Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  “Where have you gone now, my dear, in your thoughts?” asked Helen, seeing that he was clearly once again elsewhere.

  “I was basking in the pleasure of your soft hand on my cheek and your recognition that I am a good man.”

  “You bloody old liar,” said Helen gaily, this time putting her hands around his neck and feigning to strangle him.

  Onwards, Noble Yorick!

  “I’ve been thinking about Adolf Hitler,” Victor told Yorick when he returned to the house.

  The bird flapped its wings with evident happiness at seeing him.

  “As a young man he was twice refused entrance to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He was declared ‘unfit for painting’, and his ardent dreams of becoming an artist collapsed. Now: many have made the flippant observation that had he possessed more talent—and objectivity requires me to admit that his work wasn’t ‘absolute crap’, to use Harry’s expression—he might have embraced a career in painting and not embarked on the alternative vocation of war and mass murder.

  “Be that as it may, Yorick, for me it isn’t the moral of the story. What strikes me as significant is that he couldn’t just say ‘fair enough, they’re right, I love painting, but it’s true that I’m not very good at it, not up to the Academy’s high standards’. He was incapable of anything approaching an objective opinion about his abilities. And please do not think that this is impossible, because it clearly isn’t. Many men and women who set their minds on a life pursuing this or that art—whether painting, music, literature, ballet or whatever—are perfectly able, to one degree or another, to make a reasonable judgment on the quality, or its absence, of their oeuvre. And if, despite their best efforts, they don’t make the grade, don’t show any real talent, they just come to terms with it, with more or less regret or sorrow.

  “But Adolf? With his pretty landscapes, quaint town squares, portraits of fair young women, handsome hunting dogs and burgeoning flower pots? He couldn’t admit his lack of genius to himself and blamed the others for their flawed judgment. And do you know what he did soon after coming to power in Germany? He settled his scores with the arbiters of taste and talent in art. He gave orders to clear the museums and studios and to begin the destruction of the kind of paintings that he simply couldn’t or didn’t want to produce himself—modern art, which he proclaimed degenerate.

  “There’s subjective man for you, Yorick. When you cannot or won’t see or comprehend anything other than your own vision of things, everything that is in competition with, or differs from, your vision becomes unacceptable and perhaps offensive, even obscene, a matter to be eliminated, preferably along with its authors.

  “Of course, most subjective people are absolutely harmless; don’t mistake me there. But those with passion and hatred and vengeance and envy in their souls … well, anything can happen with these people if the circumstances are propitious. Often the worst. Whether they beat their wives, behave obnoxiously in the office, jail, torture or kill their opponents or invade a neighboring country.

  “And it must be said, now I think about it, that other kinds of subjective men than Adolf Hitler can participate in these great crimes. Take Eichmann, someone quite far down the pyramid of the Nazi leadership. He wasn’t a violent man; he didn’t, apparently, hate anyone in particular; he even liked the Jews, to the extent that he learned at least the rudiments of Yiddish and studied their culture. And yet he shipped them off to certain, atrocious death in their millions. And what was on his mind? What motivated him? He had no motives at all, according to Hannah Arendt. And I believe her. It was sheer ‘thoughtlessness’, she had written after his trial! The man simply didn’t think about it for himself, didn’t judge what he was doing, was remote from reality, remote from himself, incapable of objectivity.”

  I think he enjoys my speeches, thought Victor. He certainly looks cheerful. But then again, I’m quite prepared to believe that my squawking on like this is actually quite disagreeable to him and causing pain in his little head.

  However Yorick felt, it was clear from his keen attitude that he wanted to participate in all this noise Victor was making. He needed more words, that was clear.

  Victor still felt that it was premature to conclude anything definitive from his evolving thoughts about truth, for example, or objectivity; he would like to kick his ideas around a little more before settling on one view or another about these questions.

  “All is pro-vi-sion-al,” chirped Yorick gaily to fill the silence.

  Victor smiled and ventured two fingers through the bars of the cage to caress the bird’s head. To his pleasure, Yorick didn’t flinch from this physical contact. The gesture reminded Victor of Helen’s hand on his own face. We all love tenderness, thought Victor.

  “Yes, all is provisional, my friend. Even parrots and humans. Not in the sense that we’re both going to die but that we shall in time be replaced by something quite different. Or indeed nothing at all.”

  In the meantime, he thought, while you can only say what I teach you to say, I am condemned to try and keep my head and my calm in this maelstrom of words and ideas into which I have knowingly plunged. And there is no return to the past for either of us, no going back.

  “Onwards, noble Yorick!” cried Victor, startling the bird, who flapped and screeched from either fear or excitement, he knew not which.

  “Today, ‘Every man is an island’! Quite a mouthful, I know, which I would not have dreamed of teaching a parrot less intelligent and talented than thou.”

  Both Victor and Yorick were now well acquainted with the form of these lessons and rapidly settled into their usual routine. Their first session with the words of this phrase went well and left Victor full of optimism, even though he now knew that it would take a good week or two to add this idea to Yorick’s growing stock of knowledge.

  Unhappy Men Should Stay at Home

  Three months had now passed since Victor had left his job for this new life of leisure in thought. Perhaps, he asked himself, I should rather use some of my freedom and new fortune to go and lie for a week or two in meditation on a beach in the Seychelles or, more ambitiously, to discover the temples at Angkor? As the first cool and rainy days of autumn began, the travel supplement of his weekend newspaper was telling him of the urgency of doing either or both of these things, and he read their exhortations with great interest and temptation.

  Unfortunately for the travel agents, the main article in the literary supplement of the same edition carried a review of a new book about the old Chinese sage Lao Tzu and a selection of his wisdoms. One struck Victor prophetically: “One may know the world without going out of doors, / One may grasp the nature of everything without looking out of the window, / The further one goes, the less one knows.” Saves me an agonizing ten days getting sand out of my toe nails or fighting gangs of wild monkeys in the Cambodian jungle, thought Victor, who was very much in sympathy with the old Taoist’s wisdom, though he had hardly dared express it to himself, in our age when travel was generally considered absolutely obligatory to “open the mind,” “learn about other cultures,” “confront one’s ideas with other people’s,” and so on and so on.

  Victor had travelled several times around the world and learned little or nothing. In fact, he was alternately reassured and confounded that people everywhere largely behaved and thought in exactly the same way, according to the rather limited range of emotions and reactions open to the human species. Despite what the sages of our epoch were constantly telling him.

  No, I prefer to stay at home for the moment and continue my long and perilous voyage to the center of my mind, he concluded. I can hardly leave Yorick in a stranger’s hands anyhow.

  And he remembered what Pascal too had written: “All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.”

  Concentration Camps and Genocide

  Victor had always struggled with his dear Nietzsche’s postulate of the eternal return of all things, even as a
poetic and philosophic hypothesis to affirm our personal duty to accept and indeed love our fate in life. His suspicion was that Nietzsche had surrendered to an overwhelming compulsion, perhaps against his better judgment, to ‘conclude’ with a bang his revolutionary revelations about the nature of man and our extraordinary adventure on earth up to that time. In his unshakeable desire to celebrate and embrace life with joy he had, faute de mieux, settled for this consolation as the final word.

  His thoughts had wandered to the eternal return from an article in his newspaper that morning about ‘bibliotherapy’. It seemed that reading clinics were sprouting up at an astonishing rate around the country to ‘treat’ various ailments and emotional woes with literature. Exposed to books in sessions with therapists, crippled people had begun dancing; the demented were being brought back to sanity; the depressed and drugged were throwing away their psychotropics; marriages were being mended and divorces avoided. In short, pain and not only mental but physical distress were being alleviated up and down the land. These happy stories were endless.

  Victor was astonished. Have we completely lost the thread of human development, he asked himself? To the point where—even as told by media hacks—we are now ‘discovering’ again the psychological and spiritual benefits, the necessity even, of reading? It was a real lesson to him. One must really assume nothing about what we have gained for the human spirit. It could all, apparently, be lost again.

  He thought suddenly of the arguments he had once had with a woman friend who believed that concentration camps and genocide were a thing of the past, consigned to history, and that they could never return and were not worth talking about. She was always infuriated not only by his interest in these questions but by his insistence that we remained still only half a dozen steps away from a repetition of such atrocities. “You’re always so negative,” she had said bitterly. “You see evil everywhere.” It was true. He swore he could identify with ease those who remained ready for the task. The local butcher (“mere professional coincidence,” he told her, “it could have been the milkman”) could overnight volunteer to push and kick people towards the new gas chambers. She had defended the butcher, but with no real conviction. She didn’t like him either.

  They had not lasted long as a couple. It was true, he thought in retrospect: these were not thoughts to share at romantic, candle-lit dinners. At the time, he couldn’t help himself. He had learned better now. And he was proud that he had remained completely silent when, towards the end of their relationship, camps and genocide had emerged in the civil wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda within a short time of each other.

  It was evident, though, thought Victor, that everything had to be learned all over again with every man. That’s where Nietzsche had a point perhaps, though he didn’t justify his idea that way, and it wasn’t his purpose. It was not like science, which appeared to learn and advance from its mistakes and to continue to build. Every baby, on the other hand, is a potential future killer. Well, perhaps not every baby, but many of them.

  He turned back to the newspaper and read the conclusion of the article. A book therapist had observed: “Reading provides an opportunity to hold a thought together through time.” That was very good, thought Victor. That’s absolutely right and true. Clever woman. Holding thoughts together through time is my challenge too.

  Quite aside from the rediscovery of the usefulness of books in helping one reveal and develop one’s mind and soul, Victor did not share the general pessimism of literate men and women who feared the end of reading in our time. For himself, he had never seen so much of it. It had become unsafe even to walk down the street, with hordes of youngsters coming in the opposite direction reading text messages on their telephones and giving no thought to where they were stepping or with what and whom colliding. The state of New Jersey, in that pragmatic country on the other side of the Atlantic, had been quite right to ban the use of the portable telephone for any pedestrian on the move.

  At the same time, the computer and the Internet had unleashed an extravagant quantity of words upon the world. It seemed that everyone was writing! Someone must have made the calculation already (he would have to check), but he reckoned that the number of words generated in each minute, hour and day must have multiplied ten thousand-fold since the inception of these instruments. And if there was so much more writing, then presumably there had been a similar explosion in reading—it was certainly the case for the telephone, if this were still the name one gave to that device.

  Now, thought Victor, I have few illusions about the nature of much of this writing, but for the moment that doesn’t matter so much. People are expressing themselves! Yes, the Internet is a cesspool. And he had previously had no idea of the incredibly widespread need to insult and show contempt for others’ opinions that he had discovered when following with fascination and pain the multitude of so-called ‘discussions’ on various sites. But he clung optimistically to the idea that even the most poisonous idiot might eventually get bored with himself after the hundredth repetition of his own hateful lunacy and, just perhaps, experiment with another form of expression or thought, for variety if nothing else.

  Wasn’t that the way in which most of us developed, after all? We proclaimed something stupid, once, twice, maybe ten times, and then it began to sound stupid even to us. We hung on to it still because we didn’t have an alternative, but in time we wished to refine our way of thinking and our use of the words we had received in heritage. Now, when everyone was shooting off his or her opinion on everything under the sky with the click of a computer key, perhaps this process would finally undergo acceleration.

  After bibliotherapy—writing therapy! The next rage, said Victor to himself. And it’s already here. He wondered if schools would take it up. He had nothing but bad to say about the uselessness of his own education and had hoped it had improved when his son eventually went to school. There had apparently been little change. The epitaph on the tomb of his hopes about that had been delivered at a parents’ meeting with his son’s literature teacher. Memorably, she had warned: “Your children will be studying Jane Austen this term. They are not here to dissertate on their thoughts and feelings about her novels, but to analyze her use of punctuation and, particularly, the comma.” Victor had looked around him, expecting guffaws of laughter, if not protest, and seen only studious adults taking notes. The teacher looked well pleased with herself, as well she might be.

  Victor would have to come back to his school years as he reviewed his mental life. For the moment, even the idea made him flinch. He flipped his newspaper to his mouth and gave it a kiss and silent thanks for another stimulating hour with his morning coffee and got up to leave.

  Yorick Meets the Madwoman

  It was late in the evening, and Victor was returning home from a drinking session with Harry, slightly the worse for wear. They had both been in silent moods, and though they had said little or nothing to each other it had, as always, been pleasant to be together. A true friendship, he thought.

  A short way from his house, Victor was caught in a violent downpour. His first instinct was to raise his arm over his head, as though to protect himself from the blows of an assailant. And then he found himself ridiculous. What on earth does it matter if I get wet, he asked? He turned his face to the sky, opened his mouth widely and tried as best he could to gobble up the falling rain. It was delicious, exhilarating. What nonsense to cringe from raindrops!

  He saw her from a distance. Poor woman, he said to himself. Out even in this filthy weather. He crossed the pavement to his own side of the street so he would avoid entering her pacing zone, and then had second thoughts. Why not now? Why not speak to her, offer her my protection?

  Victor stumbled back over to the other pavement and kept walking until he was just a few yards from her. She was facing him. Instead of turning, according to her usual routine, to walk back her designated number of paces, she froze and bowed her head. She wasn’t even wearing a coat of any kind.


  “Good evening,” said Victor. “Terrible weather, isn’t it?”

  The woman remained stuck to the spot, her head hung.

  “Look. We must be neighbors. I’ve seen you here often. Can I help you in any way? I live just here.” He pointed to his front door. “Maybe you’d like to get out of the rain and have a cup of tea? You’re most welcome.”

  He heard something he took for a giggle, and a husky voice said: “Rather vodka.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Victor. “I never drink tea, actually. It just seemed like the right thing to propose. Personally, I’ll have a scotch. I’ve got vodka, or gin, and pretty much anything else one could want.” Oh, for God’s sake, shut up Victor, he proposed under his breath.

  The woman raised her head and fixed Victor with what he could best describe as a glare.

  “Vodka,” she repeated.

  Her mouth was strangely twisted, as though she were clenching one side of it tightly with her teeth.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said Victor. “This way.”

  He turned to check whether she was following him and she was indeed. So, she’s able to break out of the pacing routine if she wants to, he thought.

  As they stepped into his entrance, he pushed open the door to the kitchen and bid the woman to sit down. He took a towel from a fresh pile of linen on top of the washing machine and handed it to her. “Perhaps you could use this?” She said nothing but draped the towel over her head and left it there.

  “So, vodka it is. Would you like anything with it?”

  The woman didn’t answer.

  “Right. Back in a minute.”

  Victor went to his sitting room and took out bottles of vodka and scotch and glasses from his drinks cabinet. This all feels very strange, he thought. I hope she doesn’t grab a knife from the kitchen draws. Probably never find one, actually. I have difficulty enough myself.