Now you are able to understand that certain questions like this can have an implied meaning, and you act accordingly, passing me the milk without requiring a specific request to do so. But you neither understand nor see the point of most linguistic oddities and tools — irony, satire, jokes, double entendres, sarcasm, and metaphor. To your ears they only serve to create distorted meaning, misunderstanding, and disorder. How to explain to you things like faith and sin, resurrection, and redemption? And, moreover, how to explain that these words, which you (and all the rest of us!) have such difficulties in understanding to begin with, have different meanings within different religions, and even for different people within the individual religions? And how to explain to you that for some other people these words don’t mean anything at all, without that necessarily making them stupid or bad?
Then I choose, as I perhaps too often do, the simplest solution. All people are different, I say. Some believe in God, some in Allah, some in Buddha. Some others don’t believe in any of them, and many people don’t know what to believe. Me, for example. I don’t know whether it was God who created nature, or whether nature created itself. I don’t believe we go to heaven when we die, but I don’t know. Nor do I know whether there is a hell where we will be punished for our sins, but I choose not to believe it.
THINKING AND KNOWING are two very different things. You have understood that. Often, when you ask me a question that seems difficult to answer, I will say:
— I don’t know.
You don’t like to hear that, so you immediately follow up:
— But what do you think? Do you think it’s true that the sun will explode?
— Yes, but in a very, very long time.
— Do you think I’ll be in heaven by then?
— Yes.
— Do you think the angels and gods and so on can arrange for heaven not to catch fire?
— . . .
You want an answer. That’s to say, I suspect you want confirmation of the fact that there is always an answer, regardless of what it might be. The content of the answer is often subordinate; above all you want to know that all questions have their answer. Because if there is not one — and only one — answer to each individual question, then how can the world make sense? How are you supposed to relate to a world that lacks answers?
You have no choice, son. I don’t want to make things more difficult for you than they already are, but there is no way around it. Just as you have to live with the fact that all people know and believe and think in different ways about different things, and as a result there is no formula you can learn to tell you what a person is and you will have to accept that you will never get answers to everything, that very often there is no answer, no matter how hard you search, and that there will always be more questions than answers. Even for those who believe in God — that’s precisely what they do — they believe.
To believe can mean several things. It can mean imagining something you cannot know, as when you believe that you’ll be an astronaut when you grow up. It can also mean to trust, as when you say you have been given and not taken a marble at school, and I say that I believe you. And it can mean that something is likely, but not certain, as when I believe that Victoria will be angry if you go rummaging through her things. And then it can mean a mixture of all of these — to trust in something one cannot know but that seems likely. Perhaps it’s something like that people mean when they say they believe in God.
I know this confuses you. First I tell you that you will never get answers to all your questions, because sometimes there just is no answer. Then I tell you that it isn’t all that easy to believe either, since it’s possible to believe in so many different ways that you don’t know what to believe, or how.
So let’s forget them for a moment, both the believing and the knowing. Let’s instead think another thought. Let’s pretend that the world is one enormous church, or a huge temple. You know what I mean, you like being in churches and temples. Let’s suppose that every place in the world — every country and city and river and mountain and volcano and forest and sea and desert and jungle — that all of these places are inside a church that is as big as the whole earth. And that all of the life in all these places, everything that grows and breathes and crawls and walks and flies and swims, lives inside this temple that is so big that nothing can manage to survey it — not the animals, not the plants, not the birds, and not the fish. Not even the humans.
Because it isn’t always necessary to survey, to understand. Sometimes all that is necessary is to accept. Sometimes it’s necessary to do as you said to me once when I wanted to talk to you about something you thought was unpleasant:
— Can’t you just think that thought away?
You were quite right. It took a while for me to understand, but it was wisely said; I understood that later. Sometimes you have to think your thoughts away, otherwise you’ll just feel sad, or perhaps angry, or perhaps even a little crazy. As when you ask me why it isn’t possible to make gold, or why Victoria was born before you, or why it isn’t warm enough to sunbathe in spring, and I say that’s just how things are. That is an answer you dislike, because you want everything to have an explanation. And yet now and then I can see in your eyes, in the tension that seems to let go, first from your shoulders and then your whole body, that you manage it — you think the thought away, and it does you good.
When I sit in a church, or a temple, I let go. I like it. I like to feel that here, in this building that is called holy, it is safe not to know what is true and what is a lie. Normally, at work, or at school, or at home, or in the shop, we have to think all the time about what is right and what is wrong. We have to know all the time, and always be in a position to explain why and how we know. But in a church you don’t have to know. There you don’t even have to believe anything at all. Perhaps it’s because God is in there, and he is so mighty and wise that it doesn’t help anyway to think your own small, human thoughts. Or perhaps not. I don’t think it’s all that important whether God exists or not. But there is something about these buildings that feels good, that brings peace and consolation and a calm joy — because in there it’s possible to give up the need to know and instead be filled with a strange and good desire to give thanks and to enjoy.
Imagine then if the whole world were a church, or a temple. Then we could be anywhere — in Africa, on the beach, at home — and still find consolation and security. If everything that exists in nature, plants and water and stones and air, and everything that mankind has built and created — if everything were a church where you were allowed not to understand, not to believe and think, then we would be secure wherever we went.
You had a similar idea once yourself, when you were about to go on your first class outing and spend the night in an unfamiliar forest and were a bit anxious. Mom and I said we could come with you, but you protested:
— I don’t need any grown-ups with me. Jesus can look after me; he can even walk on the water!
And then you added, just to be on the safe side:
— But perhaps you could ask him to take God and Buddha with him too? And the other one, what’s his name, Anna?
YOUR NEED FOR unambiguity and literal meaning can often seem unreasonable to others, but they are counterbalanced by some exceptional qualities: you are profoundly honest, sincere, loving, and fearless. These qualities are so highly characteristic of you that it’s almost more correct to say that they are you. They form your natural, congenital defences. Without them you would have been . . . I hardly dare think the thought.
But these qualities are not something you have chosen to develop. They are not part of a strategy you’ve worked out in order to succeed or to be liked. You, who are so talented, are incapable of strategic thinking. It goes against your nature, against that part of your nature that does not understand that in their dealings m
ost people act as if in a game, with unwritten rules that seem to be there to be broken, but not always . . . a system of changing conventions, dictated by circumstance, which is incomprehensible to you and therefore impenetrable.
If it were the case that you had consciously chosen to oppose this game, which can often seem so petty, but which most people nevertheless use when they deal with others — if it were the case that you consciously chose to reject it and instead face the world with an unconditional openness, you would have been courageous in the sense of daring and foolhardy.
But that’s not the way it is. You have simply been given no choice. You know of no other way in which to relate to people; you lack the ability to dissimulate and to understand that there might be another way. It makes you vulnerable in a way most people find inconceivable. Moreover, it makes you what people call difficult, because the others don’t always know how to answer you, they don’t understand you, they are unable to escape the suspicion that you are the one who is playing with them, that you, the child, have an inexplicable and intolerable advantage over them, and that you must be overcome as a matter of urgency, if necessary by means of the most dirty and brutal tricks in the game.
Nevertheless, these qualities make you, above all, a great and fine person, Gabriel. An enrichment for those of us who know you, and a corrective. They make it a privilege to learn from you and a joy to educate — in everything that can help you to live with your own vulnerability and the bewilderment of others, everything that can shield and strengthen your own experience of happiness.
Ever since you began asking us about your difficulties, those things about yourself that seemed different to other people, your knotted thoughts, we have given them the name “problems.”
You use the word yourself too, sometimes in a way that may seem cunning and calculated, when you’re caught doing something you know you’re not supposed to:
— Oh yes, sorry, but you know me, I’ve got some problems.
But that happens only rarely. Usually you convey a profound distress when you talk about your problems, for behind this everyday word lie great and fathomless riddles like the frightening mysteries of the deep — the enigmatic reasons why you are not like others.
You have several times asked us if we’re going to “fix” your problems. Without your having to explain the question we’ve understood that what you have in mind is some kind of cure, an unvoiced expectation that Mom and Dad will make your problems disappear. But, dear Gabriel, however much we might wish to, we cannot.
Of course we’ll do all we can to help you, but even though we’re both adults as well as your parents, we don’t in fact know all that much about what we can and should do. We know what we have read and what we’ve been told by the health authorities and pedagogues and therapists, but often they don’t even agree with one another. Some, for example, think that a change in diet would have a beneficial effect; others suggest we use special methods of training to change what they call “undesirable behaviour”; still others maintain that medication is the answer.
What makes all these options so difficult and unreliable is that every child with problems like yours is unique and different from every other. So a method that achieves good results in one case won’t work, or works counterproductively, in another. And no one can know in advance who will react positively, or negatively, or not at all. All parents must therefore make some difficult decisions about which piece of advice to heed. Are they to expose their child to the endless burden of trying out one theory after another? It’s almost like sitting in a restaurant with a menu full of dishes you’ve never heard of, and having to eat them all one after the other, but not knowing whether you’re going to like or tolerate any of them.
You discovered for yourself how difficult it is when we took you to stay for a month in hospital to try out medications. Even though the doctors assured us they worked on the majority of children, they did not work on you, or else had a clearly negative effect. You lay awake at night, and finally got up, found crayons and a sheet of paper, and drew a round stomach with a long coiled intestine in it. Inside the intestine you put a tablet, drew a big red cross over it and said:
— I don’t want any more of these tablets that glide through my stomach. I can’t sleep. I’m not dreaming, but I’m inside a nightmare and my head’s going around. Get rid of these medicines!
No, Gabriel, we don’t actually know much more about your problems and what to do about them than what you’ve taught us, and what we’ve understood from being your parents. On this flimsy basis we’ve made our choices and taken our chances. We have, for example, chosen not to embrace complicated and demanding theories about nutrition and diet — quite simply because it seemed to us that the minute scrutiny of the contents of every sandwich you eat, every sweet, every sauce, and piece of cake you might come across, would be unreasonably demanding when weighed against the possible but highly uncertain potential benefits.
Our choices are guided by two wishes we have for you: that you will live, as much as possible, a life of equal status with other people, and that you will have as many chances as possible to know what you yourself call happiness. We resist methods of treatment that risk sidelining you and increasing the feeling
of being different that you already have. So instead we usually turn to what seems most natural to us: showering you with security and praise and love.
We’re proud of you, son, and proud to be your parents, just as I know your brothers and sisters are proud to have you as a brother. Never doubt that, not even when our helplessness and doubt seem to you like betrayal. Because we too can be foolish and hurt you, forget that you’re not an ordinary piece in the people game. That is another task we face, to teach you, even though it might hurt, that even your own family and friends, those whom you most trust, can be weak, stupid, and unfair, too self-centred to make allowances and approach you the way you wish to be approached.
One warm summer’s day I lay out sleeping in the hot sun on our skerries. You snuck up on me with a bucket full of cold sea water and emptied it over me. I leapt up, extremely annoyed and probably glowering at you. You looked at me in a kind of naked wonder and said, almost disbelievingly:
— But, Dad, you wouldn’t hit your own son, would you?
Of course not, son. But how is it that you’re so often ahead of me with your fearless sincerity?
ON RARE OCCASIONS you happen to meet people who see and somehow recognize you. And you do the same, in a strange, intuitive reciprocation. As a witness on such occasions, I can only assume that a bridge of spirituality spontaneously spans the two of you, although spirituality is something I normally shrink from in skeptical distrust. But the choice is not always mine, for you have also taught me about veiled contexts, Gabriel.
For example, we visit a Buddhist temple on an island in Thailand. In the library at home I have a large bronze Buddha that has always fascinated you — to such an extent that the prospect of acquiring one yourself for a long time was your main motivation for fussing about when we could travel to Thailand. Now we’re off to the temple where I bought the figurine all those years ago, and your whole being radiates with the solemnity of the occasion.
The first thing you see, long before we’re inside the temple walls, is the enormous gilded Buddha statue atop a pyramidal structure. It must be at least twenty to thirty metres high, and it stares, with blind inscrutability, through eons and universes. As soon as we’re out of the car, and without a prompting word from either of us, you remove your sandals. Then you head off up the steep stairway that ends at the feet of the statue. The decorative railings on either side are shaped like slender, coiled bodies of dragons. I follow and catch up with you at the top, where you have already lost interest in the colossal dispenser of wisdom. What interests you now is the peeling gold flake: Is it real? How can I say there’s such poverty in Thailand when they have this
much gold? Aren’t the monks, at least, very rich?
You seem uninterested in the flowers and the incense, the wreaths and the bowls containing offerings of food in front of the small altars. You make a kind of dutiful sound, tapping half-heartedly with a hollow stick on the bells and cymbals hanging from the framework of beams around the statue to produce the primordial sound om. You disregard the panoramic view. You want to go down again to buy your own Buddha.
We locate the temple’s sales booth and, after some agonizing, you make your choice: not the largest, not the most expensive, not even one made of bronze. You want the medium-sized one cast in stone, light beige, with a reddish glint — as long as we can assure you that it’s made of a genuine, that’s to say, a precious type of stone.
The purchase made, you want to leave. It’s hot and you want to get back to the beach. Moreover, the temple evidently doesn’t live up to your expectations: the monks’ cells are low, grey concrete blocks, and there are no glinting and glittering treasures. You’re pleased with your statue, but otherwise disappointed — this place has nothing to do with the temple splendours we’ve seen in pictures of Bangkok.
While you hurry off toward the exit, I turn to gather the rest of our party. It takes only a moment to signal that we’re on our way out, but when I turn back, you’re gone. From the gateway I peer out over the parking lot but see no sign of you. I’m about to go back in again, thinking that perhaps you’ve managed to slip past behind me and return to the statue, when I see you.
You stand facing a kind of enclosure that lies half hidden between large green plants in enormous pots, beneath the dense crown of a tree through which sunlight doesn’t penetrate. I approach closer and see, beyond the interlacing leaves, half a step down, a beautiful silk rug, like a processional runner. It leads to a low, carved bench, almost a little throne. An ageless monk sits there, cross-legged, shaven-headed, and swathed in orange. There is something inexpressibly mild about his face, and in the eyes that twinkle at the world and past it through simple, round glasses. It occurs to me at once that he must be the head of the monastery.
Somewhere Over the Sea Page 3