Anachronistic
Nam quicquid vivit in tempore id praesens a praeteritis in futura procedit …. sed crastinum quidem nondum apprehendit hesternam vero iam perdidit.
Boethius: Consolatio Philosphiae
Whatever lives in time exists in the present and progresses from the past to the future …. it has not yet possessed tomorrow when it has already lost yesterday.
It was tempting to say of Gerald Morton that he had been ‘born into the wrong time’ – a temptation to which some people had, now and again, succumbed. Indeed, what would be the purpose of a temptation, however modest (which, by the by, is a poor quality in a temptation) if nobody succumbed to it? Inevitably, the more high-minded will press the tips of their fingers together and be mindful that a temptation is a test and that, therefore, (opening out their hands) what loss of purpose could there be if each and every one of us passed the test. But the low minded, yawning, will be mindful that, usually, only a very few are able to pass any test; that is to say, (the mouth condescending) resist a temptation. The suspicion, however, must creep slowly in – or slink, if you prefer – that the temptation to which no one succumbs cannot be especially tempting.
‘Born into the wrong time’ is a fairly well trod phrase: it is a phrase which is easily understood, fully descriptive and yet, seemingly, entirely inaccurate. Its appearance is reassuring and inviting but, beneath this surface, it is hollow, its sap having leaked out, perhaps evaporated, through the crack in its side…but, of course, every temptation must be flawed to appeal to the flaw in the person it tempts: a mutual imperfection to establish a sympathy (truly a winking intimacy between ptotic eyes) in a union emboldened by frailty.
To digress for a moment: ideally but not necessarily this will be a moral flaw but in any temptation there must reside a flaw, a structural perversion. To tempt a person into doing good works, for example, is to make a bastard of the word; or its antimony. The appearance of the temptation is plain and without seduction but the consequences of succumbing are rich and wholesome. That is no good: a temptation’s promise must be a one-night-stand sneaking out during the night; it cannot be there in the morning, large as life, steadfast and true. Admittedly, there is no moral flaw in the phrase ‘born into the wrong time’ [except to the most paranoiac puritan who suspects that it is being used to elevate one of the Good Pagans] but the feeblest flaw may often be the most pernicious. Out of its weakness flows a tingling warmth: the gravitational pull of succumbing.
But, see here, a man cannot possess a time or belong to another one – that would be an offence against nature (another flirtatious phrase but, perhaps, with enough substance) – it is a temporal or secular or, perhaps, a profane blasphemy. People arrive in the strict order of the chain of their generative progression and it would be even more absurd to suggest that separate generations could be casually transposed into different lineal linkages; it drags the whole chain along with it, causing babies, great-grandmothers, fathers, and respectable others to get pulled along behind, banging and bumping into each other. And if the chain could be broken, that would be far worse. One must liken it to snipping a pearl from a necklace: it scatters disaster. The genealogy rains down – too late the hand flies to the nakedness suddenly exposed – and we are left with heads bashed on the underside of tables as the crawling fumble for the lost generations. Men and women on all fours again.
Still, when all that has been said and done (not that very much has been done) the phrase remains. It has been used by some and, furthermore, it is difficult to see how it may be avoided. This may be one of those goose-pimpled occasions when temptation marries necessity. More drily it may be an occasion when what the experts might call a metacommensensicality imposes itself and, on its own transcendence, rises above the impasse. In so doing, it is accepted that the phrase refers to something; only not exactly that to which it claims to belong. That being so, the right to seek out its referent cannot be denied the explorer.
So: is the person of whom it is said ‘they were born into the wrong time’ simply ill-adapted or unsuited to the period in which they live? After all, that must be the substitute sense to which the phrase slides; its back-up meaning. But is that any better? The use of the word time has to be dropped since a person is suited or otherwise to those events that are busily unfolding around them in that which is called their period; rather than within the grander, belittling sweep of the galaxies as they pivot imperceptibly through the cosmos and time (that is sometimes called Time). But to be unsuited to your period: is that to be unsuited to modernity in general or is it to be unsuited to the very particular arrangement of modernity as it exists in that exact slice of human progress? In the case of the regency observer, for example, if we are allowed a dab of facetiousness, who takes against the hats of their period, is it an objection to the size and style of the contemporary bonnet or is it a straightforward rejection of the development of a millinery that is always changing, searching for the new, restless for progress?
This distinction must be distinguished since a resistance to modernity in general must be refused. It cannot be accepted as being out of its time since each and every period is modern contemporaneously. Therefore, anyone displeased with modernity risks falling into the far larger vat containing those who are unsuited to any period and, indeed, time. This is an alarmingly capacious pot stirred by the likes of de Heer Bosch and full of stiff-jointed, arthritic types who stand shoulder to shoulder in the agony of their disgruntlement. But they cannot be born into the wrong time who dislike every time (or period).
Ah, well, yes, but the problem there, you see, the problem with being unsuited to many aspects of your period, is that the person who is disaffected with the particulars of a period – that is to say, with this thing and that thing rather than the whole lot of it – will fall into the largest cauldron of all which is known as Mother Earth and it is stirred by the likes of the Sun and the Moon. Those in it, assuredly grumble and cavil but, well, there is plenty to complain about. But that’s life, and grumbling about life doesn’t cause people to say of the grumbler that he or she was ‘born into the wrong time’.
It would seem that the condition of being born into the wrong time resembles the condition of being tone deaf. The kind and instructive doctors tell us that the diagnosis of tone deafness is an exceedingly rare one. It matters not that they seem to be in the most considerable majority, those who find it hard to hear a tone: those whose voices can tear at the meninges or those whose playing can cause fingers and toes to bend backwards. Those tuneless souls are not tone deaf, say the doctors, they are afflicted only with a lack of musicianship. In just this same way, it may very well be that the condition of being born into the wrong time is not a common one and that having a horror of the louder, flashier emanations of modern life does not qualify you as a sufferer.
Thus, we should cast aside the Shake-heads who shy away from newness and change, those who bark at motor cars and tremble (in anger it is hoped rather than fear) as the jet engine thunders in the air. They arch their backs and hiss at the new words and grammar as they scuttle by as if it were some nasty vandalism carved into the old school desk. [There are too many animals in this paragraph.] They parrot orthodoxy for such minds are liable to ape [two more] their betters whom they follow like sheep. [Any more and hackles will rise and they will start to fight amongst
the mselves a nd kno ck thith er and will it b e a all th e wor ds hi ther nd dev a job to g il of et thin gs und er control again.]
[I told you so.]
Nonetheless, allowing all that its proper place and agreeing that some of it may be so, the Shake-heads may have a point to make. There are those Shake-heads who maintain that it is no longer the case, as it was in times gone by, that procrastination is the thief of time. No: they say that it is the giver of time and that it is procrastination’s opposite that is larcenous to that degree. Procrastinate has no literal opposite of course – to expedite yesterday is clearly an absurdity – so the assumption will be made that they are referring to expeditiousness, to rapidity in general. It has been noted by them and will have been noted by everyone else that progress in technology tends towards rapidity. Those who work diligently, heads down, to further that progress and those, heads more vertical, who labour to usher it in, do not often strive to slow things down. But has it been noted by half so many, the Shake-heads asseverate, that in doing so time is stolen? One mouth may call it speeding things up, another may say it robs us of the time previously spent doing those same things, leaving an empty space – that is then only filled with more velocity.
This may seem to take the hare and split it but (doubtless waiting a moment) consider the wisdom of the tortoise say the Shake-heads …. [there is no avoiding it: this argument must be adopted, legally or otherwise, it is too tedious to be constantly referring to a third party …]
So, then, the tortoise acquired his wisdom at his leisure, for a tortoise has nothing but a leisurely pace in all things. A faster pace of travel is, undeniably, an instance of the traveller being sped up; yet the more significant component is found in the time removed, the time previously spent doing that travelling or, perhaps, waiting to travel. (Lest it be thought that a peculiarly obsessive myopia is at play, it is not just travel that enjoys this particular relationship with time – though of course that is the special nub of relativity – but all communication, the writing of a letter, as well as its composition and the waiting for a reply, and possibly aspects of human activity not involving communication – but for that you must provide your own examples: your various exemplorum gratia.)
Some may wish to say that time stolen in this way is, in fact, saved, that there has been no ‘intent to deprive’ and the time has in itself been set aside: being made available for a time after its own proper time. This is a common error to which those who have not sufficiently studied the laws concerning and properties pertaining to physical bodies are subject. Once accelerated the massive body acquires momentum and therefore the human body sped up will, typically, continue in its trajectory: doing something else with equal rapidity and then another hotly pursuant to that. All this rapidity will, of course, nourish its momentum. Time therefore will not have been gained to be regained later on like dear old Monsieur Proust (of whom it is said, he had an abundance of leisure).
Others may wish to say that time spent rushing and careering about at breakneck speed is, nevertheless, still time. To those who would maintain that, it is to be imagined that scarcely anyone else will believe there is any obligation to provide an answer. Those who think that hours and days flung and shaken about in such a manner, stuffed to bursting with a frenzy of happening, crackling with noise and the flash and blare of blinding illuminations, those who think that such an appalling impoverishment of the quality of hours and days still deserves the name time, can scarcely be imagined to possess the necessary discernment to comprehend any answer given them.
Time. to be properly called time, is reasonably quiet, not overly excited, indeed erring on the side of a slightly wistful sadness rather than happiness (which may risk degenerating into that fun that has been accused of causing time to get airborne). Otherwise its importance has been too much diminished by what hurtling things occupy it, by what, therefore, distracts us from it. For time has a significance of its own as it relates to our presence in it: the person who is untroubled in time, grows, the person who is harassed, is stretched. In very different words, if someone buys a bag of snakes as a gift, saying ‘I have bought you a bag’, the most rigid pedant will say he has a point, the rest of us will prefer to focus on the issue of the snakes.
In travel, the time removed was previously spent travelling more slowly, the Shake-heads will say.
[Yes, the adoption proved tedious and it has been hard to find any paternal fondness for this argument]
They will speak nostalgically – though often with that strange non-experiential nostalgia – of discovering new country, rediscovering, afresh, old country, encountering other travellers on the journey – perhaps sitting in a Victorian waiting room with the grate full of glowing coals and the kettle beginning to rumble. As to the writing of a letter, they will regret the loss of that time spent in reflection, in weighing one’s words and framing them more judiciously (perhaps to avoid mixing a metaphor) – they will reminisce about an epistolary art both elegant and bursting with substance.
These were certainly views that, at the very least, orbited the views of Gerald Morton but were they views that would justify a statement that his birth had not released him into the appropriate time for either his temperament or his thinking? Progress of this sort is not new nor is a dislike of it. Yet, if it is not new in itself, it is possible that what is new is its intensity and its remorselessness. Although, it is equally possible that this sense of intensity is merely a matter of perspective. In space, that which is closer looks bigger, that which is further off, smaller, but in time that which is closer looks more important, farther away, academic. The exchange of importance for intensity is, certainly a sleight of open-handedness but quite understandable. Nonetheless, assuming that the acceleration of progress, and all that underlies that impetus, to be the case, it then becomes possible, even probable, that it is that which repels (in the sense of oil and water) Gerald Morton and his temporally situated sensibilities.
In other words, – and very banal words they are too but even banality can aspire to be something more: truistic, for example – the question goes, do we live in a time in which everything must be revealed: instantly found and instantly solved? Yes, yes, the hungry human spirit has always demanded it. It is what makes mankind what it is, so they say, the yearning, the striving, the parched thirst for adventure, discovery, knowledge, and understanding. But everything? And right now? That is new, is it not? Have we, as a race always believed that we can know everything and felt that it can all be known in a generation or two? When did we begin to think so highly of ourselves? Did we not leave some of it to the deities, to the unknowable, or just to the future?
To someone of Gerald Morton’s cast of mind occurs the further question: if everything is soon to be known, what then? Will not hunger and thirst take up permanent residence in that human spirit. A hunger that cannot be satisfied because everything will have been eaten and a thirst that rages because the fountain will have been drunk dry. To put it another way, there will be no more Christmases because each and every future present will lie torn open.
It ought to be interposed at this juncture that, although these reflections or those like them had made some sort of conscious appearance in Gerald Morton’s mind, they had not necessarily been considered quite as explicitly as they are here set down. In other words, they are not exactly thoughts imposed on him from the outside but nor are they precisely thoughts that he had had. They are thoughts he would be acquainted with: he could not pass them by as strangers and he could not cleave to them as old friends. The general drift of his thinking is being expatiated though not, it is to be hoped, exaggerated.
Consequently, if it were suggested to Gerald Morton that his contemporaries were too busy making of nature a simplified equation, he would not recognise the remark as one of his own but he would nod approvingly at the sentiment. Steely equations (he might murmur assentingly) resulting in the heavens drained of their dark, unfathomable and rich waters; the stars that used to waver just beneath the rippling surface now set immobile as overly bright needles of light And space scoured, scrubbed clean and sterilised. Meanwhile, a world spread asunder, turned inside out, folded back on itself, and skewered by relentless rays of proximity – a population and all their interconnections as if it were horsehair and thistledown stuffing that filled the gaps between them. [Ah, but now we run away with ourselves – we will choke the man if we try to stuff too many words into his mouth.
Still, whether due to the loneliness of endless empty space (out there) or the loneliness of a compacted world with no space at all between the interstices, how difficult it must be for an individual person to maintain a healthy relationship with their sense of significance. Although, in that, Gerald Morton had no especial claim and it has been hardly worth the trouble of mentioning.
Something that may be worth mentioning, if only for curiosity’s sake and because it is in an extremely similar vein, was his curiously sentimental solicitude for the brain (or mind – he made no very great distinction between the two). Gerald Morton had no objection that he could, with an easy conscience, maintain against the neurosurgeon attempting to cure the maladies that afflict it, opening the brain up and poking around inside – but that did not prevent him from disliking the very idea. Equally, he had nothing absolutely concrete to place in argument against the neuroscientist who scanned, probed, and measured the orchestra of threads in the fluid loom of thought (the mycelium of mind, if you like) but they were activities that, if he didn’t actually find them distasteful, did not find favour with him.
The brain, treated this way – without any of the reverence for the mysteries that those of us with poetry lounging about in the soul usually demand – might as well be no more than two slippery handfuls of gleaming red offal; a brain whose sentience was described in nothing more glorious than ohms and amps. Gerald Morton’s attitude to the skull was rather prudish: people shouldn’t peer through its keyhole, let alone film or otherwise record what they saw. Such sordid revelations irked him but what threatened his own peace of mind the most was the fact that the brain revealed was shown to have no room inside it: no room at all. It was squashed inside a cramped, nearly airless, bone ball.
Gerald Morton had at one time or another expressed himself disappointed by the purloining of the term virtual space. Philosophy had the prior claim to its ownership but it had been brusquely annexed by what he termed computer operatives. Prior to this sequestration – as usual by stern faced soldiers who could not deign to look the locals in the face – this term had been employed by philosophy to describe the elbow room that thinking makes for itself in which to do its imagining. It creates the space in which the mind can imagine that which has size, dimension, extension call it what you will. This is the space (which is, in a sense, for any mind, all of the space it knows) in which you picture things. Topically, it is of course indispensable when reading a book.
Gerald Morton, challenged on this point, might well have tried to deny it but he had difficulty in not conceiving of this virtual space somewhat literally. He thought of this realm of the mind’s imagining as being, well, a realm: he thought of it as extending, implosively, beyond the size of a grapefruit, beyond the size of a room, out through French windows, across a many-partitioned garden, over parkland, across counties, over at least a continent and on, beyond the horizon, into space. So that the mind, and therefore the brain, had as much space internally as Space itself (we must capitalise it in this context) has externally.
Perspective
Illud in his rebus longe fuge credere, Memmi
in medium summae quod dicunt omnia niti
Lucretius: De rerum natura
There is one belief, Memmius, that you must avoid: that everything tends towards what they call ‘the centre of the world’
Others had been tempted to say of Gerald Morton that he was an eccentric fellow. How shall we plait the terms of this accusation? On the one hand the eccentric is the character that deviates from the norm and has thus strayed from the centre. Yet on the other, mathematical hand, the centre is so small as to scarcely exist. If all of human society were to occupy only the centre, it would rise up in a single column seven and a half million miles high (or thereabouts). That would be far from tenable and certain activities, to state the obvious, such as eating, drinking and, most especially, their consequences would become extremely vexing. If the centre is small, the number of people who may occupy it (however uncomfortably) will be small. Convention will therefore be legitimised not by weight of numbers but by weight of self-assurance. On such a basis, whether or not some people considered Gerald Morton to be an eccentric seems quite irrelevant. Since, after all, self-assurance is the most fallible way of legitimising anything and in itself, taken to the slightest excess, is perfectly odious.
If the term eccentric is to be treated with disdain as a category, still the possession of eccentricities is a more palatable idea: more than that, it would be almost abnormal for a character to possess nothing that could be described in any way as an eccentricity. Such a person would only be convivial company for a block of pumice. Gerald Morton had one notable eccentricity; namely, that he punctuated many of his utterances with the briefest of honorifics. Neither the Sir of clerical address, nor the Sir of knighthood, he used a lower case lacunary sir. It is bootless to object that a lacuna is a gap and if it is filled with the word sir it is no longer a gap, for a gap that is filled is still a gap else how can that which fills it gain access or, indeed, retain its residence – besides, lacuna is from lacus, lake, and a lake is always full (to some degree) or it is demoted to a hole. In this wise a lacuna differs fundamentally from an hiatus.
True, it was a lacuna that Gerald Morton had a tendency to snap shut, which badly disturbs the image of a cavity filled with fluid. Perhaps, therefore, it is better to think of the hiatus: an hiatus being in the mouth not as a yawn but as a potency that the upper jaw and the lower jaw, poised in the brevity of the word sir, will expand suddenly and shortly to expel into sound.
As will be readily imagined, he did not enunciate this eremitical word (for in this context it had none of its own: being quite unsociable with the other words in the sentence and, in fact, standing in no direct relation to them) as a schoolboy would address a schoolmaster (at least in an Edwardian school) with a greater or lesser degree of subservience. He gave to it, if not sententious emphasis, then most acutely a sentential emphasis – indeed, that was its raison d’être. Its tone required of the recipient hearer a sufficient rectitude – sometimes even intelligence – to be worthy of the remark it endorsed. It did not do so, however, in a manner that was rude or overbearing but with an abrupt confidence that assumed those qualities in the hearer and would have been shocked to find them lacking. Most pertinently, and in such a way, its use argued against contradiction. It was bluff, respectable, wholehearted, auditively imposing. Who would wish to contradict any of those attributes to its employment?
Thereby, many a sentence was concluded with the imprimatur of its own conviction. Furthermore, its use did, on some occasions, in some circumstances, flatter the recipient of the honorific – though not very frequently. In addition to its use in concluding sentences, it was used (if anything more often) prior to the end, overlaying the whole set-up and paraphernalia of the sentence with a reinforcing conclusiveness and initiating its full-stop certainty before that piece of punctuation was invoked. Thus, making of its point a foregone conclusion.
The more generous spirited or fair minded will undoubtedly agree that, as eccentricities go, it is not so very far off centre. It is a mild eccentricity one might say. One has only, if such a thing is possible, to cup an ear across the channel to overhear our cousins the French bring to term many a sentence with the word ‘quoi’ without being thought of as a throwback to the Ancien Régime (if anything it is more the styling of the sans-culottes). Were the English to follow this fashion, we should all begin to sound like Sir Percy Blakeney. From there it would be a short step of the tongue to seasoning our sentences with Zounds! and Begad!
Gerald Morton was not half so liberal with his ‘titular punctuation’ when it came to the use of its feminine equivalent. In mixed company he held to the masculine; very slightly changing his intonation as if to imply that this version of ‘sir’ was being shot into the air in the abstract. If faced with unadulterated female company, he almost never used the word madam and, indeed, the presence of a second syllable changes the import of its sound (for, as punctuation, these words had no meaning, only a sounding significance). Curiously, however, he did use the term with all the frequency that he used the masculine when describing or reporting a conversation that he had had with a woman, In that case, he was obliged to insert the word where it had not existed in the original. In no circumstances was this more his habit than when he was relaying conversations he had had with his wife.
This was, though – this particularity of interlocutory style – his only obvious eccentricity unless you count his intense predilection for travel. No, predilection is not the right word. Gerald Morton’s almost unceasing travel was more in the nature of a lifestyle than an activity prompted by a desire. So, too, the quantity of his travelling was partly a product of the pace at which it was conducted. On balance, his impulsions both to and in travel, were a milder eccentricity than his mode of address – at least in terms of the impression made on others (which is not always the truest guide). He did not, it must be acknowledged, travel to arrive. As was touched upon earlier, he was to be found in that camp that held to the idea that travelling, whether for pleasure or for more utilitarian purposes, conducted properly ought to be conducted slowly. He would certainly not have entertained the suggestion that moving from point A to point B might be achieved in an aeroplane. He was not squeamish about flying but the notion of shooting blind over countries and continents bemused him. He would liken the procedure to that of attending the theatre in a locked trunk. In general, Gerald Morton favoured the train or walking.
It seems obvious enough that being in possession of or being possessed by (who knows how these things work?) an eccentricity will put that personality into a minority – not, of course, in a minority as having an eccentricity but in the minority as being possessed of that particular eccentricity. After all, if your eccentricity is an ornament of character that is no more than commonplace then it will hardly be considered eccentric and you will sit with a sizeable enough group to be considered part of the respectable majority: dull and centric.
Although, it is true, Gerald Morton often found himself in the minority and that was not due exclusively or even usually to his eccentricities. He found himself in the minority, for example, and in one for which some sense of irony must surely be found, when he was delivering a speech at Westminster on the subject of democracy. That is to say, he was not a part of the majority who did not receive his speech very well and he was in the minority that was giving it.
Gerald Morton was in favour of democracy – at least to the extent that most right-thinking citizens are – but he was beset by doubts concerning the demos, as he put it: feeling that they were not always holding up their end of the bargain. This was not arrogance for he was not an arrogant man, nor was it condescending for his brows (the locus of patronage) were not wreathed in condescension. It was simply that Gerald Morton took particular care over his choices, or in the procedure of his choosing. Whether or not these choices were big or small made no very great difference. As far as he was concerned, whether you were deciding upon something to be entertained by or a group of individuals to be governed by, it was the exercise of judgement that was significant. In so exercising that judgement, the faculties he employed resembled the tools of the analytic chemist. It was as if he weighed the elements to be judged, sluicing them around the bulbous retort (of his mind’s eye, if you like) engaging in a slow centrifugation, separating the precipitate, decanting, and further extracting the result by filtration or sieving. For those who like their metaphors to be fully extended, they may imagine him still not fully satisfied and proceeding to a little distillation (either by absorption or adsorption), condensation, or sublimation to find the very nuclear essence of that which he analysed. All the while, his thoughts would be occupied with the careful taking of mental notes (as if with a stub of pencil) until he reached his carefully considered and very nearly irrefutable conclusions. At which point, he would look up, only to discover that, albeit by means of far less rigorous methodologies, the world had plumped for differing conclusions – which were sometimes quite diametrically opposed to his own. He was often utterly perplexed at the failure of his seemingly irreproachably calculated reasoning to coincide with that of the majority.
At such moments, reluctantly, his mind began to question the quality of the suffrage that underpinned the democratic process: was the commonwealth putting its collective shoulder to the wheel in exercising that right? In talking of a democratic process, it should be said, Gerald Morton was considerably less interested in the political electoral system that springs to mind in such a context and much more interested in all the other avenues of public choice: all those decisions that are taken in the daily stride and, truth be told, have at least as much influence on that daily life. Formerly – yes, in a previous time – this divergence (of his ‘tastes’ from those of most others) might have presented a lesser problem. As the word’s provenance attests, the notion of democracy is not new and even its admirers are not so recent a phenomenon. The current reverence for democracy is newer and the problem for those such as Gerald Morton arises because, as a result of its sanctification, it has become the conduit of all choosing. Which, of course, in the eyes of those who are not synchronised with it, makes it tyrannical.
This tendency, to be clear, is a blind reverence, a beatification of democracy, wherein those things that are bathed in its purifying light, even those things that have not had a bath in their lives, can no longer be smelled. Which is often the case: even that which may stink to high heaven and often higher, if it has been blessed by the right authority, itself becomes blesséd.
The narrative must be halted for a moment to note that what is being related now is very much closer to free indirect speech or le style indirect libre (erlebte Rede) than any previous account of Gerald Morton’s views has previously been. The tone, paradoxically, is more direct, at least less circumspect. Up to now there has been a greater use of that which might hesitantly be called free indirect thought -whilst certainly admitting that no third-party thought could actually be direct. The tone notwithstanding, since there is hardly a distinction worth mentioning between free indirect speech and direct speech, it will be as well as makes no difference to continue in the latter form. Finally, it is perhaps worth mentioning that the speaker’s tone had had no little part to play in causing his audience to receive his words with mixed feelings (though some skipped that stage and proceeded straight to the purely sceptical).
“Into the mud: the mud, sir.” had said Gerald Morton “Worse, into the mire. Much worse, for you sink into your mire whilst you only muddy your water – and which would you rather, your water muddied or yourself sunk? Though it is not your body that is spoken of here, it is your mind. That is the result. When we throw, not caution to the wind, but conjecture. Although, in throwing conjecture to the wind, we are also throwing caution into its Æolian Chaos. Not just caution or conjecture for that matter but a whole confetti of mental dignities are thrown into the currents of the air to be blown where they will: perception, understanding, discernment, reasoning, rationality, judgement and a hundred other faculties where they are owned. And, where do they land? In the mire, to sink; in the fire, to burn; on stone to shrivel; on ice, to freeze – any damn place for all you care, sir, you who wave the seal of democracy in my face and in the face of all those who would hold fast to their own thinking.
“And what is this wind? It is the crowd blowing and puffing, their cheeks blown out as if they had fallen in their thousands from the four corners of the old maps, a veritable swarm of Norths, Souths, Easts and Wests, cheeks swollen, blasting airs in every direction. Each one of us in the crowd venting in the gale of everyone else – every man Jack, and every Jill, seraphim trumpeting our windy hosannas. Yet that cannot be all, for that does not explain all. Here we are blowing, blustering, squalling, and generally ventilating in a like manner: if that were all that kept those matters pertinent in the air (the fashions, ideas, interests, fanaticisms, les cris du jour et eternel) then they would fly about like sparks from a bonfire lit by a madman in a storm. The winds of the crowd blow, hot and cold, fragrant and fœtid, vapourish and cutting, in each and every direction. But the wind of the crowd does not continue contrary and swirling. It prevails, sir, this wind, it prevails.
“It is very like your jet stream – only much lower (being closer to the ground). The air rises, heated by the press of bodies on the surface, and is snatched into prevalence by your jet stream to become this prevailing wind. Though I speak now very metaphorically of course. Whence comes this jet stream, that sweeps all into a single direction? Is it a force of nature that causes this majoritisation of the heated air? Every blast of wind originates as a single minority – everyone should have a voice but only the squall can be heard – does nature rebel against and overrule that individuality of willpower? If this really is a work of nature.
“Descartes, that estimable and wise doctor, was firmly resolved that God would not deceive us. Though, in stating that the urge to deceive could only emanate from malice, fear, or weakness, it is my opinion that he ignores the need for a good laugh. Not that it matters because what do I know of God’s sense of humour? I defer to René’s knowledge of what makes the Creator tick and what appeals to His sense of propriety. If he says that tricks and deceptions would not, I shall not argue the point. However, I am inclined to think differently of nature. Nature has slipped the leash in this regard and toys with us … ah, but mankind’s worst enemy, as they say, is man and perhaps attributing blame is cutting soap suds with a razor.
“Nonetheless, nature plays tricks. It gives to our bodies the necessity of being sheltered at the same time as it gives to the weather a cruel inclemency. It places our happiness in a peaceful, sylvan Eden but drops our survival over the wall in a scrubland of teeth and poison. Certainly nature is the champion of division: even in our minds it sets one part of consciousness against another. Whether it is malicious in its humour or just plain malicious, I can’t say.
“Still, the origin of the problem is that nature has given us two eyes and only one window. Often we blame Signore Brunelleschi or Signore Alberti – and they have much to answer for – but it may be they were just the puppets whose strings nature tweaked and jerked. For nature, as nature is, has a double mastery, a stacked deck of a mastery, sir. In this case, it provides the form and it provides the eyes to see the form. Furthermore, they both fit each other like plugs into a socket. It is easy to see how, if it was nature’s game to play, our eyesight could be drawn ineluctably down into the funnelled cage of perspective – towards the point where even singularities disappear.
“And now there is no getting free of it. It is like an eel trap this sullen perspective, this absolutism of perspective: once you have followed the lines inside you can’t turn around. Painting, sir, painting is an undeniable culprit in this trapping of our views. At the very least, and I am being generous, one of the worst culprits: thinking to hold a divine right of the brush, to depict the monocular view that allows no choice, no deviation and scarcely allows you or I free will. There can be but one way of looking at the object and that is by lancing it with remorselessly straight lines vanishing into nothing. Nothing it is, for they bring nothing but geometry and what does this geometry do other than refer to emptiness? The dimensions of space, sir, have nothing if they have not objects within them. And what does this geometry reveal? It tells of how one thing is further away than another. Does it tell of anything else, whether the thing is soft or hard, lovely or hateful, important or insignificant? It does not. It just speaks silently of the emptiness between them. It was for that that painting sold its soul.
“The divine Reverend Doctor Opimian had it right when he spoke of the Greek painters: ‘In short, they gave to each distinct object its own proper perspective,’ he said, ‘but to separate objects they did not give their relative perspective, for the reason I have given, that they did not need it’. The point exactly made: they did not need it. But the Rev. Dr. Opimian is too polite – not in himself you understand: in so far as his character is concerned, he is as polite as only does him credit (though he is not always so). He might have asked whether they did not have the same eyes that we have, whether the objects of their time did not stand at different lengths apart distantly from those Greek eyes, and so whether they did not appear relatively larger and smaller with respect to each other. He might not have stopped there and might have asked if that same nature’s pattern from which our eyesight is woven or mould in which our eyes are cast were not used all the way from those Greeks, through their Byzantine descendants, into the quattrocento and beyond.
“Are we really to say that this .. this thing (I shan’t say invention any more than I would refer to the invention of walking), this use of perspective would have been unattainable for all those artists who occupied those many centuries, (which, sir, comprise hundreds of years), had they had the need for it? Look towards the end of that period at Duccio and Cimabue, who could have had perspective for the taking merely by reaching out had they wanted to. But they didn’t want or need this one quality because they were interested in every other quality.
“Ah, but it is a cunning ploy to say that they could not have grasped it. For you see how it is formulated this justification for that which suppresses all independent points of view: by expressing this unwarranted condescension, in denying to those masters the translation of a most basic perception, they establish that ability as the only one worth having. It is like Polyphemus pitying the Achaeans for having too many eyes. Don’t be fooled, examine those older painters – those pre-lapsarian painters – and see how they forge deeper and richer relations between the matter and the persons depicted, relations forged in the purity of their souls not in a pair of binoculars. These relations they found more important than subsuming every one to its relative size. I ask you, my dear sir, to name to me a relation or a quality that is not more important than relative size.
“So sets in this thought and sets hard. It is more pernicious than the parti pris of history: history only metaphorically applies the blinkers, perspective does so actually. Before long, seeing just this one type of representation, this one point of view, mankind begins to believe that there is no other way of seeing (or, if there be an alternative, it is an inferior lens handed down from the past). Soon we are all swept away onto the road toward majorities. We cannot have minorities forking left and right, wandering down narrow lanes nor, God forbid, across the open countryside. Every thread of minority must be twisted into the majority cable: no variables, no variation, no fraying into variety.
“Therefore, I blame the demos for their lack of discernment and I blame the kratos for forbidding discernment by building that inflexible highway to the vanishing point. I do not blame democracy since in this linear perversion of both parts it is no longer democratic. If democracy is a voice for all then each voice ought to be heard yet they are silenced in the choir (indeed, indeed, you may say so, it is possible that plainchant is no less to blame than painting). These are all tyrannies: not the dictatorship just of the proletariat but the dictatorship of all. It is very Marxist this democracy…”
Here, it is sensible to leave Gerald Morton for a while. A taste of his direct style and tone has been experienced. Those who do not care for it will, perhaps, no longer be reading – just as a great many of his audience were no longer sitting.
The foule disease of Opinionation
Quando un’opinione regna per lungo tempo, e in una buona parte del mondo, finisce a esprimersi in tutti le maniere, a tentar tutte l’uscite, a scorrer per tutti i gradi della persuasione;
(Alessandro Manzoni: I Promessi Sposi)
When an opinion has been held for a long period over a large part of the earth’s surface, it will always end by expressing itself with every appearance of conviction, and by infiltrating through every gap in men’s minds and invading every level of their beliefs.
If it is said of Gerald Morton that he held opinions, this will not be thought to be all that remarkable. But if the remark is made then the deliberate making of an unremarkable remark becomes remarkable. Does the remarking of them suggest that those opinions are in themselves extraordinary. Sadly, it does not. For, in the case of opinions, it is solely their strength that requires evaluation: not just the forthrightness of their expression – expulsion might be a better word – but the zeal with which they are held. What needs to be examined is, paradoxically, the vigour with which they are thrown or projected and, simultaneously, the tightness with which the possessor refuses to let go of them.
Most easy-minded persons capable of holding an opinion hold opinions of great variety. Yet, of this multitude of opinions amongst opinion-holders, a number – perhaps the greater number – are not held fervently. In other words, they are held but they are not held clenched to the breast in one hand whilst the other hand waggles a sword at any who would try to deprive them of their opinion (or, in the worst scenario, any who would doubt that opinion’s worth). No, more usually, they are held as one could imagine a fop might hold a scented handkerchief.
Rightly so. After all, what is an opinion? It is not a belief. It is not a judgement. It rarely pretends to be anything so redolent of possibility as an hypothesis. It rests on very little knowledge – sometimes it has rested on knowledge as much as an impatient hummingbird rests on a blossom. Every dictionary attempts to define it with a fudged assemblage of other words as if circling the air will make it solid. But dictionaries are themselves repositories of opinions about meanings and are, therefore, no more reliable than the word they seek to pin to the baize.
Certainly, there are notorious aberrations of pomposity when an opinion aspires to be cloaked in judgement, crowned with knowledge and holds the sceptre of certainty. In such instances the opinion can scarcely lift its head for the immense weight of sagacity that it pretends sits upon its pate. Yet, in the pursuance of any such aspiration, honesty and any sort of self-evaluation is almost entirely sacrificed to argument. Furthermore, if it is said of someone that they are opinionated, there is no strong suggestion that they know very much at all (least of all, the estimation others hold of their knowledgeableness). Thus, to follow the syllogism, if to be opinionated is to have more opinions than most and if it is no sweet term of endearment to be called opinionated, then opinions must be better the fewer there are.
Milton says opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. How many more good men must there have been in John’s time by comparison with our own. In our times, man’s opinion is a bloated sufficiency whose unfolding stomach has no appetite left for the refined and meticulously prepared cuisine of knowledge. The mere idea of further enquiry makes him feel sick. Opinion is satisfied – it pats its belly – it is not the beginning of diligent research, it is a snooze in a deep sofa.
What is more, because an opinion has no solid shape, no recognisable image, not even as a phantasm hovering in the air, its deficiencies can avoid detection with surprising ease – sometimes astonishing ease. Unlike the work of the untrained optimist who reckons that, say, carpentry or masonry cannot be so very difficult and ‘has a go’, the ruination wrought by his handiwork is plain to see; even to the equally unskilled. It is possible for an opinion, however, to be lauded by a great many even if it is chair without a seat or a house without a door.
Without question, there are many tiers of opinion. Much depends on the setting and the scale of the exchange of opinion. The opinion passed from one old friend to another across a gate may very well be harmless enough – especially if one is leaning on the gate whilst the other chews on something from the family of grasses. Opinions may sometimes be no more than what is required to fill a conversation. If the conversationalists have tired of simple statements of fact – ‘the sky is blue today’ or ‘my knee is better’ – then it is no more than fair to expect opinion to lend a hand. It is axiomatic that the need to talk often exceeds the need to talk sense (it is the founding principle of opinion) but in those circumstances the trade-off is understood and accepted.
There is very little common ground between that kind of convivial, face-to-face exchange of opinion and the opinions of the few as they are transmitted to the many. It is possible that the statistician, aided by the epidemiologist, could apply some mathematics to this problem in order to establish whether the ratio of those offering the opinion to those receiving it determines the perfidy of the opinion. Often we see that where the ratio is very high – of the order of one to ten million or more – the result is catastrophic but that is not proof. The means for opinion to triumph now exists. During the course of history opinion has been variously limited: first by the power of a speaker’s vocal chords and then by the willingness of the victim to delve into his pocket to buy a pamphlet or some such. Today the range of dissemination has no limit.
Opinionation, where opinion is spread without check, operates like any other disease. It has a requirement to be carried, that is to say, spread abroad contagiously: limited travel, limited spread of disease. Unlike conventional diseases, no one has troubled to devise any medicines for the cure of opinion, let alone any prophylactic inoculation. An additional factor must be mentioned which is that a ragbag diet of umbrage and indignance will both promote the origination of opinion and, in those exposed to it, it will lower their resistance.
Gerald Morton held opinions. He could not easily be defended against the charge of being opinionated. But he was not a carrier of opinionation.
There will always be jungle cats – not the sleek, inky jaguar but mangy, ill-conditioned cats who can do no more than fall from a branch on top of the easier prey – stirring and growling : ”Aha! Ahaa.” they will purr, “And isn’t everything in this chapter mere opinion?” The prey will wrestle and writhe trying to heave off the cat, who continues to opine, but in the end it will have to subside and make an observation about the atrocious state of the cat’s teeth … and breath. However, the answer to the question will, of course, be: no.
Apparition
Interea niveum mira feliciter arte
Sculpsit ebur formamque dedit, qua femina nasci
Nulla potest, operisque sui concepit amorem
[Ovid : Metamorphoses]
Meanwhile he carved his snow-white ivory
With marvellous triumphant artistry
And gave it perfect shape, more beautiful
Than ever woman born. His masterwork
Fired him with love.
At a lunch near High Street Kensington, Gerald Morton spoke freely on a subject that he had not committed himself to before and which, unbidden and unheralded (such is the quotidian miraculousness of thought) had leapt forth like a Lippizaner to dance and prance in the oval school of his mind.
“Appearance. Appearance, sir, is everything. There is a vogue that tells us, and sometimes a cult that orders us, to peer beneath the surface. Do not listen to those voices. Reject all those who ask you to ignore the extrinsic, those who put all their faith in the intrinsic: who rave about the inner beauty of this or the very heart of that. Spurn them as you would the geologist who demands that you concentrate on the granite and the basalt substrata and who urges you to avert your eyes from the superficial fauna and flora of the countryside. Such voices insist on you giving up your contemplation of the changing, seasonal colour, of the swell and wash of the landscape, of the subtle influences of the weather-beaten light and focus your thoughts instead on the iron and nickel of the core.
“The human being: what is more important, the inside or the outside? This fashion will say the inside. Fashion, sir, is changeable and what is changeable must be in error for it cannot be right in saying one thing and still right in saying something else. Nonetheless, persisting in their errors, the fashion followers will no doubt seize on the word ‘important’. The root of that word, they will observe with glee, is ‘to carry in’. Hence to be essential, it must be taken within. [Ps and Portamentos, as my mother used to say]. What else does etymology record but a history of tendentiousness in mankind – it documents nothing more than bias. In any case, everything is taken in eventually – eventually, sir. However every influence comes from outside and what is the first part of us it strikes? Why our outside: the skin, the convexity of the eye, up the nose, onto the sentinel senses (neither the tongue nor the fiddly bits of the ear can truly be called our insides). These are the parts of us that are spoken to and which are confided in. When it meets us, the world dines first al fresco. If the outside is subsequently brought inside, yes, it is sheltered, given a home, but it need not affect a superiority now that it is second-hand.
“Issue too must be taken with the idea of inner beauty. Beauty is appearance’s own and special favourite. It lives in the form of a thing, often in the grace of that form. How may beauty excel in being cloaked, how may it shine if it is buried in the viscera, larded and bloody? Do we congratulate a person because he has bricked up his best painting? More to the point, this use of the phrase is a scandalous attempt to subordinate, nay, to hijack beauty’s power. Beauty gives from the outside in, it confers ability and awards skill to those that possess it.
“The latter claim could be proven scientifically. Not by myself, I am no scientist. Nonetheless should science turn its attention to the arts, the famed locus of much of the world’s beauty, it would see this transfer of proficiency from beauty to artistry in operation. Let us look at the performing arts for an example. Examine the artistry of actors and actresses whose trade is to take up that world that is, by now, inside and drag it once more into the light so that it shows again on the outside. How beautiful these people are. They are not merely attractive in a way as would turn your head on the street, no, they are uncommonly attractive, illuminated by what one calls rare beauty. The men are handsome, the women are beautiful, sometimes they are both a mixture of both – (a very few are neither but their number is not statistically significant) – and their looks strike the crowd with considerable force, even at a distance, do they not? So: actresses and actors have great good looks. This cannot be haphazard chance for, apart from any other consideration, the roles, even the trade itself, is much sought after: that is to say a remorseless process of selection is employed. Furthermore, it suffices to observe that those who enjoy the greatest success, who are most greatly admired, who are the most richly rewarded, and who reap the greatest number of prizes, awards, and statues, are almost invariably beautiful. Only one conclusion can be drawn, therefore, which is that there is a strong bond between physical attractiveness and thespian skill or speaking plainly, beauty confers on its possessor, in this instance, the ability to act. Do not ask me, sir, to disentangle the genomic DNA of the actor but it is in that genotype, rest assured, that the connection is to be found.
“I have detailed the process in actors but this same process can be observed at work in many other areas of artistic endeavour. I urge you to nurture your own research and promise it will not be without fruit. But for now, I will not digress any farther from the central point: that being the essential importance of appearance in general. Let us take the point to its extreme: the pornographic image. Nothing is more exterior than those images, nothing so emptied of the interior, nothing so emblematic of appearance. Yet many are willing to spend money on them. Money, sir. Mankind’s most precious possession. You will see this as an aside. Not so. It is perfectly to the point since it leads us on to the delicate but warm subject of arousal. Arousal, put simply, equals multiplication or put the other way: no arousal, no race. At least, not much of one; just a species coughing and hiccuping along on the sparse crop of changelings begotten in the lab. It is written – very boldly – in nature, one sex of each species must entice and arouse the other with a display of their outward features, the allure of their physical charms, their plumage, their appearance. And that, sir, is just half the battle to keep the species knocking along. If the race is alive but unfit, then the Walruses and the Carpenters come along and, before you know it, answer comes there none. Who can argue that the greater part of natural selection is not the weeding out of the wrong sort of appearance?
“The great doctor Francis Bradley exerted himself enormously and took the greatest pains to examine appearance by writing at great length on the subject and, I imagine, having the whole opus beautifully bound in calf or some such. He declared everything to be appearance. He exempted nothing – not even the Absolute. Is there a man who has ever written more clearly or more precisely in the English language than Dr Bradley? Mr Eliot thought him very eloquent. His concision on the subject of appearance is exemplary: “We have seen that religion is but appearance” he says and continues “Philosophy … is itself but appearance .. the Absolute is its appearances”. Goodness, Truth, and Nature he also includes – kindly brushing up their appearance with those capital letters. Should you care to peruse his work, he has resolved the whole question quite neatly and more than satisfactorily.
“However, doubting that you will avail yourself of the fruits of the exquisitely articulate doctor’s labours, I shall ask this question: who among us has not been looked after by fat little Mr Aeneas, the mask maker of Old Bond Street? ‘What!’ you say, ‘Not I.’ Ah, you think not, but you are wrong for Mr Aeneas works on you each day. Look in the mirror and you will see quite a crowd: Mr Aeneas, some parts of Lord George Hell, some parts of George Heaven, contending in the mask as different shades of foundation are blended by the brush of ripening. Some say that the character of a person bleeds into their appearance. No sir, it is the other way around: everyone acts their own part -which for each of us is the main part, the leading role – and as we reprise our performance (for which sleep is the only curtain) over and over again we modify that role in tiny increments of powder and paint in that mirror of our own self-regard. Each day we practice pride to push upward the centre of our mouth or rehearse a diffidence to weaken the strength of our gaze, soften the brow with happiness or draw the skin with sadness – a thousand alterations but each one so slowly, so lightly, so subtly assumed that we do not notice the changes we make to our character. But those that we rehearse often enough take up residence, the muscles learn their craft, the mask adapts: in the crease of skin beside the eye, an inflected tone, a movement of the head to coincide with a complacent skill in and around the mouth. But not one mask: masks for each occasion, to meet each different person and every situation. Or, if you must have it differently, we play various roles. Life lived is, indeed, character building.
“But I am not complaining about this. It is a very necessary control, the proper medium for the expression of character. Otherwise it is all mush sir, the insides: mush and madness. Sometimes it happens the mask slips, the face crumples or breaks open and what pours out? Nothing but tears and hysteria. Nevertheless, it is a thing worth knowing so as not to be fooled or deluded by a false sense of insight. You do not know the interior of your fellow being, you do not know him any more than you know your dog. Yet still we personify our fellow men and women – it is one of the more pathetic of our fallacies.
“Another common error that stems from this – let us call it by its proper name, another foolishness – is the exhortation ‘Be yourself’. Pah! Absurd advice. From which is derived the more grandiloquent ‘Be true to yourself’. All founded on the simpering notion of an inner you, a little statuette in a shrine, pure and inviolate. Were that true, none of us would have much more of a developed character than the two year old. ‘Keep becoming yourself’ is, I grant, a less catchy mantra (also a less self-satisfied mantra) but I cannot help that. I am not an advertiser, sir, I merely note the requirement. We are all chameleons and our background is time’s unwinding cyclorama.
“Examine the contrary propaganda: ‘appearances can be deceptive’ they say. What, I ask you, could be more nonsensical. Appearance, just to rest simply on the logic of it, cannot be deceptive. Appearance is all above board, it lays its cards on the table for it has no sleeves. At least, if it has, it owns only the outside of the sleeve. To the contrary of the contrary, it is the inside that does the deceiving, the one who is hidden who is deceptive.
“I should like to end on a related theme which it is to be hoped will lead on to further thought and that is the appearance of truth. Or, more happily, the truth of appearance. The truth that is in the telling. Just as there are no jokes good enough to make a good comedian out of a bad one, there are comedians who are good enough to make a good joke out of one that is bad. It is, so they say, the way they tell ‘em. The great poet is not so very different: skin and gut the story, swallow the delicious meat and tell me that you remain fascinated by the bare bones. The philosopher knows little more than any other man – when it comes to the enduring mysteries no one knows much more or less than anyone else – but he is a clever devil in explaining how much he knows about how little he knows. The ignorant are just ignorant, the wise man can elucidate his ignorance with extraordinary erudition and perspicacity. It is done so well that we forget that he is arguing us out of hope of knowledge. Except, of course, knowledge about the form of our own knowledge – in other words, the way that it’s told. The kernel is either a dull thing or an illusory thing. Appearance is everything, I say. You may, if you wish, go seeking a truth in the interior but it is dark inside. Perhaps you shall learn to see well in the dark which will, I fear, permit you no more than to see the dark more clearly. Which is as profitable as being able to better hear the silence.”
Supping the supernaculum
Sapiens uno minor est Jove, dives
Liber, honoratus, pulcher, rex denique regum
Praecipue sanus, nisi cum pituita molesta est
(Horace, Epist)
The sage is second only to Jupiter, rich, free, honoured, beautiful, and a king of kings; above all he is sensible, unless afflicted by a head cold.
Gerald Morton’s schedule was almost invariably full. Some would say overfilled to a point where the surface tension could not quite hold the surfeit in place. The number of talks, speeches, lectures, and other diverse prelections that he gave often numbered several in a day. That is a great many even for one as naturally inspired as he most certainly was.
He spoke without notes but then he almost always spoke from the heart. Usually, those who speak from the heart require fewer notes than those who speak from the head. This comes about because those who speak from the head have an inclination toward a more judicious manner of expression packed with delicate distinctions and, therefore, they require notes to keep all those many niceties in order. Those who speak from the heart have an inclination toward a more forthright manner of expression in either sombrous black or the most dazzling white and, therefore, the task of ordering their thoughts is that much easier. If the latter do have notes, these are usually for waving about in a demonstrative manner.
At an informal symposium not far from the Barbican, he tackled (and wrung out of it what he could) a subject that was, as has been previously mentioned, close to his heart. Although, admittedly, when one talks of a subject being close to someone’s heart what may be meant by that phrase is that the subject has been troubling the heart or even gone so far as to infuriate it.
“I repeat, for I cannot emphasise this enough, the questions answered by man are to the questions posed by man. The universe, sir, asks no questions and the universe requires no answers. There are several phrases like the riddles of the universe, nature’s mysteries, the meaning of life and other like tosh; all of which are invented by those who imagine that the universe has a special fondness for mankind. It is a patient schoolmaster, a Mr Chipps peering over the shoulder of his favourite pupil who waits proprietarily for its most talented child to ink in the correct answer. They are wrong: the universe does not care – it does not even know we are here, sir.
“We have challenged ourselves to a contest in all our enquiries. We have invented our own game. Indeed, we have made of life and the physical universe a very long, rainy Sunday afternoon during which a series of board games and puzzles are pulled out of the cupboard. We have made the rules we follow and we measure our discoveries against them. Sometimes, the weather brightens up and we can all go outside and challenge each other to jump higher or further. But what we are doing is filling in empty spaces in old score sheets alongside columns headed P, V, or Mum. We are filling in the gaps of human understanding not completing the task of becoming the Prime Mover. Yet some imagine that when the last piece of the puzzle is placed in the picture, the picture will become real.
“Scientists, sir. Scientists suffer from the same grumbling ache in the mind’s stomach that drives the plain ordinary man to religion. What life provides is insufficient to them both. It gives us bread – along with a lot else besides but all of it made of much the same stuff – and on that, alone, they cannot live. The one seeks satisfaction elsewhere, the other seeks it by trying to answer everything. It is lucky, sir, that the universe does not know we are here otherwise it is certain it would be offended. In this respect our earlier conceit was well judged, even if it falls short, for, by comparison to all that there is, we are little, snotty children standing before the most austere headmaster. If one of us should say to him ‘I know all there is to know about you’, I think it likely his countenance would cloud over.
“In any case the presumption of thinking to solve everything, obtaining a theory of everything, deserves hoots of derision. For a cogent explanation of the core of this issue we rely on the words of the inestimable Donald Rumsfeld. “There are known knowns”, he said. “These are the things we know that we know”. I must say that this must be the smallest and most tenuous of his categories. “There are known unknowns”, he continued. “That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns.” And here, sir, we get to the meat of it. “There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”
“It is hard to taunt one’s own species with its failings but just imagine how large a category that last one might be. My guess is that the things we don’t know we don’t know would fill more than a library of libraries in which every word is another building full of books.
“I accept and appreciate that you cannot have been acquainted with any of them personally, not even by repute, but, nevertheless, I ask you to cast the eye of your imagination back (leaving your nose here in the present for obvious reasons) to conjure up our ancestors of twenty thousand years ago. I employ the possessive plurally for, at that distance, even if, over all, it is a speck of time, we probably share in the fanning out of their paternity. Now, if you have them captured in that eye of yours, I ask you to reflect on how vast an amount they did not know that they did not know.
“Having completed this feat of imagination, I urge you on to an even greater effort in trying to think forward to your descendants of twenty thousand years hence (this time you could take your nose with you if you like). Even assuming you can imagine their continued survival for so considerable a span, your imagination will have little to work on but whatever you conjure up will have to do. Think, then, how much they know that you do not know that you do not know. Or, and one must release a sharp gasp of astonishment at the audacity of it, are you amongst those who think that that theory of everything is within our grasp. If so, then sir, all our descendants shall be twiddling their billions of thumbs into eternity. All the work will have been done and there will be nothing left for them to do.
“Ah but it is all too, too conceivable. If the lion is the lord of the jungle, the shark the khan of the seas, and the eagle the emperor of the skies, then the human being is the potentate of his mirror and is supreme in self-admiration. His motto, sir, is omnia possibilia – anything is possible. A further translation would be ‘there is nothing that cannot be done’ which may be yet further simplified to read ‘I can do anything’. The list of things that are impossible is at least a thousand times longer than the list of things that are possible – and I am being generous to a fault in understating the disparity.”
Nonetheless, there were subjects that Gerald Morton spoke on which had not made a nuisance of themselves in the chambers of his heart and which were, perhaps, occasioned more by a gentle amble around the less explored avenues of his mind. These were recognisable in that he felt his way through his discourse more than usual and allowed one thought to follow on from another according to its inclination. One thinks, for example, of a dinner at Mansion House.
“The conscience, sir, is a peculiar instrument – or should I call it a faculty? At its root it shares much, if not all, with the conscious: both being forms of knowledge. Yet is that a good connection? Shall we ask, is it a desirable connection? Are we conscious of our conscience? Should we be conscious of our conscience? Quite evidently it is a thoroughly bad thing if we are entirely unconscious of our conscience. To that extent, it would imply that it had no influence over us whatsoever.
“On the other hand, though, if we were to be fully conscious of our conscience then does not its influence become no more than deliberation – worse, no better than calculation. In its basest form, what calculation will find conscionable is not getting caught. It is very sad to have relate that, indeed, there are those who feel their conscience to be clear if they are not found out. These people, surely, are worse than those without a conscience for they have one but will haggle and barter with themselves until it is sold off cheap to frailty.
“Shouldn’t conscience make us feel the knots tighten in our intestines or, perhaps, the blood swell in our faces long before we have had time to think? In that sense, to fumble with the semantics of the problem, we will be aware of it before we are conscious of it. But then, a lot depends on what we are made of. The conscience can be a remarkably reactive element, transforming the body, the emotions, corroding thoughts, the whole mind: in the most sensitive it works like fluorine. But those with hides like rhinoceroses will feel the conscience like a little squeeze of lemon juice. In that sense, it works as if it troubles the nerves: in the sensitive the pain occurs before they know it. In those more inured to their own behaviour, it is little more than a something caught in the periphery of vision and they must look more closely to see whether it pains them.
“Therefore, it would be best, sir, that the conscience is woken with some of the speed of the instinctual and that consciousness is only roused a moment or so later so that, like the mind that wakes from a sleep, it has the aftermath of a powerful dream wrapped around it – a mood it cannot shake free from.
“Is one born with a conscience? I think not. That would be too sweet a picture to be convincing. To be convinced, you have to believe us closer to the angels than to the animals. Us, related to the angels; I ask you, sir. No, no. However, it is possible that we are born with rough lodgings for our consciences: each one of us with a different shape and rudimentary architecture for it to inhabit. Let’s not, though, imagine various homunculi or (for, even though, strictly, homunculus has no sex, possibly the conscience does) feminculii dropping their cases in the hallway but rather the wispy smoke of a nascent, facultative mood arising from the combustion of character and experience. You will shout out that the question has only been retarded a pace but character, sir, can turn good or bad for a handful of reasons whilst your conscience is, in varying degree, either felt or not felt.
“In recognition of which, we ought to turn conventional imagery on its head. Conventionally we refer to a black heart as a place where goodness does not reside, similarly black arts, black thoughts, books, looks, and sheep are none of them good – the aspersion of darkness is cast on all of them. When it comes to the soul, however, it must be wiser to defer to San Juan de la Cruz who wrote lyrically of its dark night. I claim no expertise whatever but even such an amateur as myself can suggest a connection between the soul and the conscience. Therefore, when San Juan says that the soul’s safety and protection is to be found in darkness (specifically dark waters, but what of that?) I shall follow his lead. The dark, quiet place is an excellent housing for the conscience – a deep, sepulchral lodging with vaulted ceilings is perfect. In such a stone womb – yes, I insist, a sepulchral womb – the conscience is not only free to grow and develop but, more importantly, the acoustics allow the plaintive voice to be heard. And to be heard, sir, is the sole ambition of the conscience.
“By contrast, the house that is above ground, filled with white walls and mirrors, that blazes with noise and light through the giant sash windows, the house in which the all-night party spins on through the daytime, is an awful place for the conscience to live. Between the raised glasses triumphantly paraded and the sprawled figures collapsed in languor, amongst the shouts and laughter, the conscience is unnurtured and, far worse, cannot be heard. Mr Poe, when writing his story, does not put the heart under the floorboards of a throbbing, deafening dance hall.
“At the same time, perhaps it is no less vital that the conscience be nurtured and looked after kindly. I should say that your conscience is your child: the child that you have left behind and yet which follows you like the ghost of some species of nostalgia. Ah, but that is not well said: a poor simile – though it is a complicated relationship, one of the most complicated, between a person and the child they have been. However, that is the conscience in a nutshell. That is why, I postulate, a child hasn’t much of a conscience or, perhaps is all conscience – which amounts to much the same thing – because there is no separation and no contrast between what the child does and what the child feels about what it has done. Whereas for the adult … well, there could scarcely be a greater contrast between the grown-up and its former childhood.
“Nonetheless, there are those who heave and heft about such grandiloquent phrases as continuity of identity. I suppose they know their own minds. Although, on reflection, that doesn’t seem very likely. As for myself and my own youth, I can only say that the child I once was seems to me to be a stranger. A stranger, sir. At least, a child estranged by time. The dissolute Mr Dorian Gray was able to look in the mirror every day; the rest of us have only the picture and have not seen that mirror of our youth since we left it behind. That estranged child is as remote in space as he is in time; and, more so, as he is removed in character. I seem to see him at the far end of an old pier, the warm sunlight on its boards, whilst I look at him along its length, a length broken in the middle, a splintered, sundered structure…my apologies, I drift, I have let go Ariadne’s thread.
“It may be that the very holy recognise their childhood as an old acquaintance, a constant companion, but not I. The child who gave me my conscience … sometimes I ache with pity for the orphan I left behind alone in that place from which time has moved on. By rights he should feel pity for me but instead it is I who feel that pity and longing – with the same love I should feel for my own child…were I have to have lost him.
“Having said that, it may be that it is important that there is this distance. The conscience should not get too close to the person who is to be stricken by it. Otherwise there might be a tendency toward forgiveness. The conscience ought not to be forgiving for fear it might become corrupt.
“I digress absurdly. The point is that the conscience, who I describe as a child, must be nurtured and looked after but it must not grow up. If he grows up, sir, he is lost to you and he will leave home instanter. Do not take your conscience with you to smoky bars, low dives, or brothels and do not allow it to practice little disagreeablenesses: to scorn the vulnerable and kick the little match sellers of this world. If you must be in the way of such a nostalgie de la boue then leave your conscience at home with a kindly nurse.
“Furthermore, the conscience must be kept safe from collocutory society, from religion, from moral philosophy, from law, from nation: it must be kept safe from every last vestige of human creed, ideology, or reason. This is essential to the well-being of your conscience. It must guard its innocence, its unsoftened innocence. Thus, it might retain an innocence that has not been violated by any argument.”
More frequently, however, it was the sore points that Gerald Morton would insist on scratching. In so far as argumentation was concerned, the advice ‘leave it alone or you will make it worse’ was lost on him. Even where he was not particularly passionate about the subject, he felt the need to rehash the relevant points. Like everyone else, he was more comfortable with old arguments rather than constructing new ones but even allowing for that, he did have an inordinate fondness for replaying the old favourites. As an example, we could follow another speech he made one afternoon near Great Portland Street.
“The dialectician, who is more or less anyone who argues, who is in turn any member of the human race – of the whole rag-tag bunch of us – worships opposites. Undoubtedly it is our belligerent natures, but in disputation the overwhelming desire is to say no. It is only the rarest and most glorious disputant who says yes. The man who agrees, sir, even – but these specimens are almost unknown – those who seek agreement. Otherwise the world is all for cutting everything in two. If to divide and conquer is the goal then perhaps it is effective, this method. However, to conquer an argument is to overrun it, it is not the way to explore it. The very great Francesco Petrarca wrote a letter to his friend Tommaso in which he disapproved of the unreasonable use of dialectic saying that those who make such use ‘are not set to find the truth – they want the struggle.’ He then leaned back toward Publilius, gesturing to his ancient presence for support, who intoned across the ages ‘In too much altercation truth is lost.’ But I suspect that so wonderful a mind would have known that he was preaching to the damned: to those who put their faith in that fool’s paradise where every notion and every thing falls neatly into halves.
“Unfortunately, in the great body of the thinkable, on the vast fathoms of the notional, there are no divisions clearly marked. It is best thought of as an expanse of deep, calm water. Along comes the human mind, showing off in his sleek, polished Riva, slicing through the water (sitting very upright in his heavily braided cap). Authoritatively, it declares the left-hand side fan of flowing ripples, port, and the right-hand side arc of fluid corrugation, starboard. So far, so not very much but the sleight of hand is to come: now it insists that port is the opposite of starboard. It is quite a muddle, of course and confuses two conceptions – the idea of one thing being placed against another thing and those two things being opposites. After all I can park my car next to my watering can but where I come from, sir, my watering can is not the opposite of my car.
“Shakespeare who, and I don’t believe I exaggerate, was one of the founding fathers of our thinking, went so far as to say ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ – at least, he had one of his characters say it. For all I know, he had something quite different in mind but, nonetheless it serves my purpose in this instance. My only quibble would be that this thinking has not made it so, it has simply told it so. I don’t think we want to start suggesting that telling and making are the same. Though, naturally, they are not opposites.
“Enough of all this preamble. It is time I enlarged and got to grips with some of the contrarieties that the contrary mind delights in. Let us enumerate a few varieties. Some are unquestioningly accepted as opposites for no other reason than that the characteristics of their extremities are, to put it bluntly, a long way apart – and despite the fact that, when they approach each other, their proximate temperaments, not to mention any point of contact, are a hideous mess and an irresolvable muddle. Good and evil would be the most hackneyed example of this type but they can never be separated from the welter of partisan associations that attach themselves like limpets to these colossal giants of abstraction. In a minor key, I should have said that cruelty and kindness were impossible to confuse and were therefore clearly to be distinguished but then the passing authoritarian says airily ‘I am just being cruel to be kind’ and they become entangled before our eyes. That there seems to be no proof of its efficacy does not entirely overthrow the existence of the phrase and I am left with thought paused, sir: mulling the fact that, malgré tout, someone has confused them.
“The difficulty with this group – and perhaps with some of the others – is that they remind me of old Isaac’s problems with space: if space is infinite, he mused wistfully into the night air, why is the sky not bright with the light of infinite suns and, if it is not, why has not gravity pulled every sun into a single great ball of fire? Their centres of gravity, sir, where are the centres of gravity of these opposites. They float all over the place and I am a traditionalist, sir, a centre of gravity should not float. If it wants things to come to it, it should stay put.
“Other opposites are forced into opposition as if by a shotgun marriage of separation – though not to overtake a pregnancy, sir, not even a fruitless loss of virginity. And, indeed, these are often the passive abstracts, rather than the active or, as they sometimes are, the aggressive abstracts such as those in our first examples. Pleasure and pain spring to mind – both figuratively here and in their operation – and for these to be indistinguishable it requires the mind not to, well, not to know itself. True, there are those curious souls who take pleasure from pain though how they manage it is beyond me since if they find pain pleasurable it’s hard to know how can they can find it pleasing for being painful (if it gives them pleasure) – which goes to show they don’t know their own minds … I have wandered from the point which is that the mind that is not confused has no trouble at all in telling pain and pleasure apart and will often make the distinction noisily. I am therefore happy to accept that they are separable and separately identifiable. But why should I bow and acquiesce at the feet of the claim that they are opposites. Is pain the opposite of pleasure? Why not boredom, insensibility, or fury? Could it not be anything that is not pleasure whilst the opposite of pain be anything that is not painful? Or none of the above. [Nothing would be a good opposite for something if only I could find it – but nothing is as hard to find as the notoriously difficult to locate nowhere].
“Herr Schopenhauer is the apologist for this particular pairing but only insofar as he was of the opinion that pleasure and happiness are merely the result of removing the painful and the miserable. In that sense, pleasure has no substance and is just a description of something else not being there. By this same logic, if we can get rid of what is unfunny we would spend all of the rest of the time laughing. But Arthur was not well known for his experience of happiness and it is possible that, on this particular subject, a very gloomy man may not know what he is talking about. Perhaps from the same cause his remarks about humour seem a little uncomprehending – though they are, paradoxically, laughable. And there is an instance of me trying to be cruel to be kind – I confess, sir, I do not really think it works.
“Still other opposites are no more than a matter of simple choice made only because we should like it to be so: that the world be ordered to our own tastes and for no other reason. This is the choice of what we want growing in our garden or the famous weed-plant dichotomy. Ah, but then, when nature is not playing tricks on us, it is also very instructive. On this issue it illustrates for us very clearly the contrived and tortured twisting, tugging, and yanking required to part the seamless cloth. Take the natural object and I urge you to try to oppose it. Find me the opposite of a cloud or a rock or a frog. This is nature’s stronghold: we run flat against the axiom that that which has substance has no opposite? Only the qualities with which we gild the lily can even be thought of as having opposites. I do not intend to dare a proof. Someone else can work their way through every solid object and verify the singularity of nouns. But, therefore it is that adjectives, unlike nouns, are vague and insubstantial; and how can something so woolly be clearly cut into opposition. Those who know me will know that I defer to no one in my admiration for the adjectival but much of that is because, as a species, they have no core or kernel – that is to say, they give quality to the dull thing that is all middle.
But here then, the more awkward among you will heckle, we have a genuine opposition: natural and unnatural. Very good, I reply, let me hear you define unnatural and delineate the border where the natural crosses that threshold into that which is unnatural. Some would say a skyscraper is not a natural object but that same person would doubtless regard the bird’s nest as quintessentially natural. Yet the only difference is that one is constructed by the hand of man, the other by the beak of bird. It is a penny to a pound that many will have the beaver’s dam, the ant’s hill, and the spider’s web in one column whilst ostracising the plastic bag, the spacecraft, and false teeth to another. All however are examples of putting things together to make other things. Just because some are more complicated than others will not make them different, let alone opposed. Even atoms, sir, had to be made from dissociated atoms and they in their turn had to be made from nothing. Either everything is natural or nothing is. That being the case – and I insist that it is – that there is no good definition of the unnatural, then the natural has no need to concern itself with any opposite.
“Some, trying to skirt this conclusion will pin their hopes on the concrete and the abstract. But I worry that the abstract, whilst seeming to be easier to track than the unnatural, nevertheless is in the same dilemma of being everywhere and nowhere. ‘Go in fear of abstractions’ said Pound. Poor old Ezra, bats in his belfry – not blind though – but with an ear for the surge of voices – for so many voices in so many languages. It is hard, very hard, to go against him. Still, I don’t think I fear abstractions.
“Other assorted opposites are no better than a means of avoiding the fact that life presents a rainbow of variety that is nearly as broad as the hopelessly impossible infinite. They are designed to simplify for no good reason and simplicity without reason is not Ockham’s razor but Blunderbore’s sledgehammer (or Solomon’s sword for that matter). Sweet and sour fall into this perspective of the ostrich. Sweet is not the same as sour, I grant you with an exaggerated, flourished bow, but it is also not the same as bitter, salty, or the other Japanese one I can never remember. It is also different from the many, many combinations of these tasty ingredients. Just as the smell of a mountain’s flank on a hot day in June is different from tens of thousands of other smells and the colour of one piece of steel in the early hours of a May morning is different from a million other colours. And I am not finished for the single experience of a single blend of all the senses coming together in a single person is different from the billions of billions of others (and I do not use bigger numbers only because they all sound ridiculous). Hah! – try to find an opposite in that unimaginably vast cloud of variety.
“The trickiest opposites are the short ones of the yes-no type – though I shall not bother with that particular tu quoque pantomime. Although, having said that, much depends on what is referred to: such as ‘yes, I want to stay’ against ‘no, I don’t want to go’. On reflection, many of them balance shakily on the smooth ice of semantics. In and out, for instance: I go out of my house and into my garden. Like a very small mote, I am both in and out. If I am in something, I must be out of something else. Each pair of such opposites are self-opposed and, thus, cancel each other out. Less clear to me is whether a head is the opposite of a tail so I shall bow to the experts who call it an obverse. The most difficult, however, is the new fundamental duality of our age: the off and the on. I might conceivably have to concede that opposition. It’s just too dull to fight over; besides I ought to allow one or two of the little dividing cells just to prove I am not a fanatic or an absolutist?
“Truth and falsehood as well as sanity and insanity are both pairings for which the claim that they are opposites is clearly too ridiculous for me to bother with. For those who wish to flog these dead horses, the very gallic Dr Foucault has explained all there is concerning the latter pair and, as for the former, one need only attend to the evidence of one’s ears. The pair of sober and drunk is an interesting one for drunkenness is certainly the enemy of sobriety which is (according to your point of view) the enemy of drunkenness. However, when they collide you obtain the hangover which is the enemy of both. Equally, many minds believe themselves to be sober when they are drunk yet no one believes themselves to be drunk when they are sober. Most important of all, it is possible to become sober without help – solipsisticly, if you will – whilst it requires an intoxicant to become intoxicated. No, there are too many contradictions for them to be accepted into the polite society of opposites. Finally, we come to life and death. Strictly speaking, for this we require Madame Arcati’s help … but no, I cannot become embroiled in some debate about the supernatural. I shall accept death, sir, as the simple opposite of life. But if I do, I do it on the grounds that I should like to see the life walking about, shaving, and thinking of smoking a pipe and I should like to be able to smell the death from forty feet and be able to hear the worms burping before I concede the opposition.
“It all depends, I suppose, on the sharpness of your criteria. If you are happy for your criteria to be loose and soggy then you will embrace a dog as the opposite of a cat and you will admit almost anything as being mutually opposed. If not, you will think it all very artificial and think that there is a very great deal more than the pitiful and miserly two sides to every argument. Indeed, yes, there are two opposing camps here – how very clever of you to point it out – now go away, sir, and start a fight in an empty room.
“Bolzano, mathematical Catholic and priestly professor of logic, insisted that equality is nothing other than a special instance of difference. I assert that opposition is nothing other than a special instance of equality. Equality is represented by two parallel lines funnelling all thought down a narrow conduit. I proclaim the need to break free of such restraint and burst forth into the world of difference and variety. Do not try to pack the world into the little suitcase of solutions, instead stroll amongst the sights and wonders with an open understanding.
“My final appeal is to the Eleatics, even though they were the very devils for opposites – but that is explained by their having lived at a time when men were generally very silly (which is infectious even amongst sages). Nonetheless, despite the handicap of having only one foot out of the cave, those old Greeks were very wise. This is how the passage of time works with us: the less we knew the wiser we were, the more we know the less wise we become (it is another principle of uncertainty). Following the gist of what it was they had to say is very hard because not only has everything they said been broken up into little bits and pieces with many having dropped through the grating into time’s drain but also because you can’t always tell who is speaking – and, whether you can or not, they availed themselves of a good half a dozen types of ambiguity unknown even to Mr Empson (who was very sound on opposites). Still, if you can make allowance for all that, the general message was that the all is one (though that may be Plato butting in). Loosely interpreting – and looseness doesn’t flap about any more than this – everything is sewn from the same thread into the same cloth, including the cloth. The details of the sewing are unimportant. Very soon science will explain how it is that everything is whole and is only differentiated by the different songs that tremble in the fibres of its being. And more or less (mostly less) the wise old men will be acknowledged as having got there first. More importantly, it will be seen that dividing things or cutting them in half is a futile and foolish activity.”
It is a very thin, sparse bouquet of Gerald Morton’s talks that has been offered up. Naturally there are many more extant lectures that could be presented but it will serve no good purpose to tug down too insistently at your eyelids. However, there is one last disquisitional topic of his that, it could be argued, is relevant to mention (at least synoptically) and that was his theory of procrastinational anhedonism.
Gerald Morton had become, at some point or over some period, an admirer of Miroslav Holub, whom he called the Divers Doctor. He so named him not so much because he was both MD and PhD but because his background covered an array of disciplines and, obviously, because his excellence straddled both the arts and the sciences. It also tickled Gerald Morton to consider the idea of a man being a poetical immunologist and giving to verse a protective quality (even though, by reversing that idea, he would have made of Dr Holub a man who strove to immunise people against poetry).
In one essay entitled ‘The Dimension of the Present Moment”, in an eponymous collection, Dr Holub had taken as the grit for his oyster the results of a series of experiments in psychology. This had determined that the present moment has a duration of no more or less than three seconds; that is to say, the present as it endures or is sustained in our consciousness. Thus, it seems to be that we are catching life in our palms as one might gather water from a spring running out from a rock: if we gather too little it begins to run through our fingers before we can drink it, if too much, it overtops the bowl of our hands.
Toward the end of this essay – in which he chiefly examines the ramifications for music, poetry, speech and, more tentatively, thought – he poses the question “how long are we happy?” The question, as it is asked by Miroslav Holub, is almost an aside but in Gerald Morton it struck a chord. Initially the chord it struck was loose and tonally unresponsive but, once struck, speculation caused attention’s head to lift, making it tauten until it responded to that initial blow with a belated answering note. Gerald Morton doubted very much that happiness could satisfactorily occupy a period of only three seconds. Happiness must have a structural timetable: it must be engendered, developed, cherished, and allowed to dissipate with a contented sigh. Three seconds, he reckoned, was scarcely enough time to bark a laugh or stifle a giggle.
Consequently, he began to wonder whether it might be the case that the mind compensated for this enforced truncation of the experiential by reliving and preliving life. He concentrated more on the need to prelive on the grounds that reminiscences and nostalgia were liable to entail a certain amount of wistful yearning or even regret even though the memories might be happy ones. Imagining and, in whatever guise, hope for the future were not similarly constrained: they were not troubled by such annoyances as history and since the events they consisted in were largely invention, there was no necessity to include doubts and fears (these were properly reserved for the activity known as worrying about the future). Indeed this kind of predictive experience forswore regret exactly as it conjured happiness.
Gerald Morton’s concern, however, was that this effect might, in turn, in the individual, become a self-fulfilling cause. After all, who would not develop a taste for a better future? He worried that in detaching itself from the present moment, the mind that anticipated the moments yet to come would start to depend on finding its happiness in what might be and, in doing so, crowd out what little room there was in the tiny aperture of its present. In other words, the enjoyment of life would be continually put off because there was not enough time in the present and because that little time was occupied in the process of deferment, there would never be enough time.
To those who questioned whether or not the enjoyable anticipation of the future was not itself an act of enjoyment in the present, he was wont to reply: “Yes, it is, sir, providing you are content to live in a daydream. In a daydream, sir.”
Matters epistolatory
“mais je tiens très bien une plume, et c’est ce qui me fait prendre patience.”
(Mme de Sévigné)
– but I can hold a pen very well, and it is that which helps me to bear up.
Gerald Morton had once asked his wife – with no more than the ordinary idle, rhetorical questioning that is usual in many marriages and which so discourages attentiveness or, sometimes, even the opening of the ears – whether there was ever anything said aloud that could not better be said in writing. He was prepared to allow, he had said (the words emerging from his mouth but, like hounds confused by a lost scent, wandering aimlessly upon leaving his lips), the instant riposte in which most of the success of either the witticism or mot juste was secured by its speed. Quite why speed was so crucial to this species of humour he was at a loss to explain but it was incontrovertibly true that the very same witticism if preceded by a modest deliberation of four or five seconds would not be half as funny – any longer and it would garner those polite smiles that mourn humour’s demise.
He insisted, however, that, aside from this exception, speech was inferior to the written word; which was, he declared, proved by the fact that speeches were written down before they were spoken. Conversation was a delightful pastime, often best served with a fine ale or a sedately aged wine, but nonetheless a recreational activity; either adversarial or comradely, it made no difference. Conversation was most succinctly revealed for what it was, he urged, in being described as social intercourse: “What sexual intercourse accomplishes for the body, conversation achieves, hermaphroditically, for the ego. It reassures us that we may penetrate the consciousness of another and stimulate another mind at the tips of the tendrils of its thinking or delve among the soft recesses of its almost palpable beliefs … and receive the responses that establish this happy connection. Which is why, madam, it is so dissatisfying an occupation when the other is not listening.”
Here was a rare example of Gerald Morton addressing his wife as madam and it was only possible, we may speculate, because in the strictest sense he was addressing the air between them. Indeed, there was now quite a crowd of words milling about, shrugging shoulders, peering this way and that, uncertain in which direction they ought to be headed.
At any rate – setting this domestic vignette to one side – he had often written to his wife. Thereby, practising, or putting on to paper if you will, what he preached. What he had written to his wife had originally been a mix of comparatively infrequent billet-doux with the more frequent, if less remarked, simple informative note. The transition from these sporadic missives into writing that might be formally recognised as letters occurred suddenly but slowly. That is to say they had begun to be written as it were from one moment to the next but had evolved only over a longer period of time. However, these letters had evolved in a conflicting manner: they had become fuller in content but weaker in presentation.
It is said that the late President Richard Nixon also had stylistic difficulties with his handwriting as his problems concerning the Watergate affair grew in number and ineluctability; even his signature altered out of all recognition (which is subversive for a signature). The President’s handwriting, during this awkward period, began to resemble that of a spider – if you can imagine such a thing – and a spider with a bad conscience at that. Whereas Gerald Morton’s came to resemble the writing of a daddy-longlegs – again, if you can get your imagination to work overtime – and a daddy-longlegs with rather extravagant mannerisms. More concretely, it was reminiscent of Elizabethan handwriting; though not with a firm flourish but rather the wandering script of an indecisive or possibly infirm Elizabethan.
Without wishing to resort to melodrama, this kind of distortion or derangement of the cursive technique is almost always the result of the mind being at war with itself. Though, in so far as it is a war, it is a very quiet, very slow, civil war in which the only weaponry is disobedience: lying down in front of things, relatively harmless sabotage, and other forms of disruption. In short, the mind gets in the way of itself and prevents the proper prosecution of its functions. More poetically, its own devils push and shove and annoy at the same time as its sirens coo and bill and wheedle. Goya doesn’t trouble to show the poor fellow’s handwriting clearly in ‘The Sleep of Reason brings forth Monsters’ but you can bet your bottom dollar it’s all gone to pot.
Still, Gerald Morton’s letters – some of his letters – are hereinafter reproduced in print which eliminates the requirement of having to decipher the handwriting of a stranger whose penmanship was not at its best. In some cases, the letters are reproduced in full, sometimes they are extracts only.
9th June
The Stairs
Dearest Catherine,
I began the day sitting on the stairs and that seems to be where I have returned now that it is evening. I have decided that the best place to sit is just below the half landing – there you can recline back onto the landing and also get the best light from the window. (There is a strange mark there on the wall, the origin of which is a mystery: I can perceive no obvious cause.)
I was thinking, of course, of Elizabeth and Francis. I remembered how we had said that their driving trip was so obviously like the Grand Tour of old but that – what did we call them? – each station of the cross of the arts can now be bridged in no time at all: an air-conditioned blur of motorway and you are at the next point of pilgrimage. All these places have become various rooms in a vast continental museum. At least that is what we said.
For a while, I thought back to our own visits to Italy: the excitement of coming from the Swiss alps down to the lakes. Do you remember Verona where we stayed for two days once and that elderly German who was always reading Burckhardt (and always tutting and tsking)? Eventually he let his bath overflow. If I remember correctly, he started running the bath, went out for some film for his camera and got back to the hotel just as the manager had spied water dribbling from the first floor gallery into the reception. The pandemonium! Every member of staff – and possibly half their relatives – shouting and gesticulating at the same time. At the epicentre, stood the old German calm, composed, rather happy I think and quoting the odd line of poetry (from Schiller someone said afterwards).
It is curious how long one can sit in places that are not specifically designed for sitting in. Perhaps it is just some type of mood that causes you to sit in such places and instils a lassitude from which you are always just on the very point of breaking free but which holds you magnetically. In any case, I sat on the staircase, beached, listing over on the sands, I believe for the entire morning. I tried to find you around midday but, well, you were not to be found. I expect you may have been in the garden and I don’t care to search for you there. I feel it is where you go to escape these days and what is the point of escaping if others try to track you down? Besides my voice sounds strange to me outside at the moment – as if it shouldn’t be there.
I’m afraid I finished what was left of the cold tongue that was languishing in the fridge. But I know it is not one of your favourites so I hoped it wouldn’t matter – or that you wouldn’t mind too much. It went very well with some potato salad.
During the afternoon I listened to the radio but really didn’t hear a word that was said – or rather I think I heard it but couldn’t understand what they were saying or really why they were saying anything at all. Eventually I returned to my position on the stairs; led no doubt by a certain spiritual fatigue. This time, however, I took up old Smollett’s Humphry Clinker for company. It is an age since I read it. I got as far as the letter describing the very first encounter that the Brambles and Melford have with Humphry Clinker. At least, just up to that point and stopped at the account of the overturning of the coach on the Marlborough Downs which I had found so funny the first time I read it. Obviously, travel was no safer at that time of aristocratic peripateia: slower but just as dangerous. People rush up to the limit of safety in every age and hope for the best. It has always been like that and nothing can be done to change our natures.
By the way, I notice that where I have been sitting, one of the brackets has broken. I wonder if I broke it without knowing. They are of wood. I always thought that they should be made of brass like the stair rods themselves. I believe I may have said as much to you on some occasion an age or two ago.
You are always in my thoughts. Wherever they go, even if they can sometimes see nothing else, they see you and find a little peace at the sight.
20th June
Dining room
Dearest Catherine,
I am in a position to inform you – fairly reliably I think – that the old outbuilding that we converted into a stable for Elizabeth’s horse is constructed of 11,647 bricks; not counting the smaller bricks that make up the various herringbone pattern and other decorative shapes (these number 2,886). There is still a faint smell of hay and damp leather inside – although that may be my imagination which seems to have a life of its own these days. I find these sorts of examinations and ‘quantity surveyances(?)’ quite soothing.
I don’t know if I ever told you about it but I was once on a business trip with Walter in Germany and our hosts dragged us along to a huge warehouse-like building to watch a display of falling dominoes (I believe there was some sort of record at stake). I expect they thought it would be an original way of entertaining us before dinner – some companies get rather desperate about these obligations. There were tens of thousands of dominoes lined up, gravestone fashion, in the most intricate arrangements imaginable. It had taken a dozen or so enthusiasts days to set up I believe. When the dominoes started to fall in waves of patterns, there was unexpectedly intense excitement from the large audience with sustained applause and occasional cheers as gravity was elaborately snared and made to drag itself through this labyrinthine tapestry of tiles.
Myself, I was struck by the motionless ranks and columns of dominoes waiting to be tipped over and the flattened wreckage left behind – a thin wave of immaterial motion turning the former into the latter. Only the wave had life. Perhaps it was just the saddening mix of steel and fluorescent light but – but nothing, I shan’t put that thought on paper so that you have to read it.
I find I regret almost everything these days. Perhaps that is what the wounded spirit does. I wish I had the resolute and resilient attitude of Madame Piaf and could sweep everything from the past away and start again from zero. Instead, when I look back – and these days I only look back – my lightest recollection turns to regret. As if, by turning over the falling tile, I turn it over to expose a regret. No matter what I have done, I wish I had done it differently. It seems I have a cursed magic wand or a sort of Midas memory.
29th June
Kitchen
[… Do you think that we might find a way to meet up a little more often? We don’t see much of each other at the moment. Often for good reason. But I worry that we are becoming separate and solitary. Alone with our sadness. If that is all we have for company, we shall start to befriend it.
I pictured the two of us today living in some crumbling castle like the one at Conwy – or even the one in Gormenghast (though rather smaller) – both of us occupying a circular room at the very top of a tall tower with the ceiling being the underside of the roof. But your tower being on one side of the compass and mine on the other; at different ends of the outer walls. In our eyries, made not of ivory but of wormwood covered in woodbind, we did not collect the books of Montaigne’s library but leaves of a silent and tenacious despondency all telling the same tale. We set bitter volumes with identical titles on the shelves and squirrelled away little knickknacks of pain. Whatever views there were from the windows, they could not draw our eyes from those sorry tasks.
Perhaps that picture is not far from the truth – give or take a castle. Perhaps we do hoard cares and concerns. There is an awful and poisonous pleasure that lies amongst the utter dregs of unhappiness. If there is a risk of us plunging that deep, we ought to help each other to not find that pleasure.
I make this as a suggestion; nothing more. Please tell me if it is a terrible idea. You may think it best we leave each other alone at the moment: chacun à sa souffrance et son soulagement etc.,etc…]
6th July
At a table, outside.
My dear Catherine,
Is it my imagination or are cracks appearing below the gable in the middle of the house at the front. I can’t be sure. For one thing the portico is in the way and for another the trachelospermum jasminoides is quite thick even up there but I believe I may be able to see a crack running through the brick work. Have you noticed anything of the sort? I can see nothing on the inside. I shall wait for various angles of the sun: the shadows may move sufficiently to one side so that I can get a clearer or a more illuminated view.
I went up to town to put in an appearance at the office. It felt rather strange after having been absent for a while. I think this is what happens if you spend day after day in the same place and then are away: it feels peculiar because it has become dislocated from habit. Walter seemed a little surprised to see me – possibly even a little nervous. Still, we had a good chat and decided that I should ‘take a sabbatical’ for six months with the usual (all too transparent) smoke screen to be put out. Susan will take on most of my work – which will annoy Julius no end – although I imagine she has in any case already been taking up the slack. Walter was touchingly concerned but, I suspect, beneath that, he was even more relieved. However, I don’t suppose there is any reason why someone can’t be genuinely concerned and relieved to be free of a problem at the same time.
To begin with, he got terribly confused and had no idea whatsoever as to what I was talking about. The reason was that, in deference to good manners, I had been using a clutch of euphemisms and he completely failed to recognise the reference to the Black Dog. I would, before today, have said it was an expression that everyone knew. Not so. I believe he thought I was talking about Fred following me around. If so, I can understand his bafflement. I should have been confused myself if one of the other directors had chosen to come into my office, especially after some time away, with the sole purpose of discussing the private life of one of their pets.
I have to admit to having had what they call mixed emotions (aren’t they all?). It was a relief to me too but also a sadness. Indeed, on my way back to the tube, I found myself walking slower and slower as if the usual willpower that keeps one in motion had drained away or the spring broken. It was with some difficulty that I got to the station. I wonder if it is a known phenomenon, human beings grinding to a halt: gently running aground in the course of their progress or slowing to immobility whilst engaged in some occupation or other as if the batteries had run out.
By the way, one other thing, can you remember having seen my hat recently? I have been looking for it for several days. I cannot find it anywhere. I know I never wear it but not being able to find it is driving me up the wall. Besides I may very well decide to start wearing a hat more often – though I doubt it.
10th July
The stairs
[… Can you make head or tail of this passage from Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller; “Why should I goe gadding and fisgigging after firking flantado amfibologies, wit is wit, and good will is good will. With all the wit I have, I here according to the premises, offer up unto to you the cities generall good will, which is a gilded Can, in manner and forme following, for you and the heirs of your bodie lawfully begotten, to drinke healths in.” At times it makes sense to me – at others, not. I should love to get to the bottom of it…]
18th July
Our bedroom
Dearest Catherine
A quick note to keep you updated.
It is very interesting. Over the last thirty-six hours or so I have refused to let a single thought drop. We are very careless, often lazy, with our thoughts. We follow them for a while but then the road becomes too steep or they branch off in several directions and so we let the train of thought drop or break. we allow ourselves to be distracted. I have resisted this. I have hunted down each thought, tracked it to the bitter conclusion, or the happy one, and begun anew with fresh vigour.
Now my thoughts burn like a lit fuse and race through my mind. Now I have no need to urge them to hunt down their quarry – this they do as if it were their nature to do so (which I believe it is). My thoughts fire like a machine gun: this thought, that thought, another thought leading to these others. It is tiring but exhilarating. My thoughts are louder and clearer than they have ever been.
There have been two occasions when the voice of my thinking has been very loud – just a phrase on each occasion – as if my own voice spoke in my mind of its own volition. My voice but not under my control. That was fairly unsettling but in the main it is like a thrilling, breakneck train ride. I don’t dare sleep for fear of bringing it to an end.
7th August
The entrance hall
[…. I grow concerned about the eating of hot food. I am not sure I subscribe to the dictum that we cannot do otherwise than we did in our long prehistory (man is a hunter and man is a such and such animal: ergo this and ergo that). Nonetheless, in this matter, our nourishment and our physiology and metabolism are effectively one and the same: the body being built, piece by piece, from its food (the transubstantiation of mortals). Therefore, I invoke that long history during which we ate food that was either cold (of an ambient temperature) or was, at most, at body temperature. But now we have a post-Promethean diet. It is clear that hominids – and their various antecedents – have been eating for a far longer time than they have been cooking. Furthermore, recently we have been using ovens of greater and greater severity.
Where does all this heat go? If a person place food that is hotter than their body temperature (and what cooked food is not?) inside themselves, wrapping the interior of their body tight around this steaming food and boiling drink, how may the heat escape? A person is not intended to be a thermos. Once eaten and drunk, it sits, this heated ingestion, at our core, insulated by fat, at the same time as the calories of which it is composed are also raising our temperature. Gradually it must dissipate, of course, but the dispersal of this heat can only be accomplished by its seeping through our flesh in all directions. What is the effect of this rise in temperature and of its slow traverse of our metabolism?
The renowned scientist Claude Bernard (who originated the concept of homeostasis) said “La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition de la vie libre.” So saying, he spells out the essential balance and regulation of the internal environment of the living organism without hesitation or caveat. It is the miracle of the metabolism that, despite all the variations that batter and assail it from outside, it can regulate a constant internal regulation. Those who eat hot food are doing their damnedest to interfere and unbalance that self-regulatory system.
This resultant heat, as I have said, must go somewhere. I made this very point to Dr Grant “Heat rises,” I said to him. “It rises, sir.” If it rises, it rises toward the brain. To heat the brain cannot be anything but a mistake. It gives rise to a host of difficulties in the cerebellum which leads to all sorts of problems in the rest of the cortex. Keeping the proverbial cool head ought to be the intention of each and every one of us; a most necessary intention. I feel this acutely at the moment. I intend to refrain from all hot food and eat only cold. Though not too cold as that would be to jump from the frying pan into the icebox with results no less disruptive. No extremes.]
11th August
[… reflecting on the question at great length, I have concluded that human kind’s greatest invention is the umbrella. It sets us apart from the animals at a fundamental level. We employ many things that set us apart from the animals but usually they only succeed in doing so in degree. To be able to move about with shelter in hand and yet be able to set it to one side is a really considerable difference in kind. After all, shelter is of absolute importance to every species of animal – though it must trouble fish to a lesser extent. The tortoise and the turtle, the snail also, carry around their shelter but they cannot hand it over to the concierge or lend it to friend (or, admittedly, leave it on the train). They must always be burdened by their portable shelter. I do not speak of the parasol. That is an affectation no better than the fan: things which hide behind their almost non-existent functionality to disguise the fact that they are, in reality, no more than ornaments coyly employed …]
14th August
Dining room
[… I am vexed by it. It is a feeling that expands in the chest and rises up the neck as if it would seize me by the throat. There are far, far too many living creatures aboard this little earth. Good heavens, to think that I felt jostled and crowded by the number of peoples on the earth – I speak of course of the sense of their untrammelled multiplicity. Now I am forced to laugh at myself for worrying about the crush of a few shoots in the midst of the choking depths of the primeval forest. If it were only people who crawled over its face, the world would be a place of comparative solitude, almost empty.
I have been totting up the giddying count of all the other creatures that swarm around us. I shall set them out up to the point that I have uncovered them – which only goes so far. Equally, they are approximate of course but with such a sandstorm of numbers, what point could there be in accuracy. Besides, they grow by the second.
Planet: 1
Species: 1,750,000
People: 7,000,000,000
Birds: 100,000,000,000
Animals: 5,000,000,000,000
Fish: 10,000,000,000,000
Insects: 150,000,000,000,000,000
Micro-organisms
(ex. bacteria): 150,000,000,000,000,000
Bacteria: 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
I have no doubt there are more to be enumerated but isn’t this already enough? Good God, more than enough.
I found Paul working in his garden as I passed by his house yesterday. Naturally I tackled this very issue with him. “People Are scarce,” I said. “Everything else teems. Bacteria do more than teem, they carpet, they swamp, they infest. There are hundreds of millions of millions of them for every one of us. There are tens of millions under your foot, tens of millions in a small glass of water, thousands of millions on your skin. And your guts, sir, your guts are full to bursting with them: hundreds of millions of millions of bacteria live in your stomach. What is more, bacterium do not sleep and, for all I know, do not take a moment’s repose.”
There does not seem to be a square inch of the world that is not infested with living things. What is my concern? My concern is that they are at liberty. Plant life I find less worrisome: in general its individual representatives are securely tethered. Bacteria, on the other hand … I do not say they have minds of their own but they can proceed and wander as they like. Needless to point out that this unconstrained movement characterises their larger living cousins.
I was in the fields beyond Backett’s wood today – a seasonably hot day – the sound of insects was like a cloud of sound, a cloud of buzzing crowding the air. Now I hear it reported on the radio that the clouds themselves are full of microscopic life. They rain from the heavens above. Is every breath we take loaded with life, choked with living matter even out on the most bracing moor? We are both utterly surrounded and entirely invaded by a morass of life that we cannot evade. We are not separate beings. To try to be free of it would be like a fish struggling in the sea to shake of the water. We wade and thrust our way through the seething biomass. Worms in loam.]
There is more that could be set down much of which, admittedly, might be relevant but, to be frank, if one is to do what is known as a cost-benefit analysis then the effort that would need to be spent deciphering the handwriting of the later letters …well, to speak plainly, would it be worth it?
At the end of the day of which we now speak
And of this world so round within that rolling case
There be two points that never move but firmly keep their place:
.. .. .. ..
The line that we devise from t’one to t’other
As axle is upon the which th’heavens about doth go;
Sir Thomas Wyatt : Iopas’s Song
The train rolled, rocking shortly from side to side, through the tunnel. Every so often the sound of metal abrading metal would shoot through the air and it would have been a strong-willed mind that could entirely refuse the idea that the steel suffered. The carriage containing Gerald Morton was now empty and he had only his own reflection in the window opposite for company. Until a couple of stops before, even at this late hour, the carriage had had a few passengers, all showing signs of wan fatigue (some the exhaustion of defeat) – one or two stragglers could still be seen in the adjacent carriages. Gerald Morton’s carriage, however, was empty.
Before long, the train rushed (but slowing) into the light of a station transforming the windows from mirrors back to their proper function. Through these windows it was now possible to see the walls of the station that were covered with advertisements which were themselves windows through which a world of shiny exuberance, of contentment, of tremendous enthusiasm clamoured and beseeched from its parallel universe to attract the attention of the dazed, the confused and, sometimes, the downright miserable. Between the Amsterdam windows of these inaudible sirens, the plaques announcing Baker Street stood proud and definite.
Gerald Morton gathered up three plastic bags that had perished slightly with overuse and which contained an assortment of papers and personal belongings. He used a few still available tips of fingers to snare a small, collapsable umbrella that did not entirely retain the symmetry it had possessed at the time of its manufacture. He worked his way slightly awkwardly from his seat across the width of the carriage and out onto the platform. The train remained immobile, its doors open, as if stunned and gaping. Gerald Morton did not immediately move any further or even appear to select a potential direction should the urge to continue overtake him. In the meantime, those remaining passengers who had been on the train left the platform briskly and even the sound of them quickly disappeared. Not so Gerald Morton.
Indeed, we look at a man both overwhelmed and on the margins. How is it possible to be overwhelmed whilst occupying a place on the sidelines? The answer to that is simple: the temporally dislocated are often in two places at the same time. In this instance, it is possible for them to watch from the edge of the river but experience the water as if they were clinging to a rock in midstream. There is nothing mysterious about this because of course we are not talking about river water but about life (the two things, as Heraclitus noticed, are usefully analogous but not exactly the same). One can, with a bit of effort and a bit of luck, climb out of a river but, in the very strictest sense you cannot climb out of life unless you are immortal (and we won’t be getting into any of that). Therefore, it is perfectly possible to experience the phenomenon of being inundated by life as if the roar and spume of events was continually breaking about one’s head whilst simultaneously feeling, to coin a phrase, that it was all passing you by. In fact, it may very well be the process of being swamped by the white water of life that gives to them the feeling of being pushed aside.
He began at long last to move down the platform in the direction, most sensibly, of those signs proclaiming ‘Exit’. His right foot kept a slightly lower, flatter trajectory from the beginning of its stride to the end than did the left whose semi-elliptical arc gave to his gait a subtly hesitant lilt. This differential in stride was further revealed (and thereby explained) when he reached the stairs: his right foot took the first step ably enough but the left rose unexpectedly high to soar above the second step allowing the sole of his shoe, hanging loose from the upper, to clear the lip of that step. In such a manner he made his ascent of the staircase: one foot sliding unobtrusively onto each alternate step: crestfallen at the antics of its partner as it kicked out wildly at the thin air.
In all other respects, his physical comportment was utterly correct. In fact his whole mien would have been exemplary – his back straight, his head high, his arms, even though encumbered, possessing an almost military correctness – had it not been for the necessary but demonic possession of his left foot. With this partially sabotaged bearing, he made his way along a succession of passages, finally reaching a more generously open cavern from which ascended an escalator (alongside its descending companion). An escalator, it hardly needs to be said, is a heaven sent boon to one whose sole has parted from its upper.
As he reached the top of the escalator, he managed to raise the bags held by one hand to a height that permitted him to extrude a small plastic wallet with a transparent cover from his jacket. Once on dry land, or rather stationary land, he slid a ticket out from the wallet; that ticket that had served him so well for the length of the day. Left inside the wallet, briefly glimpsed by Gerald Morton himself, was a photograph of a man, a woman, a girl, and a boy. It was a photograph from which a good deal of the colour had drained away or evaporated or whatever it is that happens to old photographs. It was as if the true nature of the deception of the photograph was revealed and the image without substance could not retain even the forgery of the thing itself.
Gerald Morton handed his ticket to a man who appeared to be the only person left within the station but who coincidentally wore a uniform of one who might be expected to take a passing interest in the used tickets of departing passengers. This man was guarding a barrier which would permit the passage of the broader beam of those carrying luggage. Helpfully he activated something that opened the barrier for Gerald Morton who, having taken advantage of this courtesy, raised the issue of his shoe with this gentleman saying:
“That good doctor Henri Bergson was quite adamant that time, sir, was entirely a matter of duration. The manufacturers of goods for the use of the general public take a very different and adverse view. They do not agree with Dr Bergson in the least.”
After a short pause, Gerald Morton bestowed on his solitary auditor a keener and somewhat admiring glance. It would not be too much to say that his eyes brightened, perhaps even glistened, with respect.
“It is a great and grave responsibility closing down the Circle Line. You have, so to speak, been given the keys to the heavens. I do not say you are a god, sir, you need have no fear on that score, but the task with which you have been entrusted is nothing short of godly. I do not know if you are aware of it but the Circle Line drives the Cosmos – the whole universe, sir. It is the circular demonstration of the Archimedean lever: a system of intricate and wondrous gears, if we can use such crude terms in connection with the vast and imperious revolutions of Time and Space.
“This fabric is interwoven in such a way that the myriad numbers of all the other galaxies revolve around our own dear galaxy. As you must know, our own star is on the outer edge of our galaxy and that precise situation gives to it the operation of an eccentric axis. This, in turn, gives it greater stirring power, sir, within, if I may be facetious for a second, the vast universal pottage. The sun, contrary to more recent scientific argument circles the earth (that is now heterodoxy, sir, but it will be lauded as truth when science’s imperfect understanding is brought to heel). And, sat just a little way below the surface of the earth, this incomparable yellow line, wound into the perfect circle, is the mighty engine that drives the whole affair.
“It is only when you shut her down that the stars and the galaxies drift outward. That, you see, sir, is your famous expanding universe. Only it does not just expand. Poor old Dr Edwin Hubble, admirable in all other respects, and as is the modus operandi of his trade, only examined the stars at night. For during the day, when the Circle Line revolves once more, the Contents of the Cosmos are pulled back inwards toward the centre like blossoms and pollen in a whirlpool – red shift becomes blue and vice versa. The universe breathes, in and out, slowly, diurnally, like a dark, slumbering beast. Poor old astronomy, never awake during the day, only party to half the story. So now you know, sir, now you know how considerable is your responsibility.”
So saying, Gerald Morton strode out of the station into the night, one leg half high-stepping, the sole of his shoe flapping, to find lodging where best he could.
Better than Nothing 