The text on this page is from David Lavery, "An Owen Barfield Readers Guide." Seven 15 (1998): 97-112. |
This Ever Diverse Pair. London: Gollancz, 1950; reissued Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1985. For if it is the Burdens of this world who keep traditions alive, it is the Burgeons who create them. The Burdens cannot make anything; they can only collect and preserve. (This Ever Diverse Pair 114-115) An autobiographical novel written to help avert a nervous breakdown (as Barfield explains in Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning), This Ever Diverse Pair depicts the uneasy partnership, the polar tension, between two London solicitors: the prosaic, practical-minded Burden and his invisible, "sleeping partner" Burgeon, at heart a poet and dreamer. As such, it is a humorous, whimsical commentary on, and a surprisingly candid revelation of, the difficulties inherent in Barfield's delicate balance of law and the imagination. See also Patricia Ralston's "Owen Barfield's This Ever Diverse Pair."
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