is the basic fact of our historyan age of silence. While. the countries of Europe and Asia felt the movement of tribes and the growth of nations; while the classic civilisations were tumultuously taking their shape in the Mediterranean basin; while bar- baric empires developed, with splendours of mythology and ritual, in the broad lands of South America; while the dream of spirit in nature was creating the colourful but passive culture of India: » BS islands of New Zealand were outside the mind of the world, intact and pure amid the flow of winds which brought only the sound and the distilled moisture of the sea." :

It is true that Mr. Holcroft lacks humour, and because of that lack, seldom succeeds in keeping a safe distance from the pulpit. But good writing is

worth a sermon or two,

O.

D.