Photo: Portrait of Dorothy M. Richardson., c1910s–1920s, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Turning the crank: Jonathan Wooding on the ‘inspiring’ Dorothy Richardson
‘Every Meeting has its leaven of genuine mystics.’
Friends are perhaps uniquely placed among people-of-faith-and-none to declare that the bottom line in theology nowadays is consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. Individual consciousness – invisible, unquantifiable, numinous – is the site and epoch of encounter with reality, of resolution and evaluation, of impotence and mystery. Philosopher of the religious sensibility, Iris Murdoch writes passionately: ‘The volatile variegated force, the ever-flowing energy, the temporal pressure, the unfailing presence of what we call “the stream of consciousness” – surely this is something fundamental, surely if we are searching for “being” this is it?’
