The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  For me, the majority of disagreements are about either the past or the future, about what did or did not happen or what could or should happen. History shuffles the cards of what humans remember, forget and anticipate, and in doing so it can change the way they hope, argue or despair. The twentieth century, because it was in the throes of a revolution against parental power, focused attention on childhood memories as the most valuable pointer to the future. My aim is to discover how I can confront the future with other kinds of memories, and not just my own memories. Memories can no longer be treated as heirlooms to be hoarded or treasured. Recent science has transformed them into an Aladdin’s cave containing many fakes and illusions. Since the pioneering experiments of Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969), remembering has been revealed as involving not the retrieval of an event as a complete entity but its reconstruction from innumerable dispersed fragments, which are almost inevitably mixed with more recent feelings and beliefs. We are constantly reinventing the past. One of the most significant discoveries of the twenty-first century is that our memories are formed in the same part of the brain where we think about the future. Our view of the future is determined by what we know of the past.

  In this and in my previous books I have assumed that there is no good reason why the flow of time should always be presented in classical style and chronological order, and why history should not enjoy the same freedom as the pictorial arts. I juxtapose people and ideas from different centuries and backgrounds so as to find new answers to the questions that perplex the earth’s present inhabitants. Einstein put aside the distinction between past, present and future for quite different reasons, asking himself when only sixteen years old, ‘If I were to travel with a ray of light, what would I see?’ His journey through time, and the somewhat different one by Tagore, offer contrasting visions of humans as time travellers. They impel me to explain what my alternative is to predicting or fearing the future.

  No-one lives only in the present. We store not just memories of personal experiences in our minds but also beliefs and behaviour derived from different epochs, long before we were born, from people we never met. We construct our lives by borrowing broken-off fragments from what is labelled ancient, mediaeval or modern. No historical period is ever permanently replaced by its successor. Even those who are most up-to-date in following fashion have some fossilised beliefs and dinosaur dreams. We cannot predict which acquired tastes and lingering distastes will blight our lives or give birth to ingenious inventions. Our quarrels are often battles between clashing recollections of times past. Disagreement is more common than ever because people live in two worlds at the same time – the visible world, where they eat, work and raise families, and the invisible one, inhabited by yearnings and fears, convictions and doubts, music and myth, spirituality and idealism, the supernatural and the divine, and thoughts that cannot be put into words. The second world is becoming more crowded with ancient superstitions that refuse to die, reproducing themselves in mongrel shapes, and is being invaded by new and contradictory obsessions. When we combine memories in new ways there is a chance that they could change the taste of the future.

  The Romans had almost a premonition of the implications that might follow. Janus, their god of time, of beginnings and endings, had two faces, one looking backwards to the past and the other to the future. He was also the god of conflict, travel, trade and shipping, the first to mint coins, a reminder that business is ultimately about buying and selling time. It has recently been discovered that patients with damaged memories have difficulty in thinking about the future; the more dementia sinks them into the darkness of forgetfulness, the emptier the future becomes; the more people fantasise about the past, the more their ideas about the future are fantasies too; the sharper their visual memories, the more the future has a visual shape. Memory is therefore not only about the past; it provides the building blocks from which the future is constructed. The narrower the range of memories one has, the less one is likely to have broad and original ideas about the future. How to feed one’s memory becomes as important as how to feed one’s body. Personal experiences are an inadequate diet, but they can be supplemented by vicarious memories we acquire from others, indeed from all humanity, alive and dead. With poor memories, we cannot imagine where we could be going next, apart from places we have been to before.

  When I converse with you, I hear not only what you say, but also echoes of what people of previous eras have said in a similar vein, as well as their protests against your statements. There is nothing unusual about this. Originally most civilisations did not separate the past from the present: constant and attentive discussion with dead ancestors was the basis on which they planned their future and how they tried to avoid disagreement. For them, the dead were as alive as the living. When people become modern, determined to do better than their ancestors, they cut many of their ties to the past, and became orphans of time. Knowing what to do next becomes more difficult. Machines have mitigated the insecurity this generates by creating regularity, a world constructed to produce predictable results, with clocks that allow every hour to be planned in advance and every duty to be given a fixed place in the day. But anxiously watching the minutes go by, never to return, can transform life into a perpetual war against time and into an endless dispute about how best to spend and savour one’s precious moments. Punctuality and efficiency have often become slave-masters, whipping people to cram more activities and achievements into every day, forcing them to surrender their personal rhythms to fixed, anonymous timetables. Humanity is increasingly split not just by privilege, but also by temperament, between those who appreciate regularity and an ordered life, content to fit in to what society has arranged for them, so that they do not have to constantly make decisions for themselves, and those who want to be in control of what they do and when they do it, to perform each activity at their own speed, to obtain a good part of their pleasure from surprises, variety and improvisation. This is the great division about what people would like the future to be.

  Now time is being insistently revealed as more precious than money, not for everybody, far from it, and not at all stages of life, but enough to question whether existing ways of buying and selling time, which is what earning a living now involves, are the only ones that humans can invent. Technology has yet to tackle this problem. It has hitherto tried to conquer time, liberate humans from its constraints, make everything happen faster. In the internet it has created a gigantic freezer stuffed with memory, in which the past, the present and the future are stored, potentially an archive of all that has ever happened, as well as being the instantaneous messenger of every thought sparked by the present and the theatre where visions of the future are played out. This is organised to give you what you want, or what other people want you to want, but not to remind you of what you prefer to forget.

  The French mathematician Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), who almost beat Einstein to the discovery of the theory of relativity, proposed that chaos was an integral part of the world and that inside order there was hidden disorder. Islands of turbulence in the midst of well-behaved regularity made it impossible to make long-term predictions because minute variations in initial conditions could ultimately produce enormous consequences at a later stage. He is at the origin of the idea which has now become familiar and which could only be fully understood when computers were developed much later, that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could create huge storms thousands of miles away.

  He lauded intuition, by which he meant not guesswork, but the ability ‘to unite elements long since known but till then scattered and seemingly foreign to each other . . . The value of an observation comes from its giving new value to the old facts it unites.’ Einstein said that the goal of science was to discover ‘the unity of a complex of appearances which to direct sense experience appear to be quite separate things’. Poincaré said the goal is to make sense out of confusion and to do so by reshaping it with elegance, and that one’s guide should be t
o search for beauty. ‘If nature was not beautiful, it would not be worth studying, and life would not be worth living. A scientist does not study nature because it is useful, but because he derives pleasure from it, because it is beautiful.’ For Poincaré, beauty meant simplicity. It could be recognised because it economised thought, just as machines economised effort. He did not search for certainty. ‘All certainty is a lie,’ he said. A command of the facts was only half the journey. What mattered more was the relationships between facts. So he took an interest in almost every branch of knowledge, because nothing was necessarily irrelevant. His friends commented on how ‘his imagination was almost poetic in its intensity and scope.’ ‘His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement’ in the face of nature. He argued that the best training for a scientist was in the humanities. His favourite reading was stories of exploration and travel. In conversation, or in telling an anecdote, ‘he hardly ever began at the beginning, his mind did not work in a straight line, but radiated from the centre to the periphery.’ He was always searching for practical applications which would make good use of what in a short-sighted view would appear to be mere incongruities.

  I value incompatibilities, disagreements and uncertainties that break up reality into fragments of truth and illusion and open the door to invention. When Humpty Dumpty falls off a wall and smashes his egg-shell into little pieces, there is an alternative to just gluing those pieces together again. It is also possible to make an omelette out of the mess, combined with many other ingredients, and not only with ones to which one is accustomed. The future is an endless series of experiments. Disagreement is a challenge to the imagination. Detachment is the reward of conflicting memories. As knowledge expands and fragments, fractures appear between what is predetermined and what is not. Facts mutate into mysteries and questions breed more questions than answers. A more adventurous idea of freedom emerges. Freedom is not merely a right, but a skill to be acquired, the skill to view the world through different lenses, through lenses other than one’s own, the skill to imagine what no-one has imagined before, to find beauty or meaning or inspiration. Each life is a fable about freedom.

  [12]

  Is ridicule the most effective form of non-violent protest?

  ‘TAKE THAT SMILE OFF your face.’ ‘Stop playing the clown.’ Those are the only pearls of advice about humour that I remember from my schooldays, when I was even given six strokes of the cane because my housemaster was worried that I was laughing at him. People in authority take care to conceal how vulnerable they are and how fearful of any hint that they may be thought ridiculous. The Indians, a very long time ago, believed that the gods created the world as a playground where they could amuse themselves like children building sandcastles and then knocking them down, but too many people find nothing very funny about the petty tyrannies that make havoc of daily life.

  Of course, no professor of humour could survive being told: ‘From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday, I intend to read it.’ No prophet has yet urged the jesters of the world to unite, so that humour could puncture arrogance or hypocrisy and rescue the powerless from contempt. Why is humour treated as a marginal amusement? Could it be an alternative to violent resistance or replace indignant street demonstrations? When so many people have to obey governments they despise as stupid or corrupt and have their lives poisoned by megalomaniac bosses, is mockery an art that could be developed to do more than protect them from despair?

  While Eisenstein was experimenting with the new art of the cinema to relieve his suffering in a world that obstinately rejected him, his contemporary Lao She (1899–1966) was seeing what humour could achieve. He introduced the word into the Chinese language, youmou, winning fame as one of his country’s best-loved modern novelists and dramatists, and becoming that rare phenomenon, a Chinese writer who was also a bestselling author in the U.S.A.

  Lao She grew up in great poverty, to the extent of sometimes not having enough to eat. His family were all illiterate; his mother was a washerwoman and cleaner. With enormous difficulty, he managed to get a free place in a primary school and eventually qualify as a teacher. That would normally have meant success and a job for life, particularly as he was quickly promoted. But he resigned. He wanted to be independent. He refused to have to pretend to be friends with corrupt officials, whom he damned as ‘hobgoblins and devils’. Poverty seemed preferable, even if, in mid-winter, he had to sell his fur coat to provide his mother with clothing and food. Being poor, he said, it was natural that he should malign the world, and being strong-headed, that he should judge others by the criterion of his own feelings. Humour enabled him to detach himself and to raise himself above suffering. At school he never once cried, however hard his teacher beat him, and never asked for pardon, just as his mother said she would prefer to die rather than ask for help. His alternative to rebellion was to assert his own dignity, and that of all poor people, whose company he always preferred to that of the famous and successful, even when he became one of the most famous people in China, proclaimed ‘People’s Artist’, ‘Great Master of Language’, a member of parliament and much else. He did not just meet poor people in a tea house to ‘secretly record their actions and their conversations. I have never done that. I only want to make friends. They help me and I help them. They come to wish me happiness on my birthday and I do the same when there is a marriage or a birth in their homes.’

  At the age of twenty-five he left for England, part of the huge emigration of the Chinese that is the forgotten counterpart of European escape to the New World. Somehow he got a job teaching Chinese at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, where he spent five years, from 1924 to 1929. However, confronted by Londoners who seemed to assume that all Chinese were smokers of opium, smugglers of ammunition, or cruel barbarians, how could he defend himself, and how could he respond to condescending businessmen making money out of trade with China while ignoring the country’s magnificent ancient culture? How could he be polite to patronising missionaries convinced of their own superiority? ‘The English are prejudiced and boring,’ he wrote, ‘but they are not as mean as they appear to be; they have no humour; and I can only write about them in a humorous vein, for otherwise they would sound like a band of miserable, half-mad fools.’

  His answer was to make fun of his humiliations and those of his fellow immigrants. Instead of reacting to cruelty and injustice through revolutionary protest, he preferred to soothe the pain of ordinary people by squeezing joy out of their minor, everyday triumphs over adversity, and by revealing the absurdities that surrounded them. He wrote novels in which he created laughable characters out of manipulative politicians, pompous policemen, prejudiced judges, educational experts constantly introducing new methods, ‘superficially modern students . . . split into 327 parties’ and incapable of deciding what to put in the place of the evils they denounced, bewildered bourgeois in search of values to justify their ambitions, clerks commuting between an office which is ‘the monster which waits with its big mouth wide open’ and a home where the wife is ‘the female devil’ waiting to swallow the husband up. He ridiculed ‘official business’, producing ‘documents without conclusions’, bureaucracy that ‘eats money and vomits documents’, and naïve importers of foreign habits. Above all, he denounced ‘the sound and smell of money’ as poisoning personal and family relationships.

  At the same time, he created charming characters who could be loved despite their failings. The most cherished of them is Hsiang-Tzu, a poor rickshaw puller, trying to scrape a living and save enough to buy his own rickshaw, so that he could at last be free and independent, but who is repeatedly foiled by all sorts of disagreeable cheats and thugs, until he is driven to becoming a thief himself and betraying his colleagues, learning to smoke, drink and gamble, because a little temporary enjoyment is all he can dream of as a relief from the misery of his existence. ‘Life was so cheerless, so painful and without hope. The pain of
the poisonous wheel of life would be dulled briefly by the poisonous medication of wine and prostitutes, poison to kill poison. Who has a better plan?’

  Lao She did not have a better plan. Humour, for him was ‘an attitude of mind’ that needed to be cultivated to make life tolerable. It meant watching people like a tourist finding everything interesting. His aim was to maintain joyfulness and generosity despite all the horrors that humanity perpetrates. Satire was not enough for him, its sarcasm was too cold, and its ambition to inspire antipathy towards its victims he considered unjust: ‘I hate a bad person, but he also has good points; I love a good man, but he also had his bad points.’ Wit did not satisfy him fully either, because it did not appeal enough to gut feelings. Farce, laughter for its own sake, was fine, but again there was something missing from it – sympathy, which was what he cherished most. His response to suffering was to show that everyone was fascinating and everyone was ridiculous, even the author who pointed that out. ‘All humans are brothers and all have defects’, and there was joy to be had from the recognition of ‘the little eccentricities’ of each individual. What delighted him was observing character, portraying its contradictions, the conflict of dreams and disappointments, and resilience in the face of almost inevitable failure. ‘The art of the humorist consists in showing the ridiculous aspect of things . . . but he is not content to point this out; he recognises that it is the common lot of humanity.’ He quoted Thackeray saying that ‘the humorous writer professes to awake and direct your love, your pity, your kindness – your scorn for untruth, pretention, imposture – your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy’. Lao She has been called ‘the Chinese cousin of Dickens and Mark Twain’, whose writings he loved: they would not just have loved him if they had survived into the twentieth century, but also been shaken by the predicament of humour that he struggled with, the limits of what humour could achieve.