ABSTRACT
Occasionally, very occasionally, a piece of news comes to us with a curious timeless quality, a blending of shock and of significance which seems, from the first moment when we hear it, to have been always true, part of the eternal meaning of the world. Sometimes such news is concerned with matters intimate and personal to ourselves, and its message is for ourselves alone, hardly to be conveyed to others. Sometimes, perhaps not so often, it comes to us from the affairs of a wider world, with a message that many can read, though some may understand it better than others, and few, it may be, can understand it in full. Perhaps in these cases, too, there is always some element of intimacy, of a personal concern which has behind it not only interest but a quality of identification, so that that which happened does not merely concern us, for indeed such concern may be quite remote, but has in some deep sense happened to us. Such news as that speaks to us not only of current history but of the eternal things, and of the eternal things we too are part. And such, to an Englishman living in Oxford, was the news of Gāndhi’s death.
