Later, Bayley tells us "I think one reason we fell in love, and got on so well, is that both of us have always been naive and innocent, at some deep healing level". Bayley asserts that Murdoch has always been free of professional competitiveness and ambitiousness; her having forgotten that she has written books is an extension of the modest self-forgetfulness that marked her as a writer.
But she allowed that power to show through in Mahler's "Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen," where her expressive drive was immediate and sure, through the range from naivete and violence to dreamy self-forgetfulness.
Then he grew to learn that poetry flowed from self-forgetfulness.
"Writing," he says of Hardy, "resolved the conflict he felt between loneliness and the frightening self-forgetfulness that social life could bring about".
And yet this most selfish of characters dies in complete self-forgetfulness: he can think, at the end, only of the plight of Tourvel and what he has done to her.
He dwelt instead on "the importance of the perfection and integration which self-forgetfulness, generosity and humility bring to a life of Christian service".
A reading of Arnold's Note Books will convince any reader of the depth of Arnold's spirituality and of the degree to which, in his "buried life," he disciplined himself in constant devotion and self-forgetfulness.
"Composing gives me great pleasure … there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound," she said.
But I still remember reading: the absorption in another world, the self-forgetfulness and indifference to the passing of time, the pleasure of solitude, the concentration required to reveal as significant some little observation about changing colour of someone's skin, the delight in something not constructed by my own furious wants and fears.
As for his character, his mind, his temperament, I think he has the qualities we have been, or should be, looking for (and I use the following words with precision): warmth and good will, truthfulness, fair-mindedness, self-forgetfulness, humor, imagination, vision, conscience, inner strength, intellectual and emotional depth".
McClure writes: "These characters are transformed and steadied, as it were, by the sense that the world is seamed with mystery and benignity, by awakened impulses to reverence, wonder, self-forgetfulness, and care, and by coming into company with others.
