“One recurring figment, which I find oddly consoling, involves a correspondence with June Wilson, whom I have not seen in many years. We are explaining matters to each other, and the conversation turns on my situation, which it soothes me to be able to discuss with her. She is keen to impress on me the urgency of her understanding and sympathy. She is entirely rational and humane—an ideal friend. It is such a hopeful condition, our communication, and I see it in the form of actual letters, there in front of me, on the table in Lyon’s, or wherever I happen to be. She is encouraging, saying, in so many ways, ‘There’s something behind this, and you will get to the bottom of it. There is a way through it, Alec. It is simply a question, as so often in life, of holding your nerve. That’s all you’ve to do—hold your nerve.’”
My brother John has wiry red-brown hair, unlike anyone else in the family, and eyes that are never still. He is tall and wide, and his hands are several sizes too large for trivial tasks. I am afraid of him, and grateful. His advice has been invaluable. But I am not sure that I respect him, and I think he knows it.
When I told him I’d been arrested, and what my crime was, he grabbed the desk—held it between finger and thumb. In his stripes and collar and tie he looked as henchmen do in thrillers when a knife catches them in the back.
Color and animation soon returned. He yelled at me, “Why on earth did you do it?” He meant: Why had I gone to the police about the burglary? He pointed out, rightly, that if I had not, they would never have fingerprinted the house, or found out about Cyril. I told John that it was a point of principle. I could not allow myself to be blackmailed by Cyril’s naval acquaintance. He yelled again that I was an ass. I was disgusting, unimaginable, revolting—but mostly I was an ass. A normal-sized shadow occupied the smoked-glass door of the office, then moved away, and John lowered his voice. How could someone so clever be so stupid? He spat the word over his desk. I could taste the tobacco in the air-borne spittle, and for a moment it was as if he had kissed me.
I remained calm and, in the middle of our altercation, realized that being calm was the problem. To a passionate person like John, for whom a certain kind of permitted masculine emotion—being moved to tears by the coronation, say—is a marker of trust and sincerity, a trump card with which to confound the silly-ass rationalists, my self-control must have seemed utterly infuriating.
I remember The Times of 3 June last year with distaste. Phalanx of Princes. Ovation from Great Throng. Fervor in Oxford Street. Tribal Dancing and Processions (this last not in Oxford Street). Judges in Their Robes. Pages of it—so that one had to look hard for glimpses of an unhypnotized reality. There were few. The whole paper was given over to spectacle and genuflection, apart from the weather forecast, and two letters on page 9 about Icelandic fishing and the price of Danish butter.
Determined as I am, like the spring, to mark a propitious change, I am pleased to say that the letter about Danish butter may have had an effect on governmental policy in respect of its Ag and Fish subsidies. The proposed rise in the price of butter to perhaps 5s a pound has not taken place in the half-year since Mr. Andreas Jacobsen put pen to paper; instead it has fallen to an average of 3s 9d a pound.
I am noticing things again. The strife in my veins is over, and the world is still out there. I watched a heron catch a fish today, poking forward, an old man rejuvenated by a win at Doncaster. My mother called on the telephone to thank me for her Christmas presents (a blanket and a pot of cyclamen). The Hutchings boy came in for a game of chess, and then his mathematics lesson, and together we considered a trefoil knot as a segmented reduction, and how the indefinite length of a symbolic description—one can always increase the number of segments—makes it hard to tell, merely from their description, if any two knots are the same.
His name is Raymond and he is at the local grammar. He whispers and stammers, but what he stammers is surprisingly informative. He considers problems as I considered them at his age, distractedly but seriously. He sits at a near-perfect ninety-degree angle to me, in the green library chair, and makes very few notes. He prefers neat diagrams and instant disclosure, the candor of the shy.
His parents want him to be a doctor, but he wants to mend pianos.
He was meant for Wargrave—paternal ambition—until, so Ray maintains, his mother put her foot down. Over my dead body, she said, will that boy go to one of those schools, and evidently she carried the day.
Perhaps all mothers feel the same way. Mine did. After my revelation, almost the first thing she said was that she had never wanted me to follow John to the same school. It was “wrong for me,” she said. And perhaps it was. It was certainly frightening at times, and of course the masters were disappointments, to themselves and others. I was nervous whenever I parsed something well or found out a problem—my first readings in Euler, say. The pleasure was like sunny wind in April, it blew itself out; and each triumph bordered on a faintness of heart at the thought of what might come next—failure, punishment—and what might not. Christopher solved that for me, because his presence taught me how to be on my own, and if I had not gone to Wargrave I would not have met him, or welcomed my solitude, so that I cannot honestly say I regret any of it.
Tonight, I’m having cheese on toast. Sunday evening fare at Wargrave. Pleasure’s danger is that it echoes former pleasures and produces a likeness that fails on inspection, in which case don’t order the inspection! Cheese on toast, a pickled onion, and an apple before bed, that’s the ticket. I find malic acid to be an effective sedative.
I don’t know that I will ever recover my build. My thighs and calves are roughly the size and shape they were before the Stilboestrol, but now they have a different consistency. They’re flabby. I am vain, no doubt. I wear a vest, but then so do all men, and I have never enjoyed looking in mirrors. Outwardly, there is nothing peculiar. Inwardly, too, the pulse of fear has stopped and its murmur, taking my thoughts down as if by dictation, has faded. I am left with the images, the semi-swoons, and if I pay attention to the tinnitus in my right ear I can just hear the council of the machines deprecating half a show, half a memory, how unacceptable the half of it is, etc.
Therein lies a conundrum for thinking machines. They can do nothing by halves. In theory, they will be made to remember everything, and with such a lot to remember they might not grasp how important it is, sometimes, for persons to forget. That is a kind of demonstration of Wittgenstein’s saw—his Witticism, let us call it—about answers to questions of science not answering the questions of life.
But an educable machine would be no mere store. It would sift and discard, and discriminate, as a child does. That granted, one finds oneself treating mechanical memory as a normal feat of reconstruction, and then the difference between human and machine lessens considerably, because for both creatures remembering becomes evaluative and processual, rather than crudely restorative.
In my own case, the whole question of forgetting is problematic. I’m sure I have the fragments of things, the figments, somewhere. I’m sure most people do, even the senile. Nothing is forgotten in that sense. What I lack, and this is the great change to have been worked in me, is the capacity to organize those fragments properly. (But if they are not organizable, how can I be said to remember them?) Between the walls of his study, with its eyeless maps and Degrees, the kindly Dr. Stallbrook says that this is a symptom of shock. Shell-shocked memories exist in a twilit state.