## The path to re-enchantment https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-path-to-reenchantment I could go on. Life has enough disenchantments to fill many volumes. In fact I can think of various memoirs that contain little else. Life gives us plenty of material. And in the past 18 months it has given us a little more. So the question arises of how to get above this process, or even reverse it. As far as I know, the only thing that can not just ameliorate disenchantment but actually reverse it is re-enchantment. And not merely hoping for it, but looking for it: **searching for those things that will reverse the disenchantments of age and make us enamoured with life again**. Considering how important this process is, it’s surprising how little we discuss it. Even when people are actively seeking re-enchantment, they rarely put it like that. For instance, a person might say that they enjoy hill-walking. We should not be fooled. A hill is a relatively unimportant thing to conquer. The walker hopes to find something else in the hills. And he is right to do so, for the natural world is one of the great ways to become enchanted again, or at least to spy that portal through which re-enchantment becomes possible. Religion is another way, as are wine and other intoxicants. Which is not to say that they do the same thing in the same way. But the glass can give one person a glimpse of the thing that prayer affords to another. During a recent dinner with a friend we progressed pretty swiftly through the early chat courses of Covid and travel. I mentioned that I try to read in the afternoons and he asked what I was reading. It was _The Magic Mountain_, as it happens, and he asked me why I read like this. Liberated by wine more than prayer, I confessed that it is one of my most reliable ways to seek re-enchantment. It is the same when I listen to music. I spent a portion of last year going through Bruckner’s symphonies and came eventually to the glorious Eighth. I had gone there in the hope of finding something which I did indeed find. The slow movement of that symphony has four chords that seemed to me to transform the world. It may not seem much against the many disenchantments of life. But four chords are something. And not just for their own sake. They reminded me — and remind me still — that re-enchantment is possible. So I suppose we must keep searching, with plenty of false starts and fruitless byways. Because the only way to avoid the disenchantment and tedium of life is to know the approximate locations of the places where we might escape it, and then head there.