J.N.W. Sullivan & Colin Wilson -- 'The Desirability of the Ordinary.'

Found in a pamphlet by Colin Wilson: Autobiographical Reflections (Paupers' Press, 1980) this quotation from the writer J.W.N. Sullivan. Sullivan was a friend of Aldous Huxley & John Middleton Murry, later he knew Aleister Crowley and was part of Ottoline Morrell's intellectual country house salon at Garsington in the 1920s. In the first World War he worked in the ambulance services in Serbia. Colin Wilson writes of him:

I have always felt that the very essence of the human problem was grasped by that fine music critic, J. W. N. Sullivan, in his classic autobiography But For the Grace of God (London: Jonathan Cape 1932). He writes about the first world war:

'The only assimilable 'lesson' taught by the war was the extreme desirability of the ordinary commonplace civilised life. Even as seen from the relative security of a war hospital that life seemed desirable almost beyond imagining. Looking out on those dark, alien Serbian hills, after a day spent amongst the sights and odours of suppurating flesh (for all our wounded, on the long journey from the front, developed gangrene), I have had visions of Paradise. I have pictured the lighted Strand, one of the golden streets of Heaven, and longed for its ambrosia, two poached eggs on toast, in those dazzling halls of light called Lyons' restaurants. It was inconceivable to me that I could ever have been discontented with life in such celestial surroundings.