This passage from T.H. White’s description of Guenever in The Ill-Made Knight seems like an imposing of a modern worldview on a medieval story. Weren’t the middle ages a time of a stable, religious worldview? And if so, would the state of mind sketched out here — one that settles for chaos – be possible?
As a picture of aging/maturity, surely not all that’s suggested in this passage is true…? Yet I think there’s something to the idea of the “seventh sense” described here. Is it fair to say these paragraphs represent one of the possibilities? How truthful is this writing?
There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically — she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. And then, when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living — not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth — if women ever do hope this — but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one — knowledge of the world…
The seventh sense is recognized without a cry. We only carry on with our famous knowledge of the world, riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a stage of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do.
And at this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense… But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned… All these problems and feelings begin to fade away when we get the seventh sense. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The seventh sense, indeed, slowly kills all the other ones, so that at last there is no trouble about the commandments…
