At 16, Malcolm Guite was convinced that everything about him (thoughts, love, consciousness itself) was nothing more than brain chemistry. Then an aunt dragged him to Keats’ House in London. Bored, he started reading “Ode to a Nightingale” off the wall. By the end of the poem he was standing in tears, and he walked out knowing he’d had an experience that could not be reduced to neurons.
In this clip from the Human Flourishing show, poet, priest, and Cambridge scholar Malcolm Guite tells Ian Reid the story of how one poem opened a door that eventually led him from atheism to faith. He talks about why he switched from science to literature, why the first two books on his Cambridge reading list were the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and how he learned to become “skeptical about his skepticism.” He also describes walking into the mind of St. Augustine through the small door of a paperback, and how C.S. Lewis and Tolkien’s famous late-night walk shows myth becoming fact.
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