Meeting John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys 
(1872-1963)

It’s funny, isn’t it, how the apparently insignificant trifles are the ones that turn out to have a huge impact on our lives? They say you never know the moment when someone special will come into your life and change it forever. Sometimes you don’t bump into them directly but take a bit of a circuitous route as happened to me one spring morning while I was getting ready for work. The postman knocked and gave me the parcel that I recognised as being a book my partner had bought online. I put it to one side and went off to work.

As the days passed, he talked more and more about aspects of the book and finally concluded that I must read it. So I did, and am still living with the effects of two chapters in particular, the ones that introduced me to John Cowper Powys. Despite being an avid reader and per-user of bookshops all my life, I had never heard of him until then. I re-read those two chapters numerous times and then began buying his original philosophical books before moving onto his novels.

John Cowper Powys came into my life at just the right moment. At the time, I was disillusioned and felt a sense of being lost and alone in a world that seemed alien to me. More and more, I felt like an outsider. All around me, people talked of ‘aspiration’ - the word seemed to be included in every conversation - but other people’s ideas and aspirations were not the same as mine. I loved life but was coming to loathe the cycle of work, shopping, socializing, hunger for status and money that gripped everyone. I didn’t get a buzz from the things that seemed to float other people boats and increasingly, felt more and more alone and isolated as I realized my values and view of life were at odds with the mainstream. I too had aspirations but I aspired to other, different things and my life and thoughts seemed to be constantly at variance with those around me and wider society. I now really understood what it meant to feel alone in a crowd. And then JCP burst into my life and helped me realise I was not going mad but simply reacting to modern life.  No, he assured me, I was sane and my feelings were a response to a world that treats us as workers and consumers, not as human beings with hearts and souls. He showed me that it was my humanity, my individuality, that was screaming out and fighting against being strangled by advertising, the media, peer pressure and the values and norms of modern society. 

But he didn’t stop there – not only did he point out the sources of my problems but presented his ‘philosophy of life’- ideas and practical strategies for living in psychological and spiritual healthy ways. His philosophy is a guide for living a happier and more authentic life. He offers it to the reader as a template to develop their own personal philosophy which can be used in their every-day living. He wanted his life-philosophy to act as a self-help manual but John Cowper Powys is no cliché, jargon-ridden self-professed guru. He was a great writer and philosopher, a man who lived by what he believed and a compassionate human being who hated to see suffering and what modern living was doing to his fellow man.

Delving further into John Cowper Powys’s life and works, I was amazed that such a writer has remained so obscure given he has a great deal of value to say to us today.  He deserves to be re-discovered and recognised for the wisdom and beauty contained in his books.