At mid-morning on that first day, M and Is sat on deck chairs outside the beach hut. A single cloud hung shyly above the bay. M put on her headphones and began annotating Emile Durkheim’s On Suicide. I looked around me. It would have seemed to observers that I was where I lay. But ‘I’ – that is, the conscious part of my self – had in truth abandoned the physical envelope in which it dwelt in order to worry about the future, or more specifically about the issue of whether lunches would be included in the price of the room. Two hours later, seated at a corner table in the hotel restaurant with a papaya (lunch and local taxes included)…
If we are surprised by the power of one sulk to destroy the beneficial effects of an entire hotel, it is because we misunderstand what holds up our moods. We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of buildings, but on the tropical island we learn (after an argument in a raffia bungalow under an azure sky) that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do. The task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand. Thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks, are charged with listening to music or following a line of trees. The music or the view distracts for a time that nervous, censorious, practical part of the mind which is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness and which runs scared of memories, longings, introspective or original ideas and prefers instead the administrative and the impersonal.
Of all the modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought: the views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or plane, they move fast enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects. They offer us brief, inspiring glimpses into private domains, letting us see a woman at the precise moment when she takes a sup from her kitchen shelf in her kitchen, then carrying us to a patio where a man is sleeping and then to a park where a child is catching a ball thrown by a figure we cannot see.
Asked to explain why he has been made to suffer though he has been good, God draws Job’s attention to the mighty phenomena of nature. Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way: the universe is greater than you. Do not be surprised that you do not understand why they have not gone your way: for you cannot fathom the logic of the universe. Accept what is bigger than you and you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to Job, but it does not follow that is illogical per se. Our lives are not the measure of all things: consider sublime places for a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.
No comments:
Post a Comment