The Difference between Sensation and Rationality
EXPERIENCE TEACHES US everything; but not all our thoughts are solely derived from it. Nor does experience always produce a direct result in us. This was something, an idea, some intuitive notion, I suppose it could be called, which came to me while I waited on a traffic island.
Three terrifying lanes of cars drove past me and I was enveloped in the noise and filth of the exhausts. In that moment, in fact, several minutes, I discovered for myself the reason I had not considered the things around me: neither the air, nor the traffic; or the terrible noise. I was trapped. it seemed to me, in my own thoughts. I could barely account for my own physical existence; the clothes I wore, the shoes on my feet, or even that my feet hurt. I was at a zero point, a start and an end at once. My physical condition was new to me. I believed I had walked a long distance. I did not know.
Amidst the long growl of the traffic it seemed to me that I gradually roused from that private mental state to become aware of the environment: that the clouds had gathered in a huge billowing mass and the wind had risen, as the temperature dropped, and that a storm was coming. And from such an incident, I might hope to know some things better and with greater clarity. I did not; neither then or later: much later, as it transpired, know what that was.
I had never been on that road before, and never again since; I cannot remember why I had strayed into that area. It was an industrial zone, with warehouses tucked beside rows of cheap small houses and tenements. The reason for my presence there is not important; or perhaps it is, I cannot say one way or another. If I was to arrive at an understanding of my intentions I may be able to draw a line of cause and result.
Like many journeys, this one began with an accident.
I am not certain it is significant, or if I can remember it well enough to use it as an account of why I stood on that busy road, and waited for a long time to cross. It was then that the sensation of the first rain drops slapped the road, the air turned instantly dank and quite heavy with the anticipation of a downpour.
It was late afternoon and I had some time to spare; time to waste is closer to the actual condition and my own feeling. I acknowledge that I had long, seemingly, endless days, and thus getting out of the house to break my stale life, and to go roaming into a strange part of town was a way to occupy myself. I used it to fill my days, which, without some type of experience, might have passed, even to me, without any event to mark the passage of time.
At least once a week I crossed into uncharted areas, following the uneven axes of the town and I often deviated from a true course. In following this method I discovered new places. Aside from the grim and menacing neighborhoods I found pleasant spaces: new parks, lakes, places of unremarkable beauty: a list of these landmarks could be quite long, if I had the time to make notes, in order that they might serve a useful purpose for someone else.
BY NOW IT is clear that my time is spent observing things; the way the world appears to me, but I do not consider it. Rarely if ever do I investigate or observe my own self and such experiences as I had with the traffic roaring past me, where I temporarily lost my locus of place, have not occurred again. Notes, if I had them, would complement that activity, at the end of the day as I sit in my best chair, with eyes closed, head pointed at the ceiling in quiet reflection, with the passage of the day passing behind eyes.
I would have a drink in my hand: tea flavored with bergamot; or if it was later, at about nine, a glass of whiskey, and with these things: the warm and wet, or cool and burning, I would contemplate the day as I had occupied it and it had filled me. I did not. The reason is simple: I am not a clever or unusually astute man. I should not apologize for this fact – as if it was one. I comprehend things as they are, just as anyone would.
Most everything I meet or see is simple like that, it does not require further analysis and questioning: I take it as it is, in the present, in the thing I have before me. For instance if I can explain it, as I was standing on the traffic island I knew I was lost, without any idea as to why I was there and how I would find my way home. Not that I was perturbed by that fact, the volume of cars passing gave me greater concern. In itself it highlights my thought that it is easier to be filled by sensations all around, all the sense of the world, than the fleeting thoughts in the mind. It is this cause which explains why it is difficult for me to concentrate on the material in my head; instead of taking one sensation one after another, as they arise in the world.
But as I was about to say, I was working to correct these differences in me. As a man of ordinary abilities, that would be ordinary mental abilities, I could nothing more. When I was younger I had other physical capacities, but that is all such a long time ago it hardly justifies the time to contemplate its significance.
There are three material things known about me:
I have much free time;
I am average intellectually; and,
I may have implied a certain physical power as a younger man. I can attest that all three conditions are true.
Time will not yield for anyone, and if I my walks have assisted and clarified anything for me, it is that I cannot allow my present condition to remain as it is.
Therefore, I have set upon a course of study, a format of education, to mend the gaps in my knowledge. My own education was cut short at the age of fifteen when my father left and I went to work to care for my younger brothers and sisters. Over the years I have tried to become educated, but that was impossible, as the stages of life; I mean of course, marriage and children of my own, intervened and deviated my attempts to improve my mind.
Perhaps it is this reason, obscure and unknown to me at the time, which brought me to the busy road. The revelations of knowledge can be indirect and delayed.
The Categories of Knowledge
WITH ALL THE time on my hands I had taken to walking, as is apparent. The other activity that occupied my days was reading. With hindsight it appears predestined.
The Bible was the first book I read: it has been central to many for so long, the initial encyclopedia, its place is assured. Whilst I liked the stories and some of the characters, and the flow of the books that lead to a comprehensive conclusion I was not absorbed by it; it failed to convince me. The problem as I saw it was that it is old-fashioned, out of date. By that I mean, if the names of the characters and the title were altered, the parables and lessons do not describe the world as it is, in this present epoch. The sights and people of that book are as unlike anything in this world. Any normal person under the age of thirty will plead youth in mitigation when they do not know a thing, as if the time before their own lives did not exist and there is nothing to learn from before their days. The Bible is not worse for that quality but it is not a work that an inquisitive and factual type of person would believe satisfies their curiosity.
The one necessary element that I sought was intelligible explanations that are credible, in order to improve my understanding. With that credo as my guide and compass I continued.
The religions, sciences and philosophies have become my library. I had not progressed into fiction or poetry as they seem to occlude understanding, to feed desires, unrealistic and impractical activity and unrequited wishes: the sensations, all of them personal, simple and childish. My ambition was to avoid those things, and be more resolute in the aim of rationality. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I am pompous, but the aim seems right to me.
In quick succession I read through the other great theisms of humanity and gleaned that we share a more or less common description of the deity. Turning to science I was engrossed by geology, biology and physics; the outer worlds, those true to factual depiction, measured, known: but all too incredible for this fact to be fiction in the mind of a conceited writer. The size, the speed, the immensity of what we inhabit, and the scale of our own small selves adjusts any meaning of what we are. Forgive my tone, that is, of speaking on behalf of everyone; it is the product of absorbing religion and science in varying proportions. It has given me the idea of omnipotence, that I know everything; and what I do not know, I will surely know at a fixed time in the future. It makes a man self-satisfied by the acquisition of knowledge, like a cat after its meal.
To test my mind I opened the pages of philosophy, which without innumerable facts relies solely on the evaluation and balance of words in logic. It is a clear, although refracted mental space. It is one I have moved through slowly but unlike science the facts do not replace anything; they are all there side by side, for later reference, should they be required.
While I understand the use of mundane facts, the facts that comprise the world and beyond, I am trying to understand the ideas of my mind, how it is I can think of one thing and not another; why certain ideas are important and I return to them often whilst others never enter my head. It seems to me that only philosophy can help me know these things in greater detail, it is about the mind; its organisation, categories, and what it knows, and how. Ultimately it will tell me why. That is what I have been seeking. This is what I needed to understand.
AND THEREFORE BY a long and inaccurate route have I described how I came to be here. It is the cause of my standing on a busy road because opposite me is a bookshop. This is the first occasion that I have visited it. I should explain why I have taken the trouble to go out of my way, apart from the need to stay occupied on these long days. An ordinary bookshop will never have the philosophy library that I want. In the religions and sciences they will have a good selection, for a generalist, but with philosophy the ignorance of the shop owners is manifest. The problem lies with the word which can mean subjective attitude; a general mode of living, instead of a specific line of reasoning.
In these shops there will the traditional roster of great philosophers, and even, lesser known works, but then, on the shelves too, there are the works of the café philosophers. This genus of thinkers confuseS an argument with a lesson, the former is to be analyzed, the latter can only be adopted. They describe and echo ideas from the past and interpret and prescribe them in ways that may be used as ways to live, like buying a style of furniture. But that is their appeal, as an authoritative guidebook, with the right things to say and believe.
The idea that dead authors – almost always French or Greek for reasons of climate and cuisine as much as their ideas – had thoroughly considered all elements of existence that their work was valid over time, and by implication, know something about me and how and who I am, where I am going, and what afflicts me; is an affectation in the passive reader’s mind. It is an egocentric identification with the revered person.
I was not disappointed, the bookshop was a cave of hidden pleasure and I spent hours browsing: that is what men do, alone; they fill their time in shops hunting for that special book or rare recording, studiously raking the shelves in the secret hope that the object they want is there.
Digressions, Paralogisms, Antinomies
I WAS NOT looking for a teacher, an instructor, to guide me on the correct path to fundamental knowledge. My intention had only ever been to better my understanding.
Equally, I will admit that I did not find one text so deep, so rich and fulfilling that it could instruct me on how to live well and apart from giving me great lessons; also deliver an appropriate perspective to face ethical, epistemological, pharmacological and cosmological problems.
Still: faced with such daunting intellects I yielded to their superior ideas, the complexity of their arguments, which, at times, I struggled to follow. This set me thinking as to why I should accept the new ideas when I had lived successfully, perhaps unenlightened, but nevertheless free of the anxious notion that I had failed to understand many of the ideas that seemed connected to the core of life. I was like the man given a tomato for the first time: I did not know what it was: poison or not and therefore how to interpret what I was learning: was the fruit a sign of sexual deviance and evil, or would I take it to make a sauce?
Like any student I battled against these historical authors, secure in their time and long dead, venerated since with their voluminous critiques and commentaries, which, with the principal texts comprised an industry of thoughts and words. Occasionally I raged, and sought proof in alternative ideas, even the irrational, but unfortunately my arguments were too weak, or in another more subtle and personal way, I had been accustomed to various principles which I could not shake and therefore accepted. Ultimately I had no real idea of what I was doing: being sceptical for its own sake is unproductive, serves no purpose and is false, and so I found myself disagreeing for no reason. And then later I began to ask myself why I was so attached to certain ideas and not others: the explanation I gave myself was that I was subject to common dogmatism regardless of what I knew or had learnt; I stuck fast to simple inherited attitudes, consequently I ignored what did not add, or complement, what I already believed.
Belief is the thing; it was the motor of my enduring project.
I had wanted to believe in a new something: it may help to replace some thing that I had no longer had the ability to believe in, to hold, and essentially, it had to be more profound than any clever, brilliant, idea.
The Noumena of Happiness
I SHOULD HAVE said at the beginning, at the start, but it is impolite to say such things that my wife died. It is curious to hear me say it, even now.
Aside from her closest, and her children, no one ought to be especially empathetic, except they are now; it’s fashionable, it expresses shared virtues, and so they tell me what they think and feel, which I do not want to know.
A long time ago when people were more humble, and quieter in their behavior and didn’t have to – what is the phrase?...display their emotional bling.
She is the reason I have more time now.
It is a mystery to me, and no clearer now than it ever was, that when something or someone is removed it seems inevitable to ask: how did the time pass before? It still ticks as it has for years but it seems emptier now; as if time was passing over a depopulated earth. Does time matter to rocks and stones and plants and insects? Without people, would time exist, would it persist after they are gone? In all my reading I have not found any information to support a theory; perhaps the animals are aware of time in their breeding, that insistent evolutionary beat that commands renewed life. It’s only a theory, incomplete, incoherent, and not very good.
As I said I am not a clever man. My time, the way I measure it, goes from one insignificant act to another, passing without the comments, the jokes, the reprimands of previous years. How did time change? I can’t answer that; it did, it has, and the minutes and half hours that were once filled with the small things of living, the forgettable conversations, not even conversations, verbal filling of two shared lives: the unaccountable contact that is the material of living with someone else, have all vanished with her. And they go, or are taken; and nothing replaces them.
That was the mission to all the walking, the reading, the need to know, to know better than I had ever done, because if I could make it clear and explain it I would erase the past, at least the past I do not want. I could say to myself: This and that, even or that, connect to that things, either mineral or animal or vegetable and it produces the following results, except when it is summer in the northern hemisphere and it does not, but the next set of factors make it more likely using a set of data from some major studies. The things of the world and all its parts are comprehensible; they make sense, with order and aims; there are rules and laws and processes and statistics that determine why and how it’s all as it is; it supplies the big answers, and none are as big as who lives and who will not.
I’m not certain now. I’ve acquired a mass of facts and some of it may be knowledge, even a little wisdom: I know how to classify and name, to logically deduce, adduce: and when it is needed, to infer correctly. But I am not more certain.
And what I have learned is useful when I want to correct a person on the television. A smug secretive pleasure creeps over me as I mouth the right fact to the screen and look at the ignorant presence on the other side, his or her foolish noise invading thousands of screens simultaneously. And the next day, despite an apology for the error that was broadcast the previous evening, I sit glaring into the unknown space, in my mind, behind my eyes, with no one to share this moment of triumph, however small it is and my feeling of superiority fades.
All this knowledge is useful. I know it is. It is a preparation for the future. Knowing what I know now would be useful to me if I was a young man but I have applied it to the past. I have used it to understand how I have lived. I have not been able to exercise it, although I have had solace and pleasure in the strenuous course of my reading. The entire purpose of education is the future, if not ours, then the next generation and so it all returns to time again.
TALKING ALOUD TO myself as I sit in her room, I tell myself it’s to her, that is, Emilia, that I have devoted these past months. Emilia: just a name, a classification of a female human, who may have carried one or two other names: Daisy or Millie perhaps, had some unknown procedure not intervened, like parental choice, or an argument perhaps, over the imposition of the child’s name. It is that intervention that normally accounts for second names, the ancestral and dynastic: Margaret, Lois are two obvious ones, but don’t be offended because as soon as they are uttered the reason why a little girl has one or other name is attributed to an ancient relative from three generations ago; a grandmother who is silent in peoples’ memories and who appears as a stiff and unyielding person to all her future generations in a single photograph.
And the other curiosity about classifications is that Emilia's death is listed as a traffic accident. The accident occurred on a road but Emilia was a pedestrian. To the bureaucratic mind it is right to be a road accident, as it happened on a road. The location does not matter and then perhaps only to statisticians who measure the likelihood of various activities being risky.
That knowledge can be used to plan ahead, to make life better, more interesting, to achieve something, but whatever the purpose is, it is always predicated by the future. It is the reason why older people taking degrees seem indulgent, and pointless, because the knowledge can never be exercised. Teleological arguments, however true, fail everybody, everything, in time.
It was on that road, in one stride all the knowledge Emilia possessed and seemed fixed and applied for her future: her education, the music she liked and could talk about at length when she met someone who knew music in the same depth as she did; the gardening too, and the plants, flowers, and cooking, to which she dedicated a lot of time, passed. A considerable amount of knowledge is contained in one person, and Emilia, like me, was quite average, but when I tabulate it, the extent of her interests was astonishing, the range of her personality was extraordinary.
In one stride it was gone, Emilia had lost her step.
WITH EVERYTHING NAMED and classified, correlated and correctly determined in its rightful place, a sense of peace and contentment should exist. After having done all that work it might even bring happiness. The project would be finished; it would have served its purpose. The happiness would appeal to a person who liked order and clarity: a rare type of person who has a strong mental life, where happiness in such things may reside.
Knowing and being able to act well, rationally and objectively, may make a person happier. I do not know, I am no more certain than I was at the beginning. It’s a theory, or maybe just a point of view, no better informed than that of a caveman living in sempiternal darkness. It is an intellectual attitude, raised and qualified by years of study, by the pursuit of answers, the search for a reason aside from the diurnal needs, but more than likely meaningless to anyone else.
I do not know; I will never know.
The sensation dims and ebbs: gradually less, then less again, each morning. After a handful of years, it is easier, yes easier, in the uncertain progress of the day. What is still tangible is her, Emilia, in a million different dimensions, albeit from the past. She is still strong enough to be able to say a word or have a thought saved for the next time she visits me.
I COULD NOT name that knowledge, so it is out in the world and may be discussed by people, then criticized as too simple, obvious, too banal; no, that is something I will keep inside, to myself, in my head, perfect, untouchable, ideal, mine.
Guy Cranswick lives in Sydney and, apart from English, speaks French and Italian—and survival German. He has written screenplays, a novel, My Wife, My Job, My Shoes; and a collection of stories, Corporate. His short fiction has been published in Canada, the US, UK, Ireland, Israel, Singapore and Australia.
EXPERIENCE TEACHES US everything; but not all our thoughts are solely derived from it. Nor does experience always produce a direct result in us. This was something, an idea, some intuitive notion, I suppose it could be called, which came to me while I waited on a traffic island.
Three terrifying lanes of cars drove past me and I was enveloped in the noise and filth of the exhausts. In that moment, in fact, several minutes, I discovered for myself the reason I had not considered the things around me: neither the air, nor the traffic; or the terrible noise. I was trapped. it seemed to me, in my own thoughts. I could barely account for my own physical existence; the clothes I wore, the shoes on my feet, or even that my feet hurt. I was at a zero point, a start and an end at once. My physical condition was new to me. I believed I had walked a long distance. I did not know.
Amidst the long growl of the traffic it seemed to me that I gradually roused from that private mental state to become aware of the environment: that the clouds had gathered in a huge billowing mass and the wind had risen, as the temperature dropped, and that a storm was coming. And from such an incident, I might hope to know some things better and with greater clarity. I did not; neither then or later: much later, as it transpired, know what that was.
I had never been on that road before, and never again since; I cannot remember why I had strayed into that area. It was an industrial zone, with warehouses tucked beside rows of cheap small houses and tenements. The reason for my presence there is not important; or perhaps it is, I cannot say one way or another. If I was to arrive at an understanding of my intentions I may be able to draw a line of cause and result.
Like many journeys, this one began with an accident.
I am not certain it is significant, or if I can remember it well enough to use it as an account of why I stood on that busy road, and waited for a long time to cross. It was then that the sensation of the first rain drops slapped the road, the air turned instantly dank and quite heavy with the anticipation of a downpour.
It was late afternoon and I had some time to spare; time to waste is closer to the actual condition and my own feeling. I acknowledge that I had long, seemingly, endless days, and thus getting out of the house to break my stale life, and to go roaming into a strange part of town was a way to occupy myself. I used it to fill my days, which, without some type of experience, might have passed, even to me, without any event to mark the passage of time.
At least once a week I crossed into uncharted areas, following the uneven axes of the town and I often deviated from a true course. In following this method I discovered new places. Aside from the grim and menacing neighborhoods I found pleasant spaces: new parks, lakes, places of unremarkable beauty: a list of these landmarks could be quite long, if I had the time to make notes, in order that they might serve a useful purpose for someone else.
BY NOW IT is clear that my time is spent observing things; the way the world appears to me, but I do not consider it. Rarely if ever do I investigate or observe my own self and such experiences as I had with the traffic roaring past me, where I temporarily lost my locus of place, have not occurred again. Notes, if I had them, would complement that activity, at the end of the day as I sit in my best chair, with eyes closed, head pointed at the ceiling in quiet reflection, with the passage of the day passing behind eyes.
I would have a drink in my hand: tea flavored with bergamot; or if it was later, at about nine, a glass of whiskey, and with these things: the warm and wet, or cool and burning, I would contemplate the day as I had occupied it and it had filled me. I did not. The reason is simple: I am not a clever or unusually astute man. I should not apologize for this fact – as if it was one. I comprehend things as they are, just as anyone would.
Most everything I meet or see is simple like that, it does not require further analysis and questioning: I take it as it is, in the present, in the thing I have before me. For instance if I can explain it, as I was standing on the traffic island I knew I was lost, without any idea as to why I was there and how I would find my way home. Not that I was perturbed by that fact, the volume of cars passing gave me greater concern. In itself it highlights my thought that it is easier to be filled by sensations all around, all the sense of the world, than the fleeting thoughts in the mind. It is this cause which explains why it is difficult for me to concentrate on the material in my head; instead of taking one sensation one after another, as they arise in the world.
But as I was about to say, I was working to correct these differences in me. As a man of ordinary abilities, that would be ordinary mental abilities, I could nothing more. When I was younger I had other physical capacities, but that is all such a long time ago it hardly justifies the time to contemplate its significance.
There are three material things known about me:
I have much free time;
I am average intellectually; and,
I may have implied a certain physical power as a younger man. I can attest that all three conditions are true.
Time will not yield for anyone, and if I my walks have assisted and clarified anything for me, it is that I cannot allow my present condition to remain as it is.
Therefore, I have set upon a course of study, a format of education, to mend the gaps in my knowledge. My own education was cut short at the age of fifteen when my father left and I went to work to care for my younger brothers and sisters. Over the years I have tried to become educated, but that was impossible, as the stages of life; I mean of course, marriage and children of my own, intervened and deviated my attempts to improve my mind.
Perhaps it is this reason, obscure and unknown to me at the time, which brought me to the busy road. The revelations of knowledge can be indirect and delayed.
The Categories of Knowledge
WITH ALL THE time on my hands I had taken to walking, as is apparent. The other activity that occupied my days was reading. With hindsight it appears predestined.
The Bible was the first book I read: it has been central to many for so long, the initial encyclopedia, its place is assured. Whilst I liked the stories and some of the characters, and the flow of the books that lead to a comprehensive conclusion I was not absorbed by it; it failed to convince me. The problem as I saw it was that it is old-fashioned, out of date. By that I mean, if the names of the characters and the title were altered, the parables and lessons do not describe the world as it is, in this present epoch. The sights and people of that book are as unlike anything in this world. Any normal person under the age of thirty will plead youth in mitigation when they do not know a thing, as if the time before their own lives did not exist and there is nothing to learn from before their days. The Bible is not worse for that quality but it is not a work that an inquisitive and factual type of person would believe satisfies their curiosity.
The one necessary element that I sought was intelligible explanations that are credible, in order to improve my understanding. With that credo as my guide and compass I continued.
The religions, sciences and philosophies have become my library. I had not progressed into fiction or poetry as they seem to occlude understanding, to feed desires, unrealistic and impractical activity and unrequited wishes: the sensations, all of them personal, simple and childish. My ambition was to avoid those things, and be more resolute in the aim of rationality. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I am pompous, but the aim seems right to me.
In quick succession I read through the other great theisms of humanity and gleaned that we share a more or less common description of the deity. Turning to science I was engrossed by geology, biology and physics; the outer worlds, those true to factual depiction, measured, known: but all too incredible for this fact to be fiction in the mind of a conceited writer. The size, the speed, the immensity of what we inhabit, and the scale of our own small selves adjusts any meaning of what we are. Forgive my tone, that is, of speaking on behalf of everyone; it is the product of absorbing religion and science in varying proportions. It has given me the idea of omnipotence, that I know everything; and what I do not know, I will surely know at a fixed time in the future. It makes a man self-satisfied by the acquisition of knowledge, like a cat after its meal.
To test my mind I opened the pages of philosophy, which without innumerable facts relies solely on the evaluation and balance of words in logic. It is a clear, although refracted mental space. It is one I have moved through slowly but unlike science the facts do not replace anything; they are all there side by side, for later reference, should they be required.
While I understand the use of mundane facts, the facts that comprise the world and beyond, I am trying to understand the ideas of my mind, how it is I can think of one thing and not another; why certain ideas are important and I return to them often whilst others never enter my head. It seems to me that only philosophy can help me know these things in greater detail, it is about the mind; its organisation, categories, and what it knows, and how. Ultimately it will tell me why. That is what I have been seeking. This is what I needed to understand.
AND THEREFORE BY a long and inaccurate route have I described how I came to be here. It is the cause of my standing on a busy road because opposite me is a bookshop. This is the first occasion that I have visited it. I should explain why I have taken the trouble to go out of my way, apart from the need to stay occupied on these long days. An ordinary bookshop will never have the philosophy library that I want. In the religions and sciences they will have a good selection, for a generalist, but with philosophy the ignorance of the shop owners is manifest. The problem lies with the word which can mean subjective attitude; a general mode of living, instead of a specific line of reasoning.
In these shops there will the traditional roster of great philosophers, and even, lesser known works, but then, on the shelves too, there are the works of the café philosophers. This genus of thinkers confuseS an argument with a lesson, the former is to be analyzed, the latter can only be adopted. They describe and echo ideas from the past and interpret and prescribe them in ways that may be used as ways to live, like buying a style of furniture. But that is their appeal, as an authoritative guidebook, with the right things to say and believe.
The idea that dead authors – almost always French or Greek for reasons of climate and cuisine as much as their ideas – had thoroughly considered all elements of existence that their work was valid over time, and by implication, know something about me and how and who I am, where I am going, and what afflicts me; is an affectation in the passive reader’s mind. It is an egocentric identification with the revered person.
I was not disappointed, the bookshop was a cave of hidden pleasure and I spent hours browsing: that is what men do, alone; they fill their time in shops hunting for that special book or rare recording, studiously raking the shelves in the secret hope that the object they want is there.
Digressions, Paralogisms, Antinomies
I WAS NOT looking for a teacher, an instructor, to guide me on the correct path to fundamental knowledge. My intention had only ever been to better my understanding.
Equally, I will admit that I did not find one text so deep, so rich and fulfilling that it could instruct me on how to live well and apart from giving me great lessons; also deliver an appropriate perspective to face ethical, epistemological, pharmacological and cosmological problems.
Still: faced with such daunting intellects I yielded to their superior ideas, the complexity of their arguments, which, at times, I struggled to follow. This set me thinking as to why I should accept the new ideas when I had lived successfully, perhaps unenlightened, but nevertheless free of the anxious notion that I had failed to understand many of the ideas that seemed connected to the core of life. I was like the man given a tomato for the first time: I did not know what it was: poison or not and therefore how to interpret what I was learning: was the fruit a sign of sexual deviance and evil, or would I take it to make a sauce?
Like any student I battled against these historical authors, secure in their time and long dead, venerated since with their voluminous critiques and commentaries, which, with the principal texts comprised an industry of thoughts and words. Occasionally I raged, and sought proof in alternative ideas, even the irrational, but unfortunately my arguments were too weak, or in another more subtle and personal way, I had been accustomed to various principles which I could not shake and therefore accepted. Ultimately I had no real idea of what I was doing: being sceptical for its own sake is unproductive, serves no purpose and is false, and so I found myself disagreeing for no reason. And then later I began to ask myself why I was so attached to certain ideas and not others: the explanation I gave myself was that I was subject to common dogmatism regardless of what I knew or had learnt; I stuck fast to simple inherited attitudes, consequently I ignored what did not add, or complement, what I already believed.
Belief is the thing; it was the motor of my enduring project.
I had wanted to believe in a new something: it may help to replace some thing that I had no longer had the ability to believe in, to hold, and essentially, it had to be more profound than any clever, brilliant, idea.
The Noumena of Happiness
I SHOULD HAVE said at the beginning, at the start, but it is impolite to say such things that my wife died. It is curious to hear me say it, even now.
Aside from her closest, and her children, no one ought to be especially empathetic, except they are now; it’s fashionable, it expresses shared virtues, and so they tell me what they think and feel, which I do not want to know.
A long time ago when people were more humble, and quieter in their behavior and didn’t have to – what is the phrase?...display their emotional bling.
She is the reason I have more time now.
It is a mystery to me, and no clearer now than it ever was, that when something or someone is removed it seems inevitable to ask: how did the time pass before? It still ticks as it has for years but it seems emptier now; as if time was passing over a depopulated earth. Does time matter to rocks and stones and plants and insects? Without people, would time exist, would it persist after they are gone? In all my reading I have not found any information to support a theory; perhaps the animals are aware of time in their breeding, that insistent evolutionary beat that commands renewed life. It’s only a theory, incomplete, incoherent, and not very good.
As I said I am not a clever man. My time, the way I measure it, goes from one insignificant act to another, passing without the comments, the jokes, the reprimands of previous years. How did time change? I can’t answer that; it did, it has, and the minutes and half hours that were once filled with the small things of living, the forgettable conversations, not even conversations, verbal filling of two shared lives: the unaccountable contact that is the material of living with someone else, have all vanished with her. And they go, or are taken; and nothing replaces them.
That was the mission to all the walking, the reading, the need to know, to know better than I had ever done, because if I could make it clear and explain it I would erase the past, at least the past I do not want. I could say to myself: This and that, even or that, connect to that things, either mineral or animal or vegetable and it produces the following results, except when it is summer in the northern hemisphere and it does not, but the next set of factors make it more likely using a set of data from some major studies. The things of the world and all its parts are comprehensible; they make sense, with order and aims; there are rules and laws and processes and statistics that determine why and how it’s all as it is; it supplies the big answers, and none are as big as who lives and who will not.
I’m not certain now. I’ve acquired a mass of facts and some of it may be knowledge, even a little wisdom: I know how to classify and name, to logically deduce, adduce: and when it is needed, to infer correctly. But I am not more certain.
And what I have learned is useful when I want to correct a person on the television. A smug secretive pleasure creeps over me as I mouth the right fact to the screen and look at the ignorant presence on the other side, his or her foolish noise invading thousands of screens simultaneously. And the next day, despite an apology for the error that was broadcast the previous evening, I sit glaring into the unknown space, in my mind, behind my eyes, with no one to share this moment of triumph, however small it is and my feeling of superiority fades.
All this knowledge is useful. I know it is. It is a preparation for the future. Knowing what I know now would be useful to me if I was a young man but I have applied it to the past. I have used it to understand how I have lived. I have not been able to exercise it, although I have had solace and pleasure in the strenuous course of my reading. The entire purpose of education is the future, if not ours, then the next generation and so it all returns to time again.
TALKING ALOUD TO myself as I sit in her room, I tell myself it’s to her, that is, Emilia, that I have devoted these past months. Emilia: just a name, a classification of a female human, who may have carried one or two other names: Daisy or Millie perhaps, had some unknown procedure not intervened, like parental choice, or an argument perhaps, over the imposition of the child’s name. It is that intervention that normally accounts for second names, the ancestral and dynastic: Margaret, Lois are two obvious ones, but don’t be offended because as soon as they are uttered the reason why a little girl has one or other name is attributed to an ancient relative from three generations ago; a grandmother who is silent in peoples’ memories and who appears as a stiff and unyielding person to all her future generations in a single photograph.
And the other curiosity about classifications is that Emilia's death is listed as a traffic accident. The accident occurred on a road but Emilia was a pedestrian. To the bureaucratic mind it is right to be a road accident, as it happened on a road. The location does not matter and then perhaps only to statisticians who measure the likelihood of various activities being risky.
That knowledge can be used to plan ahead, to make life better, more interesting, to achieve something, but whatever the purpose is, it is always predicated by the future. It is the reason why older people taking degrees seem indulgent, and pointless, because the knowledge can never be exercised. Teleological arguments, however true, fail everybody, everything, in time.
It was on that road, in one stride all the knowledge Emilia possessed and seemed fixed and applied for her future: her education, the music she liked and could talk about at length when she met someone who knew music in the same depth as she did; the gardening too, and the plants, flowers, and cooking, to which she dedicated a lot of time, passed. A considerable amount of knowledge is contained in one person, and Emilia, like me, was quite average, but when I tabulate it, the extent of her interests was astonishing, the range of her personality was extraordinary.
In one stride it was gone, Emilia had lost her step.
WITH EVERYTHING NAMED and classified, correlated and correctly determined in its rightful place, a sense of peace and contentment should exist. After having done all that work it might even bring happiness. The project would be finished; it would have served its purpose. The happiness would appeal to a person who liked order and clarity: a rare type of person who has a strong mental life, where happiness in such things may reside.
Knowing and being able to act well, rationally and objectively, may make a person happier. I do not know, I am no more certain than I was at the beginning. It’s a theory, or maybe just a point of view, no better informed than that of a caveman living in sempiternal darkness. It is an intellectual attitude, raised and qualified by years of study, by the pursuit of answers, the search for a reason aside from the diurnal needs, but more than likely meaningless to anyone else.
I do not know; I will never know.
The sensation dims and ebbs: gradually less, then less again, each morning. After a handful of years, it is easier, yes easier, in the uncertain progress of the day. What is still tangible is her, Emilia, in a million different dimensions, albeit from the past. She is still strong enough to be able to say a word or have a thought saved for the next time she visits me.
I COULD NOT name that knowledge, so it is out in the world and may be discussed by people, then criticized as too simple, obvious, too banal; no, that is something I will keep inside, to myself, in my head, perfect, untouchable, ideal, mine.
Guy Cranswick lives in Sydney and, apart from English, speaks French and Italian—and survival German. He has written screenplays, a novel, My Wife, My Job, My Shoes; and a collection of stories, Corporate. His short fiction has been published in Canada, the US, UK, Ireland, Israel, Singapore and Australia.
