Twenty years ago, I visited his house—or rather, his writer’s tower—outside Bordeaux. Chapel on the ground floor, bedroom on the first, study at the top. Four centuries on, both facts and furnishings were as unverifiable as any philosopher would know them to be. There was a broken chair on which the great essayist may possibly have sat—or if not, on something similar. The bed-room, in the silkily evasive French of the guidebook, was where “nothing forbids us from thinking that this is where he might have died.” The study still had Greek and Latin tags painted on the beams, though they had been many times refreshed; while the thousand-volume library that had been Montaigne’s universe was long dispersed. Even the shelves had gone: all that remained were a couple of D-shaped pieces of metal to which they might have been attached. This seemed properly philosophical.
Just off the bedroom where Montaigne might have expired while perhaps gazing at the elevated host (though nothing forbids us from thinking that his mind was on his cabbages), there was a small platform. From there, the philosopher would have been able to follow mass in the chapel below without interrupting his thoughts. A narrow, angled tunnel, made up of seven steps, offered a fine acoustic and a decent view of the priest. After the guide and the other tourists had moved on, some homage-paying instinct induced me stand on the platform, and then start creeping down this pseudo-staircase. Two steps later, I slipped, and in an instant found myself splayed and sprung against the side walls, trying to prevent myself being shot down this stone funnel into the chapel below. Clamped there, I felt the claustrophobia of a familiar dream—the one where you are lost underground, in some narrowing pipe or tube, in ever-increasing darkness, in panic and in terror. The dream which, even without waking from it, you know is straightforwardly about death.
I have always been suspicious of dreams; or rather, of excessive interest in them. I knew a couple, long and manifestly in love with one another, whose day always began with the wife recounting to her husband the dreams she had entertained that night. They were still doing it, devotedly, in their seventies. I prefer—indeed, treasure—my wife ’s extremely laconic approach to dream-narration. She wakes, and delivers her report, either as gnomic summary—“a bit of a desert”—or pithy critical assessment, such as “Rather confusing,” or “Glad to get out of that.” Sometimes description and critique are combined: “Indian dreams, like a long and rambling novel.” Then she goes back to sleep and forgets all about it.
This seems to put dreams into their proper perspective. When I first started writing fiction, I laid down two rules for myself: no dreams, and no weather. As a reader, I had long been irritated by “significant” meteorology—storm clouds, rainbows, distant thunder—just as I was bored by “significant” dreams, premonitions, visitations, and so on. I was even planning to call my first novel No Weather. But the book was so long in the writing that eventually the title came to seem coy.
I have death-dreams about as often as you might expect: some burial-oriented, involving subterranean enclosure and narrowing tunnels; others deploying a more active war-movie scenario—of being chased, surrounded, outnumbered, outgunned, of finding myself bulletless, held hostage, wrongly condemned to the firing squad, informed that there is even less time than I imagined. The usual stuff. I was relieved when, a few years back, a thematic variation finally came along: the dream in which I am registering at a suicide hostel in some country tolerant of death-seekers. I have signed the forms, and my wife has agreed—either to join me in the venture, or, more usually, to accompany and help me. However, when I get there, I find the place infinitely depressing—cheap furniture, a shabby bed reeking of past and future occupants, bored apparatchiks treating you as just another item of bureaucratic business. I realize I have made the wrong decision. I don’t want to check out (or even check in), I have made a mistake, life is still full of interest and some small future; yet even as I think this, I am aware that once the process to which I have lent my signature has begun, I cannot back out, and yes, I shall be dead within hours, or even minutes, for now there is absolutely no escape, no possible Koestlerian “clever trick” to help me out.
If not exactly proud of this new dream, I was at least pleased that my unconscious was getting updated, was still keeping pace with developments in the world. I was a little less pleased to discover from the poet D. J. Enright’s last book, Injury Time, that he had been visited by almost exactly the same dream. The establishment he was booked into sounded a little smarter than mine, but, as is typical of the melancholic’s dreamscape, something inevitably went wrong. In his case, the suicide hostel had run out of poison gas. So the new plan was for Enright and his wife to be transferred by van to the local post office, where he feared—all too plausibly—that the facilities would prove both less humane and less efficient.
I didn’t, on reflection, mind the synchronicity too much (being proprietorial about dreams would be an odd vanity). I was more dismayed, elsewhere in Enright’s book, to come across the following quotation: “I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.” But I said that first, I thought—I’ve been saying it for years, and written it too. Look, here it is in that first novel of mine, the one not called No Weather: “I wouldn’t mind Dying at all, as long as I didn’t end up Dead at the end of it.” (Rereading that sentence, I wonder if I should be embarrassed by the repetition of end. Though if challenged, I would probably argue that it was a deliberate stressing of finality. Whether it was or not, I can’t remember.) So who is Enright quoting? One Thomas Nagel, in a book called Mortal Questions. I Google him: professor of philosophy and law at NYU; date of his book, 1979; date of mine, 1980. Damn. I could counter that I had started work on my novel some eight or nine years previously, but this would be about as convincing as a dream-protest in a suicide hostel. And doubtless someone got there before either of us. Probably one of those ancient Greeks my brother knows so well.
You may have noted—may even have pitied—the vehemence with which I wrote “But I said that first.” I, the insistent, emphatic, italicized me. The I to which I am brutishly attached, the I that must be farewelled. And yet this I, or even its daily unitalicized shadow, is not what I think of it as. Around the time I was assuring the college chaplain that I was a happy atheist, there was a fashionable phrase: the integrity of the personality. This is what, amateurs of our own existence, we believe in, don’t we? That the child is father, or mother, to the man, or woman; that slowly but inevitably we become ourselves, and that this self will have an outline, a clarity, an identifiability, an integrity. Through life we construct and achieve a unique character, one in which we hope to be allowed to die.
But the brain mappers who have penetrated our cerebral secrets, who lay it all out in vivid colours, who can follow the pulsings of thought and emotion, tell us that there is no one at home. There is no ghost in the machine. The brain, as one neuropsychologist puts it, is no more or less than “a lump of meat” (not what I call meat—but then I am unsound on offal). I, or even I, do not produce thoughts; thoughts produce me. The brain mappers, peer and pore as they may, can only conclude that “there is no ‘self-stuff ’ to be located.” And so our notion of a persisting self or ego or I or I—let alone a locatable one—is another illusion we live by. Ego Theory—on which we have survived so long and so naturally—is better replaced by Bundle Theory. The notion of the cerebral submarine captain, the organizer in charge of the events of his or her life, must surrender to the notion that we are a mere sequence of brain events, bound together by certain causal connections. To put it in a final and disheartening (if literary) way: that “I” of which we are so fond properly exists only in grammar.
At Oxford, after giving up modern languages, my old-fashioned I studied philosophy for a couple of terms, at the end of which it was told it lacked the appropriate brain for the job. Each week I would learn what one philosopher believed about the world, and the next week why those beliefs were false. This, at least, was how it appeared to me, and I wanted t
o cut to the chase: what’s really true, then? But philosophy seemed more about the process of philosophizing rather than the purpose I had ascribed to it in advance: to tell us what the world consists of, and how best to live in that world. Doubtless these were naive expectations, and I should not have been so disappointed when moral philosophy, far from having any immediate applicability, began with a debate about whether “goodness” was like “yellowness.” And so, wisely no doubt, I left philosophy to my brother, and returned to literature, which did, and still does, tell us best what the world consists of. It can also tell us how best to live in that world, though it does so most effectively when appearing not to do so.
One of the many correct-until-next-week versions of the world that I was taught was Berkeley’s. He held that the world of “houses, mountains, rivers and in a word all sensible objects” consists entirely of ideas, sensory experiences. What we like to think of as the real world, out there, corporeal, touchable, linear in time, is just private images—early cinema—unreeling in our heads. Such a worldview was, by its very logic, irrefutable. Later, I remember rejoicing at Literature’s reply to Philosophy: Dr. Johnson kicking a stone and crying, “I refute it thus!” You kick a stone, you feel its hardness, its solidity, its reality. Your foot hurts, and that is proof. The theorist is undone by the common sense of which we are so Britishly proud.
The stone that Dr. Johnson kicked, we now know, wasn’t solid at all. Most solid things consist mainly of empty space. The earth itself is far from solid, if by solid we mean impermeable: there are tiny particles called neutrinos, which can pass right through it, from one side to the other. Neutrinos can pass—were passing—through Dr. Johnson’s stone without any trouble; even diamonds, our epitome of hardness and impermeability, are in fact crumbly and full of holes. However, since human beings are not neutrinos, and it would be distinctly pointless for us to try passing through a rock, our brain informs us that the rock is solid. For our purposes, in our terms, it is solid. This is not what is true, but rather what it is useful for us to know. Common sense raises utility into factitious but practical truth. Common sense tells us we are individuals with (usually integrated) personalities, and those around us are as well. It is going to take a while before we start thinking of our parents, say, as bundles of genetic material lacking any “self-stuff,” rather than the dramatic or comic (or cruel or tedious) characters, all too riddled with self-stuff, in the narratives we turn our lives into.
Chapter 44
My father was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in his early fifties. He didn’t ask the doctors what was wrong with him, and therefore wasn’t told. He went through the treatments, and the hospital recalls, and the gradually less frequent check-ups for twenty years without ever asking. My mother had asked, at the beginning, and so had been told. Whether or not she had also been warned that Hodgkin’s was then invariably fatal, I have no means of knowing. I was aware that Dad had some illness, but his inherent tact, his lack of melodrama or self-pity, meant that I didn’t worry about him, or imagine his condition serious. I think my mother told me—and swore me to secrecy—around the time I passed my driving test. Surprisingly, my father did not die. He carried on teaching until his retirement, at which point my parents moved from the outer London suburbs to a glorified cross-roads in Oxfordshire, where they lived until their deaths. My mother would drive Dad into Oxford for his annual check-ups. After a few years, his specialist changed, and the new man, shuffling through the notes, assumed that since my father was clearly an intelligent man, and had survived what most died from, he must know about this. On the drive home Dad said to Mum, as a casual aside, “Apparently this Hodgkin’s thing can be a bit serious.” My mother, hearing on his tongue the word she had strenuously kept to her side of the marriage for twenty years, nearly put the car into a ditch.
My father, as he got older, rarely mentioned his health problems, unless there was an ironic gloss available: for instance, that warfarin, the anticoagulant he was taking, also served as rat poison. My mother was more robust and outspoken when it came to her turn, though it was also the case that her favourite topic of conversation had always been herself, and illness merely gave her an extra theme. Nor did she think it illogical to berate her stricken arm for “uselessness.” My father, I think, judged his own life and travails of comparatively little interest—to others, and perhaps even to himself. For a long time I used to surmise that not asking what was wrong with you showed a lack of courage, and also of mere human curiosity. Now I see that it was—perhaps it only ever is—a strategy of usefulness.
I cannot think of my parents as self-stuff-lacking bundles of genetic material for more than a moment. What’s useful—and therefore in practical terms what’s true—is to think of them in a commonsense, stone-kicking way. But Bundle Theory suggests another possible death stratagem. Rather than preparing to lament an old-fashioned, constructed-through-life self, one if not loveable at least essential to its owner, consider the argument that if this I does not really exist as I imagine and feel it, then why am I, or I, mourning it in advance? This would be an illusion mourning an illusion, a mere chance bundle needlessly distraught about unbundling. Might this argument convince? Might it prove able to pass through death like a neutrino passing through a rock? I wonder; I shall have to give it time. Though naturally I think at once of a counterargument, based on “People tell me it’s a cliché, but it doesn’t feel like a cliché to me.” Theorists of mind and matter may tell me that my death is, if not exactly an illusion, at least the loss of something more inchoate and less personally marked than I pretend and desire it to be; but I doubt that this is how it will feel to me when the time comes. How did Berkeley die? With the full consolation of religion, rather than the theoretical consolation that it was all just private images anyway.
Chapter 45
My brother points out that, had I persisted with the study of philosophy, I might know that Bundle Theory “was invented by one D. Hume”; further, that “any Aristotelian” could have told me that there was no self-stuff, no ghost in the machine, “and no machine either.” But then, I know things that he does not: for instance, that our father suffered from Hodgkin’s disease. I was astonished to discover that my brother has no knowledge, or at least no memory, of this. “The story I tell myself (in part as a warning) is that he was in full health and vigour until he was seventy or seventy-two, and that once the quacks got their hands on him, it was downhill and rapidly.”
In this variant version—or rather, completely fanciful reinvention—the much-travelled Aristotelian joins hands with his local Creuse peasant. One of the most persistent French rural myths is the story of the fellow in perfect health who comes down from the hills one day and makes the mistake of wandering into a doctor’s surgery. Within weeks—days sometimes, even hours, depending on the narrator—he is fit only for the cemetery.
Before he left England to live in France, my brother went to have his ears syringed. The nurse offered to test his blood pressure while she was about it. My brother declined. She pointed out that it was free. He replied that this might very well be the case, but that he didn’t want to be tested. The nurse, clearly not knowing what manner of patient she had in front of her, explained that at his age he might have high blood pressure. My brother, putting on a joke voice from a radio show transmitted long before the nurse had been born, insisted, “I don’t wish to know that.”
“Nor did I,” he tells me. “Suppose my blood was OK, then the test would have been a waste of time; suppose it wasn’t OK, then I wouldn’t do anything about it (wouldn’t take the pills, wouldn’t change my diet) but from time to time I’d worry about it.” I reply that surely, “as a philosopher,” he ought to have considered the matter in the terms of a Pascalian wager. Thus, there were three possible outcomes: 1. Nothing wrong with you (good). 2. Something wrong with you but we can fix it (good). 3. Something wrong with you but, Sorry, mate, we can’t (bad). However, my brother resists this optimistic reading of t
he odds. “No, no. ‘Something wrong but we can fix it’ = bad (I don’t like being fixed). And ‘wrong and unfixable’ is far worse if you know than if you don’t.” As my friend G. put it, “The evil is knowing it’s going to happen.” And in his preferring of ignorance, my brother for once resembles our father more than I do.
I was once talking to a French diplomat and trying to explain my brother to him. Yes, I said, he is a professor of philosophy, who was at Oxford until the age of fifty, but now lives in the middle of France and teaches in Geneva. “The thing about him,” I went on, “is that he has an ambition—a philosophical ambition, you could say—to live nowhere. He is an anarchist, not in the narrow political sense, but in the wider philosophical one. So he lives in France, has his bank account in the Channel Islands, and teaches in Switzerland. He wants to live nowhere.” “And where does he live in France?” asked the diplomat. “The Creuse.” There was a Parisian chortle in reply. “Then he has already achieved his ambition! He lives nowhere!”
Do you have a clear enough picture of my brother? Do you need more basic facts? He is three years older than me, has been married for forty years, and has two daughters. The first complete sentence uttered by his elder daughter was “Bertrand Russell is a silly old man.” He lives in what he tells me is a gentilhommière (I had mistakenly called it a maison de maître: verbal gradations of house-type in France are as complex as those formerly applied to women of easy virtue.) He has half a dozen acres, with six llamas in a paddock: possibly the only llamas in the Creuse. His special area of philosophy is Aristotle and the pre-Socratics. He once told me, decades ago, that he had “given up embarrassment”—which makes it easier to write about him. Oh yes, and he often wears a kind of eighteenth-century costume designed for him by his younger daughter: knee breeches, stockings, buckle shoes on the lower half; brocade waistcoat, stock, long hair tied in a bow on the upper. Perhaps I should have mentioned this before.