he
question of whether we survive death is surely the most important one that can
occur to us. Yet almost nobody is concerned with it. With the decline of
Christianity, Western civilisation now ignores it completely. As a result,
people go blindly into death and are reborn at hazard.
J.S. Bach, Mozart, Schubert and
Brahms came to my bedside one night in a dream and told me they were all the
same entity. The next day I looked up their birth and death dates in GrovesDictionary and found that this could be
possible. Consider these dates: Bach (1685-1750); Mozart (1756-1791); Schubert
(1797-1828); Brahms (1833-1897). The entity waits six years and is reborn as
Mozart; waits six years and is reborn as Schubert; waits five years and is
reborn as Brahms. These figures broadly agree with Dr. Ian Stevenson’s
researches into reincarnation, which show that the average interval between
death and rebirth is quite short, though it varies somewhat from country to
country. Note too the continuity between their music. In particular, Brahms,
surrounded by full-fledged Romantic composers, is severely classical. Now what
happened to Brahms? Did the entity continue as a musician or did it decide to
try another field? If so, which? I would suggest mathematics or chess, for both
are related to music.
One of the most interesting aspects
of W.B. Yeats is his firm belief in reincarnation. He was determined to be
reborn, even if it meant being “pitched into the frogspawn of a blind man’s
ditch / A blind man battering blind men…” He had failed to understand the
message of the Upanishads – which he
helped translate – that one should strive not to be reborn. Was he reborn as a
poet? If so, as who? I feel that he became another Irish Nobel Prize winner,
Seamus Heaney, b.1939 in CountyDerry. Yeats could not
resist life, poetry, or official honours. Of course, this is no more than a
wild guess. (I did not know when Seamus
Heaney was born, looked it up after writing this and was delighted to find it
was after Yeats died. At least my guess was not absurd).
When a child is born, the Balinese
immediately put to it the question “Who eats the rice?” meaning, “Who were you
in your previous life?” No child has ever been known to answer, yet the
question is still asked. Why? Because the Balinese believe that a newborn
infant can often understand Balinese, since it is likely to have been a
Balinese in its previous life. They therefore ask the question to remind the
child not to forget the lessons learnt during its previous life, which would
otherwise have been led in vain. No anthropologist has yet explained this,
though most of them have remarked on the absurdity of the practice.
All of us underestimate the
importance of the vasanas, the scars
and blemishes left upon us by our past lives. Sometimes these are bodily,
sometimes mental. The worst scar or blemish is on the soul itself.
These days I find myself
increasingly preoccupied with my next incarnation. It feels like the way I used
to map out my career when young.
Choosing one’s next mother is a very
serious matter, requiring years of preparation. Unfortunately, one cannot
choose one’s father. One can only hope that if one’s choice of a mother is
sound, she will have the sense to choose a decent husband.
Ian Stevenson has shown that those
who die violent deaths not only tend to remember their previous lives but
suffer from phobias and somatic scarring, often of a disfiguring nature,
because of the deaths they have undergone. Either this is part of their karmic
punishment or the universe is even nastier than we imagine. To adapt J.B.S.
Haldane’s famous remark: “The universe is not only nastier than we imagine; it
is nastier than we can imagine”. This was the Buddha’s insight. No wonder he
compared existence to a burning house.
Compassionate people are often
unhappy, for the cruelty, suffering and injustice of the world horrifies them.
If they became enlightened, they would no longer be unhappy, for they would
understand that only such a world can produce enlightenment.
“A belief in reincarnation changes
one’s attitude to literature. For one thing, tragedies are no longer seen as
purely tragic. Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, Romeo and the others should have all
learned lessons which will enable them to cope better next time they are reborn.
Lear, for example, should have learnt not to judge people on their words alone
and to pay more attention to a daughter who cannot have her heart into her
mouth”. So my Buddhist friends argue, sounding like Victorian moralists. I am
thankful, however, that I can forget my own belief in reincarnation when I am
watching Shakespeare.
If I keep reincarnating, where will
I be a billion years from now? For that matter, where was I a billion years
ago? Living and suffering pointlessly in another universe or another galaxy?
Immortality is no joke. And neither is death after death.
Watching The Blue Planet, a TV series about life in the oceans, I was once
again struck by the thought that everything on this planet is designed to eat
and be eaten. Watching the endless eat-or-be-eaten existence of the denizens of
the sea, I was dismayed by the hideous pointlessness of it all. Is this a penal
planet? Or a purgatorial one? Or simply – a terrifying thought – like most of
the other planets in the Multiverse? As the Buddhist verses run:
These
slowly drifting clouds are pitiful.
What
sleepwalkers we are!
Awakened,
the one great truth –
Black rain
on the temple roof.
This
poem never fails to move me. The last line, in particular, has a power that has
seldom been equalled in literature.
“God sees the truth, but waits”,
runs a Jewish proverb. The truth is, He often appears to procrastinate. Perhaps
He is too busy running the Multiverse?
Alfred North Whitehead once defined
religion as “What a man does with his leisure time”. (Collecting stamps,
perhaps?) This asinine remark, coming from a man of Whitehead’s towering
intellectual stature, reminds us that even geniuses can be fools at times. It
brings to mind Newton’s
making two-cat doors in his house, a large one for his cat and a small one for
her kittens.
arcissism
is the leading psychopathology of our time. Most of my younger contemporaries –
especially the Boomers – are infected with this disease. Since the psychosis of
the individual is the final outcome of all that is wrong with a culture, an
analysis of narcissism in individuals reveals a lot about the shortcomings of
our culture. As Ken Wilber says, in our pluralistic, postmodern society all is
Flatland, horizontal surfaces without a vertical dimension. In other words, we
have a society from which the transcendent, the spiritual has been
systematically excluded. The results are devastating, not just ecologically and
culturally, but also personally.
Narcissism is the product of a
culture centred round the individual ego, a culture which sees the world in
terms of self and objects, all other besides oneself being viewed as objects.
Ostensibly brimming over with self-love, the narcissist is actually filled with
self-hatred, from which arise the feelings of emptiness, alienation, panic, fragmentation
of the self and bottled-up rage which, psychoanalytically, characterise the
real self observed in clinical narcissism.
Baby Boomers, being narcissistic, are obsessed with
their own bodies and those of others. I keep telling the Boomers I know, “As
the Hindus say, the biggest mistake you can make is to identify yourself with
your body. It’s a temporary structure”. Of course, they ignore me, being
narcissistically subconsciously convinced they are immortal.
The cult of the body leads to the formation of
disastrous relationships, especially when the worshipped ‘hard body’ begins to
lose its youthful tautness. When I survey the wreckage of so many relationships
around me, all founded on body worship, ignoring character, I am reminded of
the story of a girl who informed her elderly schoolmistress that she intended
to marry “a magnificent blond beast”. “By all means do so, my dear,” was the
cool reply. “Just remember that when the blondness fades, the beast
remains”. David’s middle-aged secretary, Lisa, a husband-hunting divorcee,
was inordinately vain. “People say I have the body of a nineteen year old”, she
would tell him. One day he was foolish enough to reply, “Really? A nineteen
year old what?” She never forgave him for the joke. From that day on she set
out to sabotage him in every possible way with the Administration. Wounded
vanity can be more dangerous than a wounded tiger – and nothing wounds vanity
like ridicule.
Ada is notorious for ridiculing friends and
foes alike. As a result she has almost none of the former but scores of the
latter. She herself becomes hysterical if she is ridiculed. She has never
stopped to consider that what she herself finds painful might also hurt others,
because she sincerely believes that other richly deserve ridicule while she
does not. This is part of her general overestimation of herself, a classic
feature of pathological narcissism, in which self-love actually disguises
intense, subconscious self-hatred. Her conduct is ingeniously designed to
gratify both.
Julian’s niece, Lynne, whom he had
helped considerably, told him it was no good his expecting gratitude, because
she “did not even know the meaning of the word.” Being young, brash and
impudent, she was not afraid of saying what most people feel and think but are
too sensible to voice aloud. Gratitude is a useless word, found only in the
dictionary but not in life, as La Rochefoucauld observed.
Inner emptiness is found everywhere
today. As T.S. Eliot saw, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction”. We look
within and find, not a soul, but a classical computer, which we programme with
trivia. Since machines are ultimately scrapped this leads to intense terror of
old age and death.
nrequited
love is a form of masochism. The sensible thing is to smile ruefully, shrug and
walk away. This is the only way to retain one’s self respect. It may even
impress the rejecter, if t is done with good grace.
Thucydides relates that Sicilian
pirates used to bind their captives face to face with a freshly killed corpse
and leave them to rot together. I can think of no better analogy for a bad
marriage. Swinburne may have had this story in mind when he wrote of marriage
turning “our loves into corpses or wives” (Dolores).
In 1875, Trollope observed in The Way We Live Now that “love was like
any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it”. This
opinion still prevails in the Third World,
where love, as defined by Westerners, is still a luxury for everyone except the
very rich, who can afford it, and the very poor, who have long ago given up
hope, cannot expect charity and so have nothing left to them except love.
Good marriages entail small
sacrifices. Most divorces (not all) spring from stubborn selfishness
masquerading as ‘incompatibility’.
My wife’s family were wholesale food
importers. From this springs her lifelong preoccupation with and encyclopaedic
knowledge of food. She is not only a superb cook, but can always remember
precisely what she ate at a dinner or luncheon party, even though it took place
fifty years ago. I, who can barely recall what I had for breakfast this
morning, find this daunting and incomprehensible. One of her numerous sisters
rings her up most mornings to discuss what they have been eating. These
gourmets remind me of the White Knight of Alice, who
claimed that the cleverest thing he ever did was to invent a new pudding during
the meat course.
Hard, shallow, sluttish and yet hail-fellow-well-met
with all and sundry, Lillian would have been in her element running a brothel.
But she had a dangerous streak of violence in her make-up. Easily provoked, she
would hurl heavy objects at her husband’s head with such force that they could
have killed him had his reflexes been slower. Once a heavy iron doorstop
narrowly missed him and smashed clean through the panels of the kitchen door.
Another time, she struck at him with a sharp knife, which embedded itself in
the table. She ended up after their divorce owning a gun-shop, after having
tried her hand at pest-extermination, both revealingly destructive occupations.
Marriages like this sometimes end in homicide. When they do, the woman
generally receives only a nominal sentence. It is interesting to note that the
children of the marriage have all taken Lillian’s side and will have nothing to
do with their father. This filial chauvinism is endemic. ‘My mother, right or
wrong!’
Einstein treated his wife badly. This may account
for the comparative intellectual sterility of his later years, for a bad
marriage saps one’s creativity. Frau Einstein had her revenge, relatively
speaking.
My father was engaged to a young woman who
contracted tuberculosis of the lungs. He was with her, holding her hand, when she
died. A couple of years later, still grieving for her, he met my mother and
proposed to her. My mother never forgave him for his devotion to his former
fiancée, feeling, rightly, that she had been chosen faute de mieux, as she put it. The marriage was thus doomed from
the start. A cleverer man would have kept silent about the relationship. Women
brook no rivals, especially dead ones, romantically enshrined amid candles and
incense, preserved forever in their husband’s heart, agelessly.
Few intercultural marriages are successful,
sociologists tells us. My father was inspissatedly English. My mother came from
an eccentric Welsh nationalist family, whose members disdained to speak English
at home and sent my mother to be educated in a Belgium convent, so the detested
English would not contaminate her. When she met my father, she spoke better
French and Welsh than she did English. No sociologist would have given such an
ill-matched alliance much of a chance of surviving. It didn’t. A shared
cultural is the necessary, though not the sufficient basis of a good marriage.
Zoologists tell us that promiscuity among female
primates is the rule, not the exception. I am always astonished at how
faithful, on the whole, the human female is. Not wholly, however. Studies have
revealed that over twenty per cent of the children born in wedlock do not
spring from the husband. The actual figure may well be higher. This is another
version of Cheats Always Prosper,
known as Fooling Round in the Gene Pool.
Most women are quietly resolved to have the upper
hand in marriage. Outside fundamentalist Islam, or certain other primitive
societies, they almost invariably get it. This is not surprising. Men need
women, for they have all sprung from a woman; most women do not need men (do ‘fish
need bicycles’, as the feminists put it?) even though they may want them, for a
time at least. For many women, men are simply a convenience or an insurance
policy, who must always be kept in their place. This game is Matriarch.
Gordon’s daughter-in-law, Amy, told her mother
before she married his son, Kevin, that she was marrying him “because she could
manipulate him”. This did not surprise Gordon as much as Amy’s mother divulging
this to him on the eve of the wedding, ostensibly because she thought it
amusing (!), but really because she wanted him to know who was going to run the
marriage – herself, through her daughter. She was right. This game is called Power Behind the Throne.
Melissa regards men as her personal slaves, to use
as she will. She made her first husband, George, hold two full-time jobs, one
during the day, the other at night. He slept only four hours before going on to
work as a musician in nightclub, finishing at six and then heading off to work
at his day-job. She went home and slept all day, to prepare for another arduous
eight hours of drinking in the club. She eventually divorced him, when he was
completely worn out and prematurely aged. He promptly found another woman, who
treated him in exactly the same way. Most of us were surprised by this, not
realising that he enjoyed being a slave. This game is Flog Me Again Massa.
Melissa then too another husband, Ben, rejected by
his first wife in favour of his best friend, whom she treated like his
predecessor. He too enjoyed playing Flog Me
Again Massa, for, like his first wife, Melissa had chosen him carefully,
rejecting other more affluent suitors who would not have given her the
opportunity to play the role of slave-owner. She herself, as befits a
slave-owner, has never worked, except for a brief period as a part-time
schoolteacher and the giving of desultory clarinet lessons. Slave-owners and
slaves, like sadists and masochists, seek each other out. George and Ben both
exemplify the adage that a hen-pecked husband is like a dead tooth, being all
that is left of a man when the nerve has been removed. This game should be
called Dentist.
Jodie, who had been beaten severely as a child and
later spent some time in a mental hospital, grew up to hate her father. She
eventually married a quiet, brilliant man, Bernard, who, subconsciously she
equated with her father. Since her father was dead, she was forced to avenge
her wrongs on her husband. She proceeded to destroy his career by making him
give up his well-paid and prestigious job and take another, which paid him very
little. This enabled her to upbraid him daily for being a failure. Since
Bernard is not a natural slave, but merely made a mistake in marrying a woman
who saw all men as hated father figures, he has twice tried to commit suicide. She
uses the children to force him to stay with her, since she enjoys punishing
him. This game is called Revenge is Sweet
or Got You at Last, You Worthless
Bastard! Jodie plays it like the expert she is. Should Bernard eventually
commit suicide successfully, Jodie and her relatives will undoubtedly excoriate
his selfishness and cowardice. Jodie will be the object of everyone’s sympathy.
Nobody has thought to ask the children what they think of the situation.
Brenda hated her philandering father, for her long-suffering
mother had taught her to do so. She married Terence, a medical specialist, but
continued to pursue a successful academic career. Her husband was the only son
of a doting mother and the only brother of a gaggle of adoring elder sisters.
Such an upbringing, in which he had always had his own way, had not prepared
him for Brenda, who was determined to have her own way in everything and saw
Terence as the embodiment of her hated father. This clash of mighty opposites
produced a great deal of fire and smoke. The battle has been going on for years
for irresistible force has met immoveable object. The upshot of this war of
Titans and Asuras is a wasteland. Terence’s career has been completely
destroyed. He is no longer a specialist but has been reduced to a lowly GP.
Brenda herself is a neurotic wreck. Deeply troubled, unhappy and fearful, she
spends her time travelling the world in the course of her job, but has failed
to get the promotion she longs for. The couple will not divorce since both are
deeply religious, thought, of course, they do not belong to the same
denomination. Mothers who teach their children to hate their fathers are
commonplace. But not every mother could achieve the stunning success that
Brenda’s mother must be credited with. This game is called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
Andrew has spent his life travelling the world, for
his job as marketing manager of a multi-national demanded it. His passport bore
the stamps of one hundred and eighteen countries, he would say. He lived a lonely
life, out of a suitcase, in myriad hotels, for over thirty years. Suddenly
retrenched at fifty-five, he found himself confined not just to his home town
but to his apartment, where his wife, Sheila, complained shrilly that he was
‘under her feet all day’ and told him to find another marketing job quickly,
not an easy thing to do at his age. Disconsolate, Andrew would henceforth leave
the house every day at nine, as though he were off to the office, to spend the
day in the public library typing fruitless job applications or wandering
aimlessly about the streets. At home, he lived a Spartan life, for Shelia
insisted that they had to economise in everything and fed him sparsely. “Ice
cream only on Tuesdays. You know the rule!” she would remind him. Andrew
eventually grew so unhappy he decided to end it all by developing cancer. He
died, with characteristic thoughtfulness, just after his sixtieth birthday.
Sheila promptly sold the apartment, collected Andrew’s superannuation and life
insurance and moved triumphantly to her own home town, where she bought an
expensive town house close to her mother’s and furnished it with well-chose
antiques. She now spends her time travelling the world on luxury liners and has
ice cream every day. People admire her courage. Her game is Survivor.
Edith was promiscuous, even as a fifteen year-old
schoolgirl. She continued this promiscuity into both her first and her second
marriages. At one time, she was running four lovers simultaneously, one for
each of her four young children, as it were. She stopped sleeping around only
when, after her husband divorced her for adultery, she took as her de facto a man twelve years younger. One
concludes that (a) she regarded marriage and children as a license to be
unfaithful, like an insurance policy against being thrown out in the street (b)
she valued only a man who made her feel much younger than she was, for she was
incorrigibly vain. Did she grow out of her genetic programming for infidelity,
or did she give it up reluctantly, like a reformed alcoholic? Oddly, both her
parents and her brother were sexually inhibited and prudish. One cannot always
form an estimate of a woman’s character by scrutinizing even her closest
relatives. Edith’s game is known as Living
Dangerously, a variant of the popular game, Cheats Always Prosper, although she called it Stolen Sweets are Best, borrowing a line from the poetaster, Colley
Cibber (1671-1757).
Richard’s wife, Rosemary, was always threatening
him with ‘a lonely old age’. Unknown to him, she was systematically blackening
him to their young children behind his back, to ensure they would have nothing
to do with him once they grew up. Nobody could ever accuse her of being
short-sighted. Her game was Undermine.
Early on in the marriage, Christine, her mother and
her daughter, Emily, formed a powerful Triple Alliance against Christine’s
husband, Ian. Grandma lived in the same suburb, only two blocks away. Battered
and bruised, Ian at last recalled the Chinese says, “Of the thirty-seven
possible strategies, the best is to run away”, and took a well-paid engineering
job in Saudi Arabia, coming
home to Brisbane
only once a year for a month. During most of that time, grandma, wife and
daughter go off to Singapore,
while Ian goes fishing with his mates. Christine tells all her friends, who all
envy her, that she has a perfect marriage, just like her mother’s was before
her father’s premature death in New
Guinea. The fact that she has not slept with
Ian for many years does not worry her, since, like her mother, she has always
abhorred sex. Emily has grown up to dislike and distrust men, as will Emily’s
daughter and granddaughter. This neurotic chain may well have been unbroken for
centuries. It is probably genetic. Ian calls this game Survivor; Christine calls it Strength
through Unity. I suspect grandma calls it Men! Behind his back, his mates refer to Ian as ‘that poor
bastard,’ claiming Christine has his balls in her pocket.
Bernadette, an arrogant, iron-willed woman with
aristocratic connections, was married to Charles, an outstandingly clever
surgeon with a mother-fixation. He had been orphaned when young and brought up
in Dr Barnado’s home, rising to the top of his profession and a Chair in
Surgery through hard work and intelligence.
Driven out of his native country by politics, Charles found a temporary,
ill-paid job as Registrar in Australia.
However, every time he moved to a prestigious and highly paid new post, his
wife either refused to go or went with him for a month and then returned home.
Unable to live without her, he would then resign. Eventually, nobody would give
him a job. He then resigned from the hospital at the age of fifty-five and
devoted his time to housework, dying of cancer three years later. As Sir
William Ostler remarked, “Happy men seldom get cancer”. This game is called Cat and Mouse. The man is allowed to run
a little way before the relentless claws scoop him back again. At his
cremation, ironically, they played I Did
it My Way. Hello! Whose way? His
widow now luxuriates in the sympathy she receives for her unhappy plight.
David, a rather unworldly and naïve academic, was
married to Rosemary, who was anything but naïve. Behind his back, she managed
to conduct a complicated series of extra-marital affairs, sometimes running
several men at one time. To cover her tracks and safeguard her reputation in a
small university community, she would systematically trek from house to house
among her friends, often accompanied by the two youngest of her four small
children, weeping convincingly as she consumed coffee, cakes and cigarettes,
while telling them that David’s lascivious promiscuity was causing her to think
seriously of leaving him and asking for their advice, which was sympathetically
and copiously proffered. When rumours of her affairs eventually began to leak
out, her friends were properly understanding, arguing that her rakish husband’s
noted promiscuity had eventually driven poor Rosemary to seek consolation
elsewhere. Meanwhile David, who still remained stupidly ignorant of what was happening,
being totally immersed in his work and having no interest in other women, was
surprised to find himself rapidly becoming a social pariah. Even his own
colleagues, fearful of their wives’ disapproval, began to avoid him. His first
faint inkling of the reality of his situation came only when Amira, the wife of
one of Rosemary’s most recent lovers, confronted him angrily, accusing him of
driving his wife into the arms of Ian, her husband, in order to further his own
infidelities. Even then, David still did not understand what was going on,
telling himself that Amira was deluded by jealousy. He did not even mention the
matter to Rosemary for fear of upsetting her, not knowing that Amira and
Rosemary had nearly come to blows in a violent confrontation that very
afternoon. After the divorce that ensued some years later, David was dismayed
and puzzled to find that not only did he have no friends but that even his
children had turned against him. Those who do not want to see will always
remain stubbornly blind. This game is called Sucker, or more precisely, Machiavelli’s
Best Pupil, for Nicolo would have been proud of Rosemary.
Shortly after his marriage, my father went out,
with his mother in tow as adviser, and bought a house. He was naïve enough to
expect my mother to be pleased at the prospect of living in a house, chosen in
effect by her mother in law, which she disliked at first sight, especially as
he had bought it in that location so as to be close to his mother, whom she
detested. This totally unsuitable house became a constant bone of contention
between them. Even when their marriage eventually broke up, he could still not
understand what he had done so wrong. My father believed he was playing Patriarch, a game now almost obsolete,
except in Islamic and African countries, where it enjoys great popularity. In
fact, he was a pawn in the game of Matriarch.
When my uncle George was demobbed in 1946, after
five years away from my aunt while serving in the army, they found they had
become complete strangers to each other. Five years of warfare and extensive
travel had transformed him. Five years of freedom had matured her. Divorce
became inevitable. Marriages are based on propinquity and habit. Few will
survive even a year or so of separation. The exceptions are the marriages of
Chinese, which seem to endure for decades even though husband and wife only
meet at rare intervals. In fact, such traditional marriages survive because of
the separation, not in spite of it. This Chinese game is called Keep Your Distance, Keep Your Marriage.
On his wedding eve, James, an up-and-coming young
lawyer, handed his bride a pre-nuptial contract. “If things don’t work out,
this will make divorce easier”, he told her. He was quite upset when she called
the wedding off. Some lawyers appear to stand just outside the enclosure marked
‘Human’. It’s an occupational hazard.
My wife comes from a Manchu family (plain blue
Banner) which managed to emigrate to Singapore
from Amoy in the upheaval after the Opium War (1839-1842), though Manchu Banner
men, the ruling class of the Qing dynasty, were theoretically not allowed to
leave China.
Her father, who had a legal wife and several secondary wives (qi), as permitted by Chinese customary
law and the British Colonial Office, not to mention an assortment of
mistresses, turned the family into a battleground through his amorous exploits,
which rivalled those of Xi Men-qing in the famous classical novel, Jin Ping Mei. The Japanese occupation of
Singapore,
which he almost alone among his family managed to survive, had convinced him
that life was so uncertain one should gather one’s pleasures whilst one could.
My wife’s mother compounded the ensuing problems by putting most of the
children out to a wet-nurse for several years, very much in the fashion of the
English upper class and aristocracy in the eighteenth century. This enabled her
to pursue her own feverish pleasures, such as mah-jong parties. To
paraphrase Churchill, monogamy, like democracy, is the worst form of alliance
except all those other forms which have been tried from time to time.
My maternal grandfather had been badly wounded and
gassed in Flanders in the First World War, for
which he had volunteered. When my grandmother died, his old war wounds,
apparently healed, opened up again through grief, the buried shrapnel, which
the surgeons had not dared to extract at the time, working its way to the
surface. He died a few months later. Such love is rare, though one instance is
recorded in exquisite, seventeenth century verse on a tombstone:
She first deceased. He for a little tried
To live without her, liked it not,
and died.
The
classical brevity and deep pathos of this epitaph has surely been seldom
equalled and never excelled. Today, we would say it reveals a neurotic
dependence syndrome.
ulian
once remarked – humorously – that an elderly German colleague of his looked
like Rommel, when he wore a peaked cap. He thought he was bestowing a
compliment. His colleague was furious with him when this remark was repeated to
him by a mischief-maker. Too late Julian realised that one should never compare
anyone to the brilliant general of defeated
army. Had he substituted ‘Patton’ or ‘Zhukov’ for ‘Rommel’ his colleague
would doubtlessly have felt flattered. Human vanity is apparently limitless, as
is the human propensity for making mischief.
A close friend of mine once turned
on me savagely, insisting that I had ruined his chances of gaining a Chair for
which he had applied by slandering him to the Selection Committee. Nothing I
could say could persuade him otherwise, even though I proved to him that I
could not have had access to the Selection Committee, since I did not know any
of its members. He broke off our friendship. I could only surmise that someone
had invented the story and he wanted to believe it to explain the failure of
his application. But who would spread round such a story and why? The
“motiveless evil” of Iago exemplifies this type of destructive lying. People
like Iago are found everywhere. They destroy for the sheer pleasure of
destroying. And we are often their willing accomplices as well as their
victims.
The slanderer’s story found fertile
ground because my friend had earlier almost died from a heart attack. While he
was in hospital, his wife had angrily accused me of having brought on the
attack through persuading him to take up jogging with me three years earlier.
Yet the doctors said that had he not been so fit, he would not have survived
the attack. Nothing they or I could say could persuade her to change her mind.
She continued to hold me responsible. The real culprit, as she was aware, was
probably her fat-saturated Russian cooking, which had raised her husband’s
cholesterol levels to dangerous heights. Once a scapegoat, always a scapegoat.
As René Girard.
My aunt once remarked petulantly,
“You know, she’s my best friend yet I can’t stand her”. I told her that I was
sure her friend was saying the same thing about her.
Forgiving one’s enemies is easy,
forgiving one’s friends almost impossible. After all, one does not associate
with one’s enemies.
La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
remarked that it was more shameful to distrust one’s friends than to be
deceived by them. To believe this today is rightly to be marked down as a fool.
“Women look at each other like
Guelphs and Ghibellines”. A close friend of Constance’s told her recently that
thirty years ago, when they first met, she and all the other women on campus
heartily disliked and resented her because when she was out with them, men
looked only at her. This surprised Constance, who had never for a moment
suspected that she was unpopular. Great beauty, like high intelligence or
marked talent, entails serious disadvantages. As the ancient Taoists pointed
out, “the sweet spring of water is the first to be drunk dry; the straight tree
is the first to be cut down”. That Taoists understood the destructive power of
envy.
So did the Jews. “Anger is
raging…but who can stand against envy?” (Proverbs). The envious strike out
because they themselves suffer torments. As the Russian proverbs say, “Envy
fired and grills itself”. And, “The envious drink vinegar”.
One of Sharon’s
brothers-in-law remarked to her, “For God’s sake, Sharon, never tell your sister any good news
about your family. It upsets her dreadfully and she takes it out on me”.
When my study caught fire, some
years ago, almost burning the house down and destroying my valuable library,
several of my colleagues could not hide a smile of satisfaction even as they
were commiserating with me. One of them even burst out laughing, such was her
pleasure. This is the smile of schadenfreude,
malicious delight in another’s misfortunes. The Germans have a word for it, the
English do not. Clearly, the Germans have more self-insight in this matter than
do the English.
When we sustained a serious
financial loss, the schandenfreude
felt by some of our relatives was too great for them to hide. Their pleasure
was so obvious, it embarrassed us, but not them. We were embarrassed because
they did not realise how crassly they were behaving. La Rochefoucauld was
right. Only the truly good do not derive some pleasure or at least some
consolation from the misfortunes of others, especially the misfortunes of their
friends (Maxims, 1665). The truly
good do not realise this and hence form wrong opinions about the essential
goodness of humanity.
The police are familiar with a
phenomenon they call ‘the criminal grin’. This is also indicative of schadenfreude.
I once saved a stranger from
drowning in Beirut,
coming very close to drowning myself as I did so because, as he struggled
hysterically, his spear-fishing line wrapped itself around us, twice pulling us
both under. To free us, I was forced to cut the line. I dragged him to a nearby
reef and held him there till he recovered, with the waves washing us painfully
back and forward across the sharp rocks. Back on shore, he reproached me
angrily for making him lose his spear gun and stalked off, leaving me nursing
my cuts and bruises. As Mark Twain observed, “You must have helped that man a
lot for him to turn on you like that”.
Time and time again, I have known
people suddenly turn on me because someone had lied to them about something I
was falsely supposed to have said or done. Nobody has ever asked me if the
story was true. Presumably, there is some sort of evolutionary benefit in
slander, or it would not have survived. If chimpanzees could talk they would
certainly lie, for they are known to deceive each other to obtain food. Lying
is inseparable from speech, since deception confers an advantage.
