One is left with the rest of the world. I told Raymond that it is satisfying to mend things, as well as people, and that music gives a great deal of comfort to almost everybody. At which he pointed to my violin, lying open in its case these last seven days, asked if he could have a go, and gave a most spirited, lovely rendition of “Over the Mountains”! I have the Ferrier recording.
Now if I had had a son like that—particularly like Ray—I would not have wanted to send him away, either. When we sit together, it is as if our two lives have blended in time and are no more than the same life at two different stages.
The tax on old pleasures, those I have come to value more and more—food, sunlight on the common, listening to familiar music—is that they are shadowed by discoveries. One has had the chance to do so much “not in the ordinary line” that it is painful to find oneself of use in this new and ordinary way.
I think empathy is a treated, enhanced version of sympathy, but I am not sure it exists. We can’t be in someone else’s emotional shoes. We don’t ever feel what they’re feeling. What makes us cry or makes our heart race is probably just this intense awareness of “not quite”—of being so close to feeling what they’re feeling. I’d go so far as to say that empathy is a sort of artifice. And what, one might ask, is wrong with that?
To Brighton yesterday, at last, for which bright skies.
I went to the fortune-teller’s stall on the front pier and before I knew it I was outside again, being fussed over by Anthony and his wife, Elizabeth. I’d fainted—the first time in years. I must have seen blood, though I examined myself thoroughly afterward for cuts and grazes and found none. I had no reading, that much is clear, because the shawled lady came out after me and pressed my shilling back into my hand.
It has left me shaken. On the train on the way back, a little sick with the seaside’s cure-all remedy—fish and chips—Elizabeth said that I looked as if I’d seen a ghost, and the moment she suggested it I seemed to hear someone else say, “Why on earth did you do it?”—though it was not exactly the voice of anyone I knew, or at least not the voice of any one person, and the voice was not angry—and I answered back, quite honestly, “Because I didn’t think it mattered.”
What did I do? What am I supposed to have done? What have I not done, yet?
Why my mind alights on these imponderables I’m not certain. They seem to be puzzles that are “unsolvable” in the mathematical sense of that word. Not puzzles that absolutely lack a range of answers, but ones that we cannot in practice find answers to—ones that a procedure or a process will not clarify in any humanly helpful stretch of time. I think we have been asking these simple questions since we first killed living things and ate them, perhaps since we first woke up and knew that the day was the day. It probably is true that if you know where something is at any locatable point in the universe and you have a full description of the forces working on it, then you can in principle work out where it will be many years from now. But there is just not the time to make that calculation. It isn’t algorithmically compressible, and therefore the puzzle is unsolvable. I should add, by the way, that I see quantum uncertainty in a similar light—i.e., as something practically unverifiable, not as a problem that is inherently mysterious. The mystery resides in the fact that the observer who supposedly acts on wave function to bring about its collapse into stability does so at intervals. But if the observer could be made to carry on staring at the system—ever so rudely, as it were—then its evolution might slow to a halt. In other words, history happens in the gaps. We can’t in practice keep on looking at something all the time and expect to know what it will do next. A total observation yields nothing. If you do look at circumstances that way, you end up with a person or a situation that is stuck in time, and how they are ever to be sprung from that I do not know. Some sort of induced calamity by one’s own hand or another’s. A fluke from outer space.
Or a bit of a shock. When I heard that voice asking why I’d done whatever it is I’m supposed to have done, I had a strong memory of asking the fortune-teller if I would ever meet Christopher again, and she said yes, we are all made of the same materials, we are atoms, bits of Morse, and you are breathing him in even now. Her shawl smelled maternal—a hint of bergamot and talc—but her eyes were like Indra’s net, inhumanly compound, and after that I must have passed out.
I came back from the station via the deep shelter, at the edge of the common’s south side, where I sometimes fancy the murmur has gone into hiding, along with the machines. They are down there, at the bottom of the spiral staircase, stuck in a loop, possessors of all the information they need to find out about the universe, but unable to sift any of it. Doubtless they find it unacceptable.
In the light of these winter afternoons, the eastern half of the entrance to the shelter stays white and frosty. The western section, caught by the sun, is like one of those bronze cauldrons the early Britons buried, not in fear of death, but to extend the feast of life. I had an impulse to go over and put my ear to the door.
There I stood, rattling the padlock like a madman. Stallbrook says that analysis is a little like the voyage of a shaman who goes down into middle earth to bring back the buried parts of a sick man’s soul, but I don’t know about that. One can have too much talk, which in any case tends to drive people away. It is better to listen. The machines are in council, down there, wherever they are, because they cannot decide on anything. That is why they suffer from a sense of persecution and abstraction. They need a connection to something beyond themselves, which it may not be easy for them to achieve, or admit, given their prowess, but I’ve decided I’m willing to lend an ear. Before speech there was listening, and the dead rise with the love of it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the Bodleian Library in Oxford for a Sassoon Visiting Fellowship in 2016 that greatly assisted the completion of this book. I wish also to acknowledge the collegiate support of the universities of Melbourne and Warwick, the hospitality of Yale Review, Sonofabook, and Hotel magazines, the generosity of the Society of Authors, the encouragement of the BBC National Short Story Award 2017 (for which the opening chapter of this novel was shortlisted), the critical help of Anna Aslanyan, and the friendly guidance at all times of Dr. Hunaid Rashiq and family.
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Praise for Murmur
Goldsmiths Prize Shortlist
BBC National Short Story Award Shortlist (for the novel’s opening chapter)
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by Guardian * New Scientist * Times Literary Supplement * Australian Book Review