Like Everyone Else

“Think of them all,” said Truman. “Cities, manganese mines, governments, clubs. India, China, Russia — make you wonder what it all means. Cotton, iron, steel … where does it all lead?”

“All parts of an unco-ordinated pattern. Man as a person looking for what I think I’ve found. The search throws up bright bits of gold and information which catch his attention and prevent him from looking deeper into himself. Yes, a staggering spectacle of a genius engaged in a wasteful way of living. And yet every activity leading back like an arrow on the map to central metaphysical problems of the self. The wars of factories, of diplomats, of concepts—all hopelessly entangled in the opposites that created them.”

‘Could you teach them any different?” Truman spoke piously, enviously, as if there were nothing he himself might wish to do more than to alter humanity. “I would not try: any more than I try to alter you.”

“What would you do then?”

“Nothing. Pay my rent like everyone else.”

Quotation from:  The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell

Sneaking a Look

You are in your 60s, even 50s, and you are walking by a shop window, or in some area in which a security monitor shows a scan of the line you are in. You sneak a look. You see someone in the space where you should be but you do not recognize the interloper. Then, after an unseemly lag of a second or two you are forced to remake you own acquaintance; it seems you no longer know yourself at first sight. The you behind your eyes believes you look like you did twenty years ago, and it assumes that dated image is the real you, even if recent photos tell a horror story. But photos seldom confirmed your self-image, even when you were young, so you can dismiss the latest batch. In high school you accepted only one or two out of the fifty on the contact sheet as satisfactory, though none of your friends or family, when asked, could distinguish the person in the photos you thought reasonably flattering from the many in which you looked like a total doofus. To them they were all indistinguishably you they were not even putting you on, as you vainly believed, when they thought the best picture was one you felt the most loathsome. 

Quotation from: Losing It: in which an aging professor laments his shrinking brain, which he flatters himself formerly did him Noble Service.  By William Ian Miller. Yale University Press. 2011

An Affair of Disentangled Minds

In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares twopence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. 

We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague, or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which gave value to survival.

Quotation: The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. 1960

Curiosity and the Bibliomaniac

The fanatical reader is not only anxious, he or she is curious. And surely human curiosity—condemned as it was by certain Fathers of the Church as being of no purpose since the coming of Christ, and even prohibited, since we now have the Gospels—is one of the determining factors of all our actions? A capital element in the search for knowledge, in scientific discoveries or technological progress, the essential force behind human endeavor. And curiosity has no end: it is without limits. It feeds on itself, is never satisfied with what it finds, but must always press on, exhausting itself only with our dying breath.

 

 … And reading expands indefinitely our perforce limited experience of reality, giving us access to distant ages, foreign customs, hearts and minds, human motivations, and everything else. How can you stop once you have found the doorway offering the chance of escape from an inevitably constricted environment? Liberty was within arm’s reach, so all I have to do was read and read, more and more, hoping to escape my individual destiny. Then I had only to add to this boundless curiosity a certain methodical tendency, which drove me to read all the works of a given write, or all the books written on a certain subject, or the literature of a certain period, or country, and to wish as I went along to keep the books I had read, adding new ones that might be connected to them, gradually acquiring more topics I was interested in—and there I was—a bibliomaniac reader. 

Jacques Bonnet  Phantoms on the Bookshelves. Trans. Sian Reynolds. MacLehose Press, London. 2008