Monet said he wanted to paint the air, a task not unlike writing about consciousness, the medium for seeing which can’t itself be seen. I have failed to paint the air or to write about consciousness, but it’s enough to know that there are states of mind and works of art which deliver this paradox: that the thing which is closest to us is the most mysterious. Something I’d glimpsed in the desert was now in front of me, already made. The pleasure of recognition shimmered through my bloodstream. Obsessive reflection, which had sent my own mind falling and flailing over the last few months, stood before me like a serene piece of nature, and I felt like a walker on a cliff path who is met by a perfect gale and can lean effortlessly into the slope with outstretched arms.
I hurried out of the gallery, trying to protect this decaying impression. My attention was locked on to my imagination and I was almost run over as I crossed the street. Passing the window of Hatchard’s bookshop, I saw the latest cluster of books to emerge from the great consciousness debate: Emotional Intelligence, The Feeling Brain, The Heart’s Reasons. I felt the giddy relief of knowing that I wasn’t going to read any of them. The fact that science has decided to include emotion in its majestic worldview seems about as astute as an astronomer discovering the moon.
In five minutes I must go and fetch my daughter from her school. How will I tell her where I’ve been? My novel, thank goodness, is abandoned, and the sequel to Aliens with a Human Heart is unlikely to deliver any aesthetic charge, other than the stunned incredulity which sometimes sells fifty-three million tickets. Life is coming to get me, like the latest model of the sea monster in Phèdre, no longer the agent of divine cruelty but of pointless information, squelching down the beach, dragging its tail in the sea; it will soon crush me, downloading its scaly mass of triviality into my frail mind, but I am going to go down fighting, fighting for the flash of freedom at the heart of things.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EDWARD ST. AUBYN lives in London with his two children. He is the author of The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels (Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mothers Milk, and At Last). Mother’s Milk was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006. His novel On the Edge was published in the United States for the first time by Picador in 2014. His latest novel is Lost for Words. You can sign up for email updates here.