Waiting for the Last Bus

by Richard Holloway

  Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

  And then is heard no more; it is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing.29

  The philosopher Mary Warnock tells the same story in a different way. She says that if we lived in laboratory conditions where all the chance elements in our lives from birth could be exactly clocked and recorded, the choices we made as our story unfolded would appear to be foregone conclusions. She says we feel free because we are ignorant of our own genetic system and all the circumstances that programmed the computer that is our own brain. ‘Spinoza said that freedom was the ignorance of necessity.’30 As we shiver at the coldness of this idea, we ought to remind ourselves that it also has a long religious pedigree called Predestination. Religious thinkers trace everything back to God, so it was inevitable that in the compulsions of human behaviour they saw the hand of God. Saint Paul wrestled with the issue in his Letter to the Romans. Like many of us, he was baffled by his own behaviour:

  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me . . . I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.31

  Paul was a religious visionary not a philosopher, so he found the resolution to the puzzle of his own behaviour in the will of God.

  We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined . . . And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified . . . 32

  It’s not clear what Paul means here, but the sense is that, however mysteriously, God is directing the show and everything that happens is determined by him. That is certainly how the Protestant Reformer John Calvin understood it. He was in no doubt that

  By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or death.33

  Islam has a similar line. In the Qur’an, Surah 9 tells us: ‘Naught shall visit us but what God has prescribed for us.’ And it is made even more explicit in one of the reports of Muhammad’s table talk known as Hadiths:

  There is no one of you, no soul that has been born, but has his place in Paradise or Hell already decreed for him, or to put it otherwise, his unhappy or his happy fate has been decreed for him.34

  In these quotations, if you substitute for the word ‘God’ the words ‘all the facts of the Universe so far’, you are close to Mary Warnock’s description of the human situation: in our lives each of us was determined by factors that were beyond our control.

  The chances are that you won’t like this description of human behaviour in either its religious or its secular version. Like it or not, the facts seem to fit it. As you read these words, two children are born in the same ward of the same hospital. Tomorrow they will be taken home to very different parts of the same city and their predestined stories will unfold, one to success and acclaim, the other to failure and shame. What we need to consider is whether we can alter the script already written for us in any of its versions or whether, as Shakespeare expressed it in Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods’, so all we can do is play out the hand dealt to us before shuffling off the stage.35 There is evidence that another story can be improvised from the script written for us, and I want to introduce it in the words of another philosopher, Hannah Arendt:

  . . . though we don’t know what we are doing when we are acting, we have no possibility ever to undo what we have done. Action processes are not only unpredictable, they are also irreversible; there is no author or maker who can undo . . . what he has done if he does not like it or when the consequences are disastrous. The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility is the faculty of forgiving . . . Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would . . . be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victim of its consequences forever.36

  Our tragedy is that though we do not know what we are doing when we act, our actions are irreversible. There’s no rewind button in a human life, though we often wish there were. We long to go back to how things were before we uttered that word or committed that act. But we can’t. That’s what we said. That’s what we did. The tragedy is that our acts go on to determine the behaviour of those they have damaged, and the script drives the action on to the next crisis. Since art imitates life, this is the pattern we see repeated again and again in novels and plays and soap operas. As Jeremiah put it: ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’37 Arendt suggests that the only way to change the direction of the plot is through forgiveness. Forgiveness cannot reverse the action, but it can reject or interrupt its consequences. Without forgiveness the scripted sequence flows on. And a marriage is destroyed. A career is wrecked. A relationship is shattered.

  How does forgiveness happen? Like everything else in human psychology, the ability to forgive seems to be already present or predestined in some but not in others. Nietzsche thought those who were unable to forgive and forget lacked plastic energy:

  In order to determine the extent and thereby the boundary point at which past things must be forgotten if they are not to become the grave diggers of the present, one has to know the exact extent of the plastic energy of a person . . . that is, the power to grow uniquely from within, to transform and incorporate the past and the unknown, to heal wounds, to replace what is lost, and to duplicate shattered structures from within . . . There are people so lacking this energy that they bleed to death, as if from a tiny scratch, after a single incident, a single pain, and often in particular a single minor injustice.38

  I have known people who fitted this description. Visiting them was to endure a recitation of outrage at an injury from the past, often the distant past. Most of the energy of their life was consumed in rehearsing it. They suffered from a locked-in syndrome that imprisoned them in the memory of the offence. And it played on a loop to those who would listen to it.

  If forgiveness is the force that frees victims from this constant playback, what prompts it? An important factor seems to be the spontaneous energy of compassion, the ability to feel or intuit another’s distress. In the injured person, compassion for the perpetrators overcomes the pain of the wound they inflicted. In some cases, the compassionate person feels the offenders’ distress at their own action. Or the victim feels pity for the one who could do such a thing and be such a person. Wherever it comes from, one of the paradoxes of compassion-forgiveness is that it can release the sorrow of offenders at their own action. This is what happened between Jesus and Peter. Jesus looked with compassion at Peter after his denials, and it caused Peter to weep. Jesus understood the misery Peter felt at discovering he was not the man he thought he was, but the kind of failure he actually turned out to be.

  The account of the forgiveness of Peter by Jesus for his denials comes at the end of the Gospel of John. With the tact of the artist, John doesn’t tell us about Peter’s forgiveness, he shows it. Jesus is dead, and Peter has gone back to his job as a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee, haunted by his betrayal of the man he loved. Suddenly Jesus is beside him on the beach, but he does not mention the three betrayals. Instead, he asks Peter three times if he loves him. And Peter brings to his three avowals of love the same passion he brought to the denials that had broken his heart.

&nbs
p; Peter was not a vicious man: vice is unconscious of itself. Peter was a weak man: and weakness is all-too conscious of itself. What Jesus gave Peter was the gift to fail without being destroyed by it. This is one of the ways forgiveness works. Peter’s threefold renewal of his broken vows could not undo his three denials. His denials were irreversible and could not be undone, but their consequences were halted by forgiveness, and a different script for the future became possible. In Nietzsche’s words, the actions of Peter’s past were not allowed to become the grave diggers of his future.

  In thinking about the mystery of forgiveness and the fact that some seem to forgive with ease and some cannot forgive at all, it is important to get the tone or the mood of our language right. It is not a matter of approving those who can and condemning those who cannot forgive. Even here our natures seem to be predetermined. So it is yet another aspect of human behaviour we should try to understand. If the ability to forgive opens the script in a new direction and offers the possibility of a different future, the inability to forgive does the opposite. It kills and buries the future, and locks the participants not only into the memory of the past but also into all the consequences that will continually flow from it. It reminds me of people I have known who never recovered from the death of a loved one and whose life became a sustained act of mourning. No present, no future, only the compulsive memory of the past. The inability to forgive works the same way. It imprisons us in the past, whether in our personal or in our group relations. That’s why most of the wars and feuds that characterise human history are the constant rehearsal of a past offence. In these communities, there is no present, no future, only the compulsive remembrance of the past.

  That can be true of individuals as well as of whole communities. They can be trapped in the memory of an offence they committed that has dominated their whole life. They are never able to silence the inner voice that proclaims them a failure. They had their chance and blew it. Moving on from that kind of paralysis requires what for many is the most difficult kind of forgiveness to achieve — self-forgiveness. It is hard to extend compassion to the self for the pain and hurt it has caused others, but there is no worthwhile future without it. The secret lies in the perspective we adopt. We should bring to ourselves the same eyes, the same look, that we brought to those who shared their guilt and sorrow with us. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins understood that. He was no stranger to self-accusation and depression, so he prayed:

  My own heart let me more have pity on; let

  Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,

  Charitable; not live this tormented mind

  With this tormented mind tormenting yet.39

  Artists are usually better at expressing the intricacies of the human soul than theologians. Let me prove the point by looking at Edward St Aubyn’s series of novels about Patrick Melrose. One way to read them is as an investigation of the dynamics of forgiveness. Patrick is looking back on a life ruined by a father who abused him and a mother who neglected him, a life characterised by destructive addictions and damaged relationships. In the novel Some Hope, he tries to tell his friend Johnny about the abuse he suffered:

  ‘How do you mean ‘abused’? asked Johnny uncertainly . . .

  ‘I’ . . . Patrick couldn’t speak. The crumpled bedspread with the blue phoenixes, the pool of cold slime at the base of his spine, scuttling off over the tiles. These were memories he was not prepared to talk about.

  He tells Johnny he was sexually abused by his father, adding: ‘But now I’m exhausted by hating him. I can’t go on.’40 His predicament is that he can see how his father’s abuse had caused the disastrous pattern of his own life:

  He knew that under the tall grass of an apparently untamed future the steel rails of fear and habit were already laid. What he suddenly couldn’t bear, with every cell in his body, was to act out the destiny prepared for him by his past, and slide obediently along those rails, contemplating bitterly all the routes he would rather have taken.41

  A few pages later in the novel, Anne, another friend, asks if he’s tried to forgive his father. Patrick replies that to forgive him he’d have to be convinced that his father had made some effort to change the course of his life.

  ‘If he’d changed the course he wouldn’t need forgiving,’ said Anne. ‘That’s the whole deal with forgiving. Anyhow, I don’t say you’re not wrong not to forgive him, but you can’t stay stuck with this hatred.’42

  Anne’s words perfectly express the human predicament: we may be justified in our refusal to forgive an injury, but it means we are stuck with the hatred we feel for the offender; and the steel rails of our bitterness propel us into the future already scripted for us. It is not till the last page of the final novel in the series, At Last, that the resolution is achieved and Patrick is able to tear up the script, forgive and move on:

  . . . he opened himself up to the feeling of utter helplessness and incoherence that he supposed he had spent his life trying to avoid, and waited for it to dismember him . . . Instead of feeling the helplessness, he felt the helplessness and compassion for the helplessness at the same time. One followed the other swiftly . . . As the compassion expanded he saw himself on equal terms with his supposed persecutors, saw his parents, who appeared to be the cause of his suffering, as unhappy children with parents who appeared to be the cause of their suffering: there was no one to blame and everyone to help, and those who appeared to deserve the most blame needed the most help. For a while he stayed level with the pure inevitability of things being as they were . . . and he saw that there was a margin of freedom . . . in that clarity.43

  Patrick’s ‘margin of freedom’ was the sudden insight that liberated him from the steel rails of his own past that were forcing him towards a predestined future. Understanding the forces that controlled him gave him enough of a margin of freedom to redirect them. It is only when we acknowledge how imprisoned we are that we become free. This is not far from Spinoza’s idea that, although everything is predetermined, our capacity to understand the facts that determine our behaviour gives us a margin of freedom and control over it. Only when we know how bound we are can we break free.

  This is a paradox well understood by artists who use their genius to express the human condition. It is there in the myth of the voyage of Odysseus. Odysseus is warned that when he sails past the island of the Sirens, their beautiful voices will lure his ship onto the rocks. So he tells his sailors to plug up their ears and tie him to the mast to prevent them being lured to their own destruction. Understanding his own compulsions gave him a margin of freedom over them. Self-understanding helps us connect our own weaknesses to the weaknesses of others and forgive them. And compassion is the energy that drives it, including compassion for ourselves.

  But it can be left too late. That’s why the practice of self-examination is worth mastering early in life, while there may still be time to rewrite the script and make a happier story. Not that it’s ever entirely in our own hands. I’ve known men – they have usually been men – who have died consumed with regret because their mistakes were not met with forgiveness at the time, and the steel rails running out of their past drove them away from those they loved. One of them was consumed with sorrow that he was dying without ever having met his grandchildren. An affair had broken his marriage and provoked an enduring bitterness in his wife, who made sure he lost his family when he injured her. And of course she lost everything as well, because her life had become an act of revenge against him. The price of her inability to forgive was imprisonment in the kind of hatred Patrick Melrose had finally managed to escape from. What harm we can unknowingly do to each other! Our own hearts let us more have pity on.

  Bringing all this together at the end of a long and muddled life can be painful, especially if we are trying to do it on our own. This is where religious traditions can help us even if we are not religious. Making a confession or owning up can be a beautiful and releasing act as we face the end of life. And we can do it in any number of way
s. We can confess to a priest if that’s our style; or to a friend, if we need a listening ear. But the pillow on our bed or the flowers at the bottom of the garden will do just as well. It’s only a matter of being honest, with the right mixture of compassion. Yes, that’s who I was, we can say with a sigh. That’s what I did. Wish I hadn’t, but it’s too late now. Forgive me.

  Then we should let it go. The last bus is on its way . . .

  IV

  THEN WHAT?

  What will it be like, our last moment alive? The chances are that we won’t be alert enough to notice it. Our doctors will try to make it as easy as possible, so we may not be conscious when we finally slip away. But suppose we are. Suppose we are aware till the very end, will we notice it? Will we know it is the final moment? Will there be any sense of pulling up anchor and casting off? There is an old poetic tradition that imagines death as a sea journey. In Greek mythology, everyone had to pay Charon the ferryman in order to cross the river Styx, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. Other poets have used the same metaphor. To describe the moment of death, Tennyson used the image of crossing the sandbar to catch the tide where the river meets the sea:

  . . . such a tide as moving seems asleep,

  Too full for sound and foam,

  When that which drew from out the boundless deep

  Turns again home.44

  Is this pure artistry or is there some collective memory in humanity that poets draw on when thinking about death? The poet Michael Donaghy used the analogy of the car-ferry to anticipate his own early death, as if he were standing on the passenger deck of his own body looking down on ‘the skilled frenzy’ of the workers on the pier as they released the mooring ropes and sent him out to sea: