A Clue to the Exit

by Edward St. Aubyn

  It was late afternoon by the time I set out for my walk. Restless a few moments before, my limbs turned to coffins at the garden gate. If death is the end, terror. If it’s not the end, terror too. Terror if nothing matters. Terror if it all matters absolutely. I haven’t murdered anyone. I haven’t raped anyone. I haven’t stolen, or committed acts of arson. But I have had thoughts, and that’s been more than enough.

  I persevered and set off towards the southern coast. Everything was oppressively symbolic. I was chained to a rock having my liver eaten by vultures. If I had gone to the trouble of stealing fire from the gods, it might have seemed worthwhile. How could Heidi cocoon herself in frivolity and pettiness, while those sharp beaks tore at the last shreds of my life? It isn’t achievement that makes our actions immortal, it’s death. Whatever we’ve done when we die lasts for ever. If we’ve failed, we’ve failed for ever. There is so little time to pass on my love to my daughter, and when I die the catastrophe will be incorruptible. A spasm of loathing for Heidi suddenly animated my body and I stormed towards the Gorge du Loup, breathless with fury and panic. No human sounds distracted me from my state of mind, just the wind combing the pines and the sporadic clocking of the pheasants in the wood.

  The path forked, both branches leading to the coast. I tried to gild my mood by taking the high road, but it turned out to curve towards the village. I doubled back and took the other path. The cheap symbol of the high road usurped by the cheap symbol of the wrong path. A lifetime of choosing the wrong path, I thought grandly.

  I struggled to the clifftop, the sweat drying icily on my chest. The waves boomed in the Gorge du Loup. The wind was solid enough to support my leaning body and loud enough to make my screams inaudible. Although I was shouting, I couldn’t quite make out what I was saying. I realized how little substance any of my feelings had without the loop of listening to myself think and speak. Better to stay on this clifftop having my thoughts ripped from me by a gale.

  As the sun bled into the sea, the full moon surged out of the forest, stained red by the dying light. I fell silent, my mood shattered like the waves exploding on the coast below. Soon enough the colour drained from the moon and it turned back into sizzling white rock, making its arching progress over the island.

  After this hammer blow of awe, I started to look suspiciously at what had happened. If terror was just another feeling, why was the sense of beauty any different? Wasn’t it a ‘quale’ among ‘qualia’? It was easy to prefer it to terror, but that didn’t make it any more essential. From the point of view of consciousness, the fact that it derived from something out there in the world didn’t alter the situation either. Consciousness was my total present awareness, whatever its content or the origin of its content.

  I struggled to find something essential in the beauty itself, to give it some absolute independence. The moon rising opposite the setting sun, their perfect opposition turned into perfect intercourse, the sun and the moon mingling blood, the poignant clash of scales, an effect with a lifespan even shorter than mine, acted out on a celestial plane.

  There were rules to these pleasures, I thought irritably, as I pounded down the silvery track to the Calanque de la Bréganconnet, where I intended to hide from the wind and the mesmeric curiosity of the lighthouse beam which had started to sweep the eastern end of the island. Under the wrapping paper of individual occasions there were always the same characteristics to aesthetic success, the stale surprises of conflict and reconciliation, variety and unity, symmetry and asymmetry. This and that were sometimes thrillingly supplemented by The Other. The Other was probably something Jean-Paul should think about. Not a bit of the other, but The Other, the French philosopher’s d’Artagnan, always ready to leap from the rooftops and create a diversion. My thoughts were all over the place; even my own characters weren’t safe.

  The wind started to subside as I walked downhill. The calanque itself was almost still. I found a hollow in the rock and watched the frantic sea calmed and confused as it was funnelled towards the beach, sometimes crashing in, sometimes bobbing up indecisively. The moon was not yet shining into the creek, but I saw it whitening the waves further out to sea. Lines of seaweed were stranded on the sand, some dry, some lolling in the surf.

  I seemed to have completely lost the conviction, which had come to me so triumphantly when I first arrived on the island, that beauty was the natural order of things. The first time I saw this coast I was blown away by its visual brilliance. Was I misled this evening by the lure of symbolic thinking? The sun and moon mingling blood – wasn’t it enough that the moon was briefly reddened by the setting sun? And yet the idea that they were mingling blood had been the content of my thoughts at the time. The sexual, the tragic and the symbolic registers were as much part of my consciousness as the optical. Beauty could not depend on an allegedly direct encounter with the thing that seemed beautiful. No such directness was possible. The sun and the moon, even if I landed on them, would come to me in the form of knowledge. There could only be more or less intimacy with the mental reality in which they made their appearance. There might be a primordial encounter with that knowledge but not with the object itself. I was not being solipsistic. I didn’t want to deny that the sun and the moon were out there, with a lifespan of their own, somewhat longer than mine, and that some kinds of knowledge referred to the facts of the case whereas others did not. But whether it was Phoebus, skin cancer, a small yellow star, the bleeding sun or entropy that appeared in consciousness, real beauty could only come from this intimacy with mental reality, whatever it might contain, and not from the inherent beauty of the thing or the thought. Who has not noticed a mood swing turn the petal-coaxing sun into the maggot-breeding sun? Sometimes I am delighted by things being as they are, sometimes by their resemblance to something else. Sometimes understanding how things work weakens my desire for metaphor, sometimes the desire is sharpened by understanding how things work.

  The moonlight had reached the creek by now and made it look like boiling mercury. Sandflies, celebrating a warm human presence, left the banks of seaweed and danced ecstatically on my body. As I sat in the hollow slapping my face and neck, the dichotomy between appearance and reality seemed to infold and disappear. One appearance was being replaced by another. Reality might be the sum of all possible appearances, some generated by science, some by art, some by psychosis; some known, some unknown, some unknowable. In that case it was forever out of reach. Or it might be an unbroken awareness of the content of consciousness, and of its nature, with one appearance being replaced by another: this was what I now meant by intimacy.

  The oxymoronic violence I’d been subjected to since my fatal visit to the doctor had distracted me from pursuing this intimacy. At first, I glimpsed that my only chance of reconciling myself to the undistinguished heap of incidents which made up my life lay in that direction. But then I got caught up in Prozac and New York and gambling and Angelique and the mirage of love and money. Not to mention my scholarly efforts to understand the current consciousness debate, a debate which happens to contribute nothing to the resolution of the question.

  I wondered again whether I should give up writing On the Train. It didn’t seem likely to bring me any closer to my objective. Maybe Patrick – who, strangely enough, also has cirrhosis – should carry the burden of some of the things that have started to take shape for me on the beach. When writers imagine a character who is dying, or condemned to die, they all too often make him ruminate about the past, worrying that he may not have led a good life, or being haunted by some forking in the road when he ran away from true love, or failed to save a friend’s life. Something with tons of flashbacks, and a big violin section. Either the character claims to have a few regrets but, then again, too few to mention after page 300, or he has the incredible courage and honesty to regret everything and wish he had not done it his way. In either case, the main feeling about dying, namely that it’s happening too soon, is blurred by a preoccupation with the past.

&
nbsp; Well, those of us who are dying – as opposed to those who are lounging around in their studies making dinner engagements, and then reluctantly disconnecting the phone for twenty minutes in order to browse through a medical textbook and look up some realistic details – those of us who are really dying haven’t got time to ponder the past. The present is scintillating with horror and precision. The past is a luxury for people who think they have a future. Does my life have subtle connecting threads, strange coincidences, uniting themes? You’d better believe it. Things can’t help repeating themselves, can’t help colliding. That’s not meaning, it’s where the search for meaning begins.

  I was beginning to feel cold and hungry, and tempted to return to the farmhouse, but I stayed crouched in the hollow, feeling there was something I had overlooked. And then I realized that beauty had seemed fundamental to me when I thought I was going to see my daughter. Now that I was not going to see her the conviction had deserted me. Sometimes the closest things are the hardest to see. I was shattered by the stupidity of not noticing that my whole outlook pivoted on my daughter. That feeling of panic and self-reproach when you realize, at exactly the moment you slam the front door closed, that you’ve left the keys inside, if it could be magnified a thousand times, would dimly resemble the electrocuting shame that rushed through me on the beach. Ton Len, I had forgotten Ton Len. When I saw her a year ago, she was lying on the sofa and I held her small feet completely in my hands and she smiled and looked at me with utter trust. She knew I’d always be there to look after her. That’s the picture that comes back to me again and again. The smile, the trust. I haven’t written about it, but then again there’s no mention of camels in the Koran. Some things are too flagrant to point out until they’ve shown a talent for hiding or getting lost. Last night I doubled my betrayal by losing sight of her. I will almost certainly die too soon to see her again and I am powerless to do anything about it.

  And so I sat in the hollow, pinned down by the fascination of the way that everybody hurts each other by trying to make themselves happy. The pursuit of happiness is not so much an inalienable right as an inevitable disaster. I seemed to understand, without needing to formulate it, how things had come to be as they were, with my four-year-old daughter a thousand miles away, the memory of her father’s love drifting into the fog banks of early childhood and infancy, her mother in a tangle of hatred and spiritual ambition, and her hysterical and gloomy father fixed on a strangely academic obsession. All the players without any recourse to freedom. Locked.

  I was stung by the irony of pursuing something I was calling intimacy, some relationship with mental reality which I hadn’t yet defined but was already invoking like a mantra, when the ordinary intimacy of contact with the person I loved most was absent from my life. I could sense a chain-mail landscape receding infinitely in every direction. Each generation linked by steel. Everyone acting under the duress of circumstance and personality. What did it mean to be free in this situation? Did I have to content myself with amor fati, the love of fate, doing willingly what I must do anyway? Was that it? I noticed that I was not breathing and started again hastily. I stopped slapping my face and neck. My hands dropped to my side. If I wanted intimacy I could have it with the sandflies.

  In the delirium of my longing to reassure Ton Len, I started to think of the insects which were now eating my neck and hands and face as the appetites of all the furious generations before us, the troupe of hungry ghosts who had prepared the way for this meticulous tangle of suffering. With every bite I imagined I was offering them my blood, like a coin in a cup. Finally, when my whole body was contorted with the desire to crush them, I saw that my need for Ton Len to know that I loved her was itself a hungry ghost. At that moment the ravenous troupe subsided, appeased by blood and recognition. The emotions which had seemed to be inextricably entangled with my love for Ton Len – frustration, despair, longing, resentment, the desire to be a good person – took on their own separate natures, leaving an unalloyed love radiating from my body through the rest of space.

  I was jolted into a new clarity by this strange fantasy. I started to flick away the flies and scratch my bitten skin. I’m not interested in martyrdom, just in having as many lucid episodes as possible before the curtain drops.

  The wind had died down and the glassy atmosphere it left behind was turning a lighter grey behind the high hill to the east of the creek. I sat very still for a moment as if I was made of glass as well. The icy moon had sunk out of view. I felt drained and light. I couldn’t think any more, any more than I could have stopped thinking at the beginning of the night. My legs were half dead as I clambered to my feet. I tottered home like a dizzy pensioner.

  22

  I was welcomed back to the house by a pair of air-force fighters cracking the sky above my head, the sharp lines of their vapour trails turning to smears of lipstick against the lurid dawn. I can never sleep in daylight or, for that matter, in darkness, but at least at night I’m in with a chance. I knew I would have to bully my way through another day on the volatile fuel of coffee and desperation. After a bath, I dragged myself to the village and had breakfast at L’Escale. I’ve given Heidi the number of the cafe, in case she changes her mind. I can’t help entertaining the superstition that my little breakthrough of the previous night, however buried it now is by exhaustion, will be rewarded by some transformation in her attitude. Just as I was mocking myself for this magical thinking, Jean-Baptiste, the barman, came over to tell me that a woman had telephoned last night and would call again in the afternoon. It must be Heidi. She is the only person who knows I’m here. I settled down for the day and, after my sixth double espresso, started to write as if there were no tomorrow.

  After his period of silence and withdrawal, Jean-Paul felt lucid and calm and, if he was going to be impeccably honest, rather superior, among all these Anglo-Saxons who brought the atmosphere of Sherlock Holmes to intellectual life, observant only in its case-by-case myopia, and lacking that power of impertinent generalization to which it was so invigorating to return in a text such as Le Mythe du sens.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may we have your attention, please—’

  The announcement broke off immediately.

  Ah, no, thought Jean-Paul, not my attention, that is asking too much. Won’t it be more than enough to leave part of my mind, as I inevitably do, receptive to the information of my senses, to let your dead words drift down and land on the ground of my awareness? You really can’t expect me to leap up and catch those withered trophies.

  Crystal didn’t speculate: a man had been talking; now he wasn’t.

  What has secured our attention, thought Patrick, is the interruption of the message. More is said in the pauses, blah, blah, blah.

  The announcement resumed. ‘Due to circumstances beyond our control this train will be terminating at Didcot Junction. Coaches have been provided for passengers to continue their journey to London’s Victoria coach station. The coaches are located outside the main entrance to the station. We apologize for any inconvenience.’

  A collective, stoically English groan passed through the compartment.

  ‘Circumstances beyond our control’ is an excellent phrase, thought Patrick. There’s hardly a statement that wouldn’t be improved by mentioning them. ‘Due to circumstances beyond my control it’s my birthday today … Due to circumstances beyond our control we still don’t know how consciousness works.’

  By the time they arrived at the coach, there were too few seats for Jean-Paul, Crystal and Patrick to sit together. Crystal smiled forlornly at the others and sat down in the first free seat. Patrick walked down the aisle, hoping to find someone who would not awaken the monster of his intolerance. When he got to the back of the coach he settled there anyway.

  Jean-Paul installed himself as near to Crystal as possible, a knight’s move away as he saw it, two rows back, on the other side of the aisle. He knew that the man next to him was Derek Wood, the evolutionary psychologist, and he had no
intention of talking to him. Jean-Paul took an aloof view of ‘Evo-babble’, as Crystal liked to call it. For him, what characterized the twentieth century, if one could put aside its dazzling achievements in the competing spheres of overpopulation and mass murder, was the way in which thoughts, behaviour and communication had been set adrift from the intentions of the person making them, first by psychoanalysis, leaving us helpless in the hidden face of the unconscious, and then by all the disciplines that could loosely be called structural. Evo-babble was the latest attempt to demonstrate the vast weight of prejudicial habit. It was, in Jean-Paul’s estimation, a natural consequence of the famous death of God that his depressing omniscience should be redistributed among genetic, linguistic and cultural structures. Evo-babble trumpeted the maturity of facing up to the blindness of natural selection, without that blindness leading to any more freedom than the most rigid predestination.

  ‘My wife’s waiting for me at Paddington,’ sighed Derek, ignoring Jean-Paul’s hasty immersion in his book.

  ‘You have been hunting in Oxford, and your wife is gathering you in Paddington,’ said Jean-Paul drily.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Derek, laughing too hard, ‘I hope you’re not making fun of evolutionary psychology. It’s very easy to mock, very easy indeed.’

  ‘There is no need to mock it,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘It is too banal to require mockery. If someone tells me that we spend more time standing on our feet than on our heads, mockery is an exaggerated response. We are clearly embedded in our bodies, in our ecologies, and in the history of our species. There is no doubt that the mind is modular and that its various modalities have evolved.’

  ‘We see eye to eye, then,’ said Derek.

  ‘But if I am reading a page of Proust, let us say a scene from the final reception given by the Princesse de Guermantes in Le Temps Retrouvé, how will my appreciation of the complexity of this experience be enhanced by the knowledge that fifty thousand generations earlier the Prousts were wandering the plains of Africa, peeping greedily and apprehensively over the tall grass, without yet having attended even the most rudimentary cocktail party?’