I'm telling you because I know.
I saw him later, swinging through the double doors in his American trenchcoat and trilby.
'How's the Brief?' asked his friend.
'Having a bit of trouble with the old crocodile that's all.'
The old crocodile. I suppose he means me. Do I look like a Leviathan? Do I look like Hobbes? I hope not. It might be flattering to have a philosopher's jaw but I'd rather be mistaken for Descartes. I know you'll think that is because he was a Catholic, it's not, it's because he did his best thinking inside a stove. I've never had much patience with Hobbes. I can work with a man who is a) an athiest, b) a monarchist, c) a nominalist, d) a materialist, but I can't work with a man who is all of these things at the same time.
Well, Hobbes's bastard shade is having its day out in the City. We are all athiests, materialists, nominalists, now. Oddly, we seem to be turning into monarchists too, there's nothing as effective as abolishing a King to bring out the worst of royalist sentimentality. The antique shops are crammed with fading Union Jacks and coronation mugs. The richer men buy gewgaws from Windsor Castle. It's too late, can't turn the clock back, ticks the cliché, although, God knows, we turn it back day and night when it's a matter of prejudice. No, in the dreary Hobbes world, where religion is superstition and the only possible actions are actions of self-interest, love is dead. That young man in the spotted braces thinks me a fool to listen to opera, to go to Mass, to sit quietly with a book that is better than me. What use is it? What use is it to love God, to dig my hands in the dark red soil of my home, and feel for it a passion which is not posession but recognition? What use is it to believe that beauty is a Good, when metaphysics has sold her in the market-place?
Of course we have romance. Everyone can see how useful romance is. Even the newspapers like romance. They should; they have helped to create it, it is their daily doses of world malaise that poison the heart and mind to such a degree that a strong antidote is required to save what humanness is left in us. I am not a machine, there is only so much and no more that I can absorb of the misery of my kind, when my tears are exhausted a dullness takes their place, and out of that dullness a terrible callousness, so that I look on suffering and feel it not.
Isn't it well known that nothing shocks us? That the photographs of wretchedness that thirty years ago would have made us protest in the streets, now flicker by our eyes and we hardly see them? More vivid, more graphic, more pornographic even, is the newsman's brief. He must make us feel, but like a body punched and punched again, we take the blows and do not even notice the damage they have done.
Reportage is violence. Violence to the spirit. Violence to the emotional sympathy that should quicken in you and me when face to face we meet with pain. How many defeated among our own do we step over and push aside on our way home to watch the evening news? 'Terrible' you said at Somalia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Russia, China, and Indian earthquake, the American floods, and then you watched a quiz show or a film because there's nothing you can do, nothing you can do, and the fear and unease that such powerlessness brings, trails in its wash, a dead arrogance for the beggar on the bridge that you pass everyday. Hasn't he got legs and a cardboard box to sleep in?
And still we long to feel.
What's left? Romance. Love's counterfeit free of charge to all. Fall into my arms and the world with its sorrows will shrink up into a tinsel ball. This is the favourite antidote to the cold robot life of faraway perils and nearby apathy. Apathy. From the Greek A Pathos. Want of feeling. But, don't we know, only find the right boy, only find the right girl, and feeling will be yours. My colleagues tell me I need just such a remedy. Buried up to my neck in pink foam nothing can hurt me now. Safe to feel. All I can feel is you darling.
I was standing at the station waiting for the train, when a woman approached me, with a wilting red rose in a plastic wrapper.
'Buy it for your lucky day.'
'When will that be?'
'The day you fall in love. I see romance for you. A tall blonde lady.'
'Romance does not interest me.'
She stared at me as though I had uttered a blasphemy in church, and I suppose we were in a church of a kind, the portable temple of sentimentality that can be flapping about your head at a moment's notice.
She walked away, hawking her exhausted roses around the others, some of whom were glad enough to buy. I don't blame them, the dead world greedy of feeling, but there must be another way.
My own austerity, some might say severity, is like those magic girdles that knights used to wear when fighting dragons. Irrelevant, certainly, but it protects me by reminding me of what things I value. And the things I value are not the fake attentions and easy affections of a world unmoored from its proper harbour. I too long to feel, but feeling genuine and deep. My colleagues think me a remote sort of man, but, if I do not know what feeling is, at least I have not yet settled down into what I know it is not.
- Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
'How's the Brief?' asked his friend.
'Having a bit of trouble with the old crocodile that's all.'
The old crocodile. I suppose he means me. Do I look like a Leviathan? Do I look like Hobbes? I hope not. It might be flattering to have a philosopher's jaw but I'd rather be mistaken for Descartes. I know you'll think that is because he was a Catholic, it's not, it's because he did his best thinking inside a stove. I've never had much patience with Hobbes. I can work with a man who is a) an athiest, b) a monarchist, c) a nominalist, d) a materialist, but I can't work with a man who is all of these things at the same time.
Well, Hobbes's bastard shade is having its day out in the City. We are all athiests, materialists, nominalists, now. Oddly, we seem to be turning into monarchists too, there's nothing as effective as abolishing a King to bring out the worst of royalist sentimentality. The antique shops are crammed with fading Union Jacks and coronation mugs. The richer men buy gewgaws from Windsor Castle. It's too late, can't turn the clock back, ticks the cliché, although, God knows, we turn it back day and night when it's a matter of prejudice. No, in the dreary Hobbes world, where religion is superstition and the only possible actions are actions of self-interest, love is dead. That young man in the spotted braces thinks me a fool to listen to opera, to go to Mass, to sit quietly with a book that is better than me. What use is it? What use is it to love God, to dig my hands in the dark red soil of my home, and feel for it a passion which is not posession but recognition? What use is it to believe that beauty is a Good, when metaphysics has sold her in the market-place?
Of course we have romance. Everyone can see how useful romance is. Even the newspapers like romance. They should; they have helped to create it, it is their daily doses of world malaise that poison the heart and mind to such a degree that a strong antidote is required to save what humanness is left in us. I am not a machine, there is only so much and no more that I can absorb of the misery of my kind, when my tears are exhausted a dullness takes their place, and out of that dullness a terrible callousness, so that I look on suffering and feel it not.
Isn't it well known that nothing shocks us? That the photographs of wretchedness that thirty years ago would have made us protest in the streets, now flicker by our eyes and we hardly see them? More vivid, more graphic, more pornographic even, is the newsman's brief. He must make us feel, but like a body punched and punched again, we take the blows and do not even notice the damage they have done.
Reportage is violence. Violence to the spirit. Violence to the emotional sympathy that should quicken in you and me when face to face we meet with pain. How many defeated among our own do we step over and push aside on our way home to watch the evening news? 'Terrible' you said at Somalia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Russia, China, and Indian earthquake, the American floods, and then you watched a quiz show or a film because there's nothing you can do, nothing you can do, and the fear and unease that such powerlessness brings, trails in its wash, a dead arrogance for the beggar on the bridge that you pass everyday. Hasn't he got legs and a cardboard box to sleep in?
And still we long to feel.
What's left? Romance. Love's counterfeit free of charge to all. Fall into my arms and the world with its sorrows will shrink up into a tinsel ball. This is the favourite antidote to the cold robot life of faraway perils and nearby apathy. Apathy. From the Greek A Pathos. Want of feeling. But, don't we know, only find the right boy, only find the right girl, and feeling will be yours. My colleagues tell me I need just such a remedy. Buried up to my neck in pink foam nothing can hurt me now. Safe to feel. All I can feel is you darling.
I was standing at the station waiting for the train, when a woman approached me, with a wilting red rose in a plastic wrapper.
'Buy it for your lucky day.'
'When will that be?'
'The day you fall in love. I see romance for you. A tall blonde lady.'
'Romance does not interest me.'
She stared at me as though I had uttered a blasphemy in church, and I suppose we were in a church of a kind, the portable temple of sentimentality that can be flapping about your head at a moment's notice.
She walked away, hawking her exhausted roses around the others, some of whom were glad enough to buy. I don't blame them, the dead world greedy of feeling, but there must be another way.
My own austerity, some might say severity, is like those magic girdles that knights used to wear when fighting dragons. Irrelevant, certainly, but it protects me by reminding me of what things I value. And the things I value are not the fake attentions and easy affections of a world unmoored from its proper harbour. I too long to feel, but feeling genuine and deep. My colleagues think me a remote sort of man, but, if I do not know what feeling is, at least I have not yet settled down into what I know it is not.
- Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies