Bewilderment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  They felt deeply perplexed, like bewildered children; the intellectual and moral foundations of their lives had been radically undermined, and they experienced a frightening, vertiginous doubt (aporia). For Socrates, that was the moment when a person became a philosopher, a “lover of wisdom,” because he had become aware that he longed for greater insight, knew he did not have it, but would henceforth seek it as ardently as a lover pursues his beloved. Thus dialogue led participants not to certainty but to a shocking realization of the profundity of human ignorance. However carefully, logically, and rationally Socrates and his friends analyzed a topic, something always eluded them. Yet many found that the initial shock of aporia led to ekstasis, because they had “stepped outside” their former selves. Plato (c. 428–347 BCE), Socrates’ most famous disciple, used the language associated with Mysteries of Eleusis to describe the moment when, pushed to the very limit of what was knowable, the mind tipped over into transcendence: It is only when all these things, names and definitions, visual and other sensations are rubbed together and subjected to tests in which questions and answers are exchanged in good faith and without malice that finally, when human capacity is stretched to its limit, a spark of understanding and intelligence flashes out and illuminates the subject at issue. 4 As for the sages of India, this insight was the result of a dedicated way of life. It was, Plato went on to explain, “not something that can be put into words like other branches of learning; only after long partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and once it is born there it nourishes itself hereafter.” 5 Socrates used to describe himself as a gadfly, stinging people to question every one of their ideas, especially those about which they felt certainty, so that they could wake up to a more accurate perception of themselves. 6 Even though he was conversing with Socrates and others, each participant was also engaged in a dialogue with himself, subjecting his own deeply held opinions to rigorous scrutiny before, finally, as a result of the ruthless logic of Socrates’ questioning, relinquishing them. You entered into a Socratic dialogue in order to change; the object of the exercise was to create a new, more authentic self. After they had realized that some of their deepest convictions were based on faulty foundations, Socrates’ disciples could begin to live in a philosophical manner. But if they did not interrogate their most fundamental beliefs, they would live superficial, expedient lives, because “the unexamined life is not worth living.” 7 The Chinese philosopher and mystic Zhuangzi (c. 370–311 BCE), one of the chief sages of the Axial Age, agreed that the only thing worth saying was a question that plunged listeners into doubt and numinous uncertainty.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  They were utterly confused: one teacher after another had descended upon them, but each simply promoted his own teachings and poured scorn on all the others. How could they tell who was right? “Come, Kalamans,” the Buddha said, “do not be satisfied with hearsay or taking truth on trust.” Instead of reeling off his own dharma and giving the poor bewildered Kalamans yet another doctrine to puzzle over, he told them that they were expecting other people to give them the answer when, if they looked into their own minds, they would find that they knew it already. Step by step, he helped them to draw upon their own experience: Was greed good or bad? Had they not noticed that when somebody was consumed by greed, he could become aggressive and even steal or lie? And had they observed that hatred simply made the hater unhappy? Yes, the Kalamans had noticed all this. So, the Buddha concluded, they had not needed him at all: they knew his dharma already. If instead of giving rein to their hatred and greed they tried to live more kindly and generously, they would find that they were happier. 8 We do not engage in many dialogues like this today. The debates in our parliamentary institutions, the media, academia, and the law courts are essentially competitive. It is not enough for us to seek the truth; we also want to defeat and even humiliate our opponents. The malice and bullying tactics decried by Socrates are embraced with enthusiasm as part of the fun. A great deal of this type of discourse is a display of ego. There is no question of anybody admitting that she does not know the answer or has doubts about the validity of her case—even about complex issues for which there are no easy answers. Admitting that your opponents may have a valid point seems unthinkable. The last thing anybody intends is a change of mind. But while aggressive debate may be useful in politics, it is unlikely to transform hearts and minds—especially when an issue arouses passions that are already bitter and entrenched. In our highly contentious world, we need to develop a twenty-first-century form of Socrates’ compassionate discourse. For some years now, I have tried to counter the stereotypical view of Islam that has been current in the West for centuries but has become more prevalent since the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Like any received idea, it is based on what the Buddha called “hearsay” rather than accurate knowledge or understanding. So when politicians or pundits have insisted that Islam is an inherently violent, intolerant faith or inveigh furiously against the practice of veiling, for example, I have written articles, based on my study of Islamic history, to challenge this. But I have recently decided that this is counterproductive. All that happens is that my article is virulently attacked and my assailants rehearse the old ideas again with greater venom.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Distance-apart, too, is a simple sensation—the sensation of a line joining the two distant points: lengthen the line, you alter the feeling and with it the distance felt. Space-relations. But with distance and direction we pass to the category of space-relations, and are immediately confronted by an opinion which makes of all relations something toto cœlo different from all facts of feeling or imagination whatsoever. A relation, for the Platonizing school in psychology, is an energy of pure thought, and, as such, is quite incommensurable with the data of sensibility between which it may be perceived to obtain. We may consequently imagine a disciple of this school to say to us at this point: "Suppose you have made a, separate specific sensation of each line and each angle, what boots it? You have still the order of directions and of distances to account for; you have still the relative magnitudes of all these felt figures to state; you have their respective positions to define before you can be said to have brought order into your space. And not one of these determinations can be effected except through an act of relating thought, so that your attempt to give an account of space in terms of pure sensibility breaks down almost at the very outset. Position, for example, can never be a sensation, for it has nothing intrinsic about it; it can only obtain between a spot, line, or other figure and extraneous co-ordinates, and can never be an element of the sensible datum, the line or the spot, in itself. Let us then confess that Thought alone can unlock the riddle of space, and that Thought is an adorable but unfathomable mystery. Such a method of dealing with the problem has the merit of shortness. Let us, however, be in no such hurry, but see whether we cannot get a little deeper by patiently considering what these space- relations are. 'Relation' is a very slippery word. It has so many different concrete meanings that the use of it as an abstract universal may easily introduce bewilderment into our thought. We must therefore be careful to avoid ambiguity by making sure, wherever we have to employ it, what its precise meaning is in that particular sphere of application. At present we have to do with space-relations, and no others. Most 'relations' are feelings of an entirely different order from the terms they relate. The relation of similarity, e.g., may equally obtain between jasmine and tuberose, or between Mr. Browning's verses and Mr. Story's; it is itself neither odorous nor poetical, and those may well be pardoned who have denied to it all sensational content whatever. But just as, in the field of quantity, the relation between two numbers is another number, so in the field of space the relations are facts of the same order with the facts they relate.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  rusty iron hooks, which I was told later was used as a bicycle store. When I first set foot on this platform years ago, on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of the vacation period, however, there was not a bicycle to be seen, and perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because of the plucked pigeon feathers lying all over the floorboards, an impression forced itself upon me of being on the scene of some unexpiated crime. What is more, said Austerlitz, that sinister wooden structure still exists. Even the gray pigeon feathers have not yet blown away. And there are dark patches, of leaked axle grease, perhaps, or carbolineum, or something altogether different, one can’t tell. Moreover, I was disturbed by the fact that, as I stood on the scaffolding that Sunday afternoon looking up through the dim light at the ornate ironwork of the north facade, two tiny figures which I had noticed only after some time were moving about on ropes, carrying out repair work, like black spiders in their web.—I don’t know, said Austerlitz, what all this means, and so I am going to continue looking for my father, and for Marie de Verneuil as well. It was nearly twelve o’clock when we took leave of each other outside the Glaciére Métro station. Years ago, Austerlitz said as we parted, there were great swamps here where people skated in winter, just as they did outside Bishopsgate in London, and then he gave me the key to his house in Alderney Street. I could stay there whenever I liked, he said, and study the black and white photographs which, one day, would be all that was left of his life. And I should not omit, he added, to ring the bell at the gateway in the brick wall adjoining his house, for behind that wall, although he had never been able to see it from any of his windows, there was a plot where lime trees and lilacs grew and in which members of the Ashkenazi community had been buried ever since the eighteenth century, including Rabbi David Tevele Schiff and Rabbi Samuel Falk, the Baal Shem of London. He had discovered the cemetery, from which, as he now suspected, the moths used to fly into his house, said Austerlitz, only a few days before he left London, when the gate in the wall stood open for the first time in all the years he had lived in Alderney Street. Inside, a very small, almost dwarf- like woman of perhaps seventy years old—the cemetery caretaker, as it turned out—was walking along the paths between the graves in her slippers. Fa a wes ' a a: a

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Ashman and Hilary, Iver Grove and Andromeda Lodge, whatever my thoughts turn to, said Austerlitz as we descended the darkening grassy slopes of the park to the city lights which had now come on in a wide semicircle before us, it all arouses in me a sense of disjunction, of having no ground beneath my feet. I think it was in early October 1957, he continued abruptly after some time, when I was on the point of going to Paris to pursue the studies of architectural history on which I had embarked the previous year at the Courtauld Institute, that I last visited the Fitzpatricks in Barmouth for the double funeral of Uncle Evelyn and Great-Uncle Alphonso. They had died almost within a day of each other, Alphonso of a stroke as he was picking up his favorite apples out in the garden, Evelyn in his icy bed, cramped with pain and anguish. Autumn mists filled the whole valley on the morning of the burial of these two very different men, Evelyn always at odds with himself and the world, Alphonso animated by a cheerfully equable temperament. Just as the funeral procession began moving towards Cutiau cemetery, the sun broke through the hazy veils above the Mawddach, and a breeze blew along its banks. The few dark figures, the group of poplars, the flood of light over the water, the massif of Cader Idris on the far side of the river, these were the elements in a farewell scene which, curiously enough, I rediscovered a few weeks ago in one of the rapid watercolor sketches Turner often made, noting down what he saw either from the life or looking back at the past later. This almost insubstantial picture, bearing the title of Funeral at Lausanne, dates from 1841, and thus from a time when Turner could hardly travel anymore and dwelt increasingly on ideas of his own mortality, and perhaps for that very reason, when something like this little cortége in Lausanne emerged from his memory, he swiftly set down a few brushstrokes in an attempt to capture visions which would melt away again the next moment. wel ; : wat vo.% i Chi 4 Vs

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  knew himself was that the Eliases had taken me into their house at the beginning of the war, when I was only a little boy, so he could tell me no more. He was sure it would all be settled once Elias’s condition improved. As far as the other boys are concerned, said Penrith-Smith, you remain Dafydd Elias for the time being. There’s no need to let anyone know. It’s just that you will have to put Jacques Austerlitz on your examination papers or else your work may be considered invalid. Penrith-Smith had written the name on a piece of paper, and when he handed it to me I could think of nothing to say, said Austerlitz, but “Thank you, sir.” At first, what disconcerted me most was that I could connect no ideas at all with the word Austerlitz. If my new name had been Morgan or Jones, I could have related it to reality. I even knew the name Jacques from a French nursery rhyme. But I had never heard of an Austerlitz before, and from the first I was convinced that no one else bore that name, no one in Wales, or in the Isles, or anywhere else in the world. And since I began investigating my own history some years ago, I have never in fact come upon another Austerlitz, not in the telephone books of London or Paris, Amsterdam or Antwerp. But not long ago, turning on the wireless, I happened upon an announcer saying that Fred Astaire, of whom I had previously known nothing at all, was born with the surname of Austerlitz. Astaire’s father, who according to this surprising radio program came from Vienna, had worked as a master brewer in Omaha, Nebraska, where Astaire was born, and from the veranda of the Austerlitz family’s house you could hear freight trains being shunted back and forth in the city’s marshaling yard. Astaire is reported to have said later that this constant, uninterrupted shunting sound, and the ideas it suggested of going on a long railroad journey, were his only early childhood memories. And just a couple of days after I chanced in this way upon the story of a man entirely unknown to me, Austerlitz added, a neighbor who describes herself as a passionate reader told me that in Kafka’s diaries she had found a small, bow-legged man of my own name who, as Kafka recorded, had been called in to circumcise his nephew. I feel it is unlikely that these trails lead anywhere, nor do I entertain any hopes of a note I found some time ago in a file on the practice of euthanasia, mentioning one Laura Austerlitz who made a statement to an Italian investigating judge on 28 June 1966 about the crimes committed in a rice mill on the peninsula of San Saba near Trieste in 1944. At least, said Austerlitz, I haven’t yet succeeded in tracking down this namesake of mine. I don’t even know if she is still alive, thirty years after making her statement. But personally, as I was saying, I had never heard the name Austerlitz before that April day in 1949 when Penrith- Smith handed me the piece of paper on which he had written it. I couldn’t work out the spelling, and read the strange term which sounded to me like some

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  quietly to herself. All I remember of it now is a phrase about the poor lovers qui se promenaient dans les allées désertes du parc. We were almost back in the town, said Austerlitz, when a little company of some ten or a dozen small people emerged from the dark as if out of nowhere, at a place where white mist was already rising from the ground, and crossed our path. They were the sort of visitors sent to the spa because of their failing health by some Czech enterprise or other, or perhaps they came from one of the neighboring Socialist countries. They were strikingly short, almost dwarfish figures, slightly bent, moving along in single file, and each of them held one of those pitiful plastic mugs from which the water of the springs was drunk in Marianské Lazné at the time. I also remember, added Austerlitz, that without exception they wore raincoats of thin blue-gray Perlon, the kind of thing that had been fashionable in the West in the late 1950s. To this day I can sometimes hear the dry rustling with which, as suddenly as they had appeared on one side of the path, they vanished again on the other.—I dwelt on my memories of Marienbad all night after my last visit to the Sporkova, continued Austerlitz. As soon as it began to grow light outside I packed, left the hotel on Kampa Island, and crossed the Charles Bridge, which was wrapped in early mist, walked through the streets of the Old Town and over the still deserted Wenceslas Square, making my way to the main station on Wilsonova which, as it turned out, did not correspond in the least to the idea I had formed of it from Vera’s narrative. Its Jugendstil architecture, once famous far beyond Prague, had been surrounded, obviously in the 1960s, by ugly glass facades and concrete blocks, and it took me some time to find a way into this forbidding complex over a taxi ramp leading down to the basement story. The low-ceilinged hall I now entered was crowded with throngs of people who had spent the night there among piles of luggage, huddled together in groups of various sizes, most of them still asleep. A sickening red-hued light immersed the entire apparently boundless encampment in a positively infernal glare as it shone from a slightly raised platform measuring at least ten by twenty meters, on which about a hundred games machines were arranged in several batteries, idling to no purpose and chanting inanely to themselves. I stepped over some of the motionless bodies on the floor, went upstairs and downstairs but failed to find my way through this labyrinthine station, which seemed to consist of nothing but sales booths and stands of all kinds. Eventually I asked a uniformed man who came towards me: Hlavni nddrdazi? Wilsonovo nddrdzi? whereupon he took me carefully by the sleeve, like a lost child, guided me to a dark recess in a remote comer, and there showed me a memorial plaque saying that the station had been named in 1919 after the freedom-loving American president Wilson. When I had deciphered the memorial and nodded my thanks to the railway official, who had

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Factuality, it seems, is not in itself a guarantor of existential traction. Some facts, however, seem to occupy an intermediary zone. These take the form of observations that hint at a deeper order or interconnectedness in the world, possibly pointing beyond themselves to significant truths awaiting our discovery. Why is the sky dark at night? Why do the fundamental constants of our universe seem fine-tuned for life? These are like clues calling out for interpretation. Their importance lies not simply in their observational actuality, but their theoretical potentiality. When rightly understood, these facts might turn out to be gateways to a richer understanding of ourselves and our world. Yet they might equally turn out to be dead ends. Let’s move on to the next stage of my mental experiment. We’ve already explored what might be included in this imagined world. But what convictions would be excluded from this world of certainties because they are beliefs? Because they cannot be proved to be true? In my view, a list of such excluded beliefs would (unfortunately) include the following: 1. All people are created equal. 2. It is wrong to torture people. First, we must exclude the statement that ‘all people are created equal’. This is clearly a belief, not a fact, perhaps reflecting a profound human desire that it should be true when accidents of birth clearly continue to shape our social status and prospects. It is for many a deeply attractive belief, calling into question social constructions of value, significance and intrinsic merit. For Christians, for example, the belief that all are created equal is a social leveller, demanding that we look beyond how society values individuals and discern something deeper, more significant beneath the surface. Yet the statement that ‘all people are created equal’ is ultimately a belief, not something that can be publicly demonstrated to be true. The American philosopher and statesman Benjamin Franklin would disagree with my judgement. He confidently declared that this was a ‘self-evident’ truth – most famously, in his landmark statement in the American Declaration of Independence. But why is this view ‘self-evident’? After all, Thomas Jefferson’s original version of this statement, which was modified by Franklin, spoke more cautiously of holding certain truths to be ‘sacred and undeniable’. A ‘self-evident’ truth is basically an intuition, in which someone just ‘sees’ or ‘senses’ that something is right, without relying on evidence or argument.16 Yet these ‘intuitions’ are self-evident only within certain cultural contexts and because of those cultural contexts. Franklin’s assertion that this belief is a ‘self-evident’ truth is little more than an intellectual ploy, designed to fend off criticism or critical evaluation of this decidedly under-evidenced assertion, no matter how culturally desirable or politically convenient it might be. It is a defiant assertion, not an evidenced conclusion, a decision to present a belief in such forceful terms that it will be treated as if it were a fact.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Yet hard as I tried both that evening and later, I could not recollect myself in the part. I did recognize the unusual hairline running at a slant over the forehead, but otherwise all memory was extinguished in me by an overwhelming sense of the long years that had passed. I have studied the photograph many times since, the bare, level field where I am standing, although I cannot think where it was; the blurred, dark area above the horizon, the boy’s curly hair, spectrally light around the outline of his head, the cape over his arm which appears to be held at an angle or, as I once thought, said Austerlitz, might have been broken or in a splint, the six large mother-of-pearl buttons, the extravagant hat with the heron’s feather in it, even the folds of the stockings. I examined every detail under a

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  He had emerged from this doorway half an hour ago and now disappeared through it again, with an odd jerk, as it seemed to me. To this day I cannot explain what made me follow him, said Austerlitz. We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious. But in any case, that Sunday morning I suddenly found myself on the other side of the tall fence, facing the entrance to the Ladies’ Waiting Room, the existence of which, in this remote part of the station, had been quite unknown to me. The man in the turban was nowhere to be seen, and there was no one on the scaffolding either. I hesitated to approach the swing doors, but as soon as I had taken hold of the brass handle I stepped past a heavy curtain hung on the inside to keep out drafts, and entered the large room, which had obviously

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  THE SEVENTH STEPHow Little We KnowQuite early in my career, I was struck by a footnote in a book referring to the “science of compassion” that should characterize the work of a religious historian. This was not science in the sense of physics or chemistry, but a method of acquiring “knowledge” (Latin: scientia) by entering in a scholarly, empathetic way into the historical period that is being researched. Some of the religious practices of the past may sound bizarre to modern ears, but the historian has to “empty” herself of her own post-Enlightenment presuppositions, leave her twentieth-century self behind, and enter wholeheartedly into the viewpoint of a world that is very different from her own. A religious historian must not “substitute his own or his readers’ conventions for the original,” the author explained; rather, he should “broaden his perspective so that it can make place for the other.” He must not cease interrogating his material until “he has driven his understanding to the point where he has an immediate human grasp of what a given position meant” and, with this empathetic understanding of the context, “could feel himself doing the same.”1 I was at once impressed by the phrase “make place for the other.” When I tried to put this directive into practice in my studies, I found that it entirely changed my conception of religion. Hitherto I had tended to project my twentieth-century assumptions onto the spiritualities of the past, and not surprisingly, many had seemed absurd. But when I tried to “broaden” my perspective in this disciplined and empathetic way, they gradually began to make sense.2 As this attitude became habitual (I was practicing it at my desk for several hours every day), I began to notice how seldom we “make place for the other” in social interaction. All too often people impose their own experience and beliefs on acquaintances and events, making hurtful, inaccurate, and dismissive snap judgments, not only about individuals but about whole cultures. It often becomes clear, when questioned more closely, that their actual knowledge of the topic under discussion could comfortably be contained on a small postcard. Western society is highly opinionated. Our airwaves are clogged with talk shows, phone-ins, and debates in which people are encouraged to express their views on a wide variety of subjects. This freedom of speech is precious, of course, but do we always know what we are talking about?

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I’d seen movies, read magazines and novels and Cathy cartoons. I’d heard groups of women talk shit about men—men always this, men always that—as though men were a unified, homogeneous category, and I’d heard groups of men do the same. It made me queasy. Even people who seemed to be happily partnered talked shit about their significant other in private. How much annoyance with one’s partner is normal? A lot of people seem to barely tolerate the person they love. Is that normal? If it is normal, is it okay with me, in my life? Which compromises could I live with and which would fester, rise up between us like a wall? How could I know—and know right now—which attributes were important? What could I live with, for the sake of us? How does anyone know? I was happy with Brandon. Was that enough? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The following spring, on a sunny late-March day in Brooklyn, we sat down on a bench beside the East River and he slid suddenly to his knees and pulled out a ring. I said yes and quietly panicked, bewildered and ecstatic, a collision of feelings that felt very sane. We were twenty-four and twenty-seven. We’d been together for eleven months and four days, though we’d lived on opposite coasts for every day of it. We held hands and walked on the waterfront, stopping in a chocolate shop we’d read about. We tossed back and forth dates and locations and daydreams and the question of where we would live. There was another question I remember not saying aloud: How will we handle our money? I couldn’t make my mouth form the phrase. It was too unsexy, unromantic, anxious. I didn’t believe that getting married was supposed to be some blissful state of suspended animation, but I wanted to be elated, swept up, careless. I wanted to be transformed. I wanted to be able to be someone else, even just for a day, maybe a week or two. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Both before and after we were married, I hated the thought of needing someone to “complete” me. Of course I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted to love someone and be loved. But surely I was not lacking on my own, not incomplete. I grew up an only child, so I’d always been on my own, and I liked it. As I envisioned it, my husband and I would be separate people. We would be as important individually as we were together, as a couple. We’d be discrete entities with our own histories, energy, and motion, but we’d be bound to each other like stars in a constellation: a union born by the force of imagination and emotion, by the curious work of the human mind.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  The building of this singular architectural monstrosity, on which Austerlitz was planning to write a study at the time, began in the 1880s at the urging of the bourgeoisie of Brussels, over-hastily and before the details of the grandiose scheme submitted by a certain Joseph Poelaert had been properly worked out, as a result of which, said Austerlitz, this huge pile of over seven hundred thousand cubic meters contains corridors and stairways leading nowhere, and doorless rooms and halls where no one would ever set foot, empty spaces surrounded by walls and representing the innermost secret of all sanctioned authority. Austerlitz went on to tell me that he himself, looking for a labyrinth used in the initiation ceremonies of the Freemasons, which he had heard was in either the basement or the attic story of the palace, had wandered for hours through this mountain range of stone, through forests of columns, past colossal statues, upstairs and downstairs, and no one ever asked him what he wanted. During these wanderings, feeling tired or wishing to get his bearings from the sky, he had stopped at one of the windows set deep in the walls to look out over the leaden gray roofs of the palace, crammed together like pack ice, and down into ravines and shaft-like interior courtyards never penetrated by any ray of light. He had gone on and on down the corridors, said Austerlitz, sometimes turning left and then right again, then walking straight ahead and passing through many tall doorways, and once or twice he had climbed flights of creaking wooden stairs which gave the impression of being temporary structures, branching off from the main corridors here and there and leading half a story up or down, only to end in

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  going past outside the train was the original of the images that had haunted me for so many years. Then I recollected another idea which had obsessed me over a long period: the image of a twin brother who had been with me on that long journey, sitting motionless by the window of the compartment, staring out into the dark. I knew nothing about him, not even his name, and I had never exchanged so much as a word with him, but whenever I thought of him I was tormented by the notion that towards the end of the journey he had died of consumption and was stowed in the baggage net with the rest of our belongings. And then, Austerlitz continued, somewhere beyond Frankfurt, when I entered the Rhine valley for the second time in my life, the sight of the Mauseturm in the part of the river known as the Binger Loch revealed, with absolute certainty, why the tower in Lake Vymwy had always seemed to me so uncanny. I could not take my eyes off the great river Rhine flowing sluggishly along in the dusk, the apparently motionless barges lying low in the water, which almost lapped over their decks, the trees and bushes on the other bank, the fine cross-hatching of the vineyards, the stronger transverse lines of the walls supporting the terraces, the slate-gray rocks and ravines leading off sideways into what seemed to me a prehistoric and unexplored realm. While I was still under the spell of this landscape, to me a truly mythological one, said Austerlitz, the setting sun broke through the clouds, filled the entire valley with its radiance, and illuminated the heights on the other side where three gigantic chimneys towered into the sky at the place we were just passing, making the steep slopes on the eastern mountains look like hollow shells, mere camouflage for an underground industrial site covering many square miles. Passing through the valley of the Rhine, said Austerlitz, you can scarcely tell what century it is. As you look out of the train window it is difficult to say even of the castles standing high above the river, bearing such strange and somehow preposterous names as Reichenstein, Ehrenfels, and Stahleck, whether they are medieval or were built by the industrial barons of the nineteenth century. Some of them, for instance Burg Katz and Burg Maus, seem to be rooted in legend, and even the ruins resemble a romantic stage set. At least, I no longer knew in what period of my life I was living as I journeyed down the Rhine valley. Through the evening sunlight I saw the glow of a fiery dawn rising from my past above the other bank, pervading the whole sky. Even today, Austerlitz continued, when I think of my Rhine journeys, the second of them hardly less

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The gossip had reached the minister, Jamie’s white-haired and gentle old father. He had looked at the girl with bewildered eyes—he had always been bewildered by his daughter. A poor housewife she was, and very untidy; if she cooked she mucked up the pots and the kitchen, and her hands were strangely unskilled with the needle; this he knew, since his heels suffered much from her darning. Remembering her mother he had shaken his head and sighed many times as he looked at Jamie. For her mother had been a soft, timorous woman, and he himself was very retiring, but their Jamie loved striding over the hills in the teeth of a gale, an uncouth, boyish creature. As a child she had gone rabbit stalking with ferrets; had ridden a neighbour’s farmhorse astride on a sack, without stirrup, saddle or bridle; had done all manner of outlandish things. And he, poor lonely, bewildered man, still mourning his wife, had been no match for her. Yet even as a child she had sat at the piano and picked out little tunes of her own inventing. He had done his best; she had been taught to play by Miss Morrison of the next-door village, since music alone seemed able to tame her. And as Jamie had grown so her tunes had grown with her, gathering purpose and strength with her body. She would improvise for hours on the winter evenings, if Barbara would sit in their parlour and listen. He had always made Barbara welcome at the manse; they had been so inseparable, those two, since childhood—and now? He had frowned, remembering the gossip. Rather timidly he had spoken to Jamie. ‘Listen, my dear, when you’re always together, the lads don’t get a chance to come courting, and Barbara’s grandmother wants the lass married. Let her walk with a lad on Sabbath afternoons—there’s that young MacGregor, he’s a fine, steady fellow, and they say he’s in love with the little lass. . . .’ Jamie had stared at him, scowling darkly. ‘She doesn’t want to walk out with MacGregor!’ The minister had shaken his head yet again. In the hands of his child he was utterly helpless. Then Jamie had gone to Inverness in order the better to study music, but every week-end she had spent at the manse, there had been no real break in her friendship with Barbara; indeed they had seemed more devoted than ever, no doubt because of these forced separations. Two years later the minister had suddenly died, leaving his little all to Jamie. She had had to turn out of the old, grey manse, and had taken a room in the village near Barbara. But antagonism, no longer restrained through respect for the gentle and child-like pastor, had made itself very acutely felt—hostile they had been, those good people, to Jamie.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  the sight of it, however, was not the question whether the complex form of the capital, now covered with a puce-tinged encrustation, had really impressed itself on my mind when I passed through Pilsen with the children’s transport in the summer of 1939, but the idea, ridiculous in itself, that this cast-iron column, which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember me and was, if I may so put it, said Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself. Beyond Pilsen the line ran towards the mountains dividing Bohemia from Bavaria. Soon the gradient was delaying the tempo of the train, and dark forests were almost encroaching on the railway embankment. Swathes of mist or low, drifting cloud hung among the dripping pines, until after about an hour the line went downhill again, the valley gradually broadened, and we came out into pleasant countryside. I don’t know what I had expected of Germany, said Austerlitz, but wherever I looked I saw trim towns and villages, neat yards around factories and industrial buildings, lovingly tended gardens, piles of firewood tidily stacked under cover, level asphalted cart tracks running through the meadows, roads with brightly colored cars purring along them at great speed, well-managed woodland, regulated watercourses, and new railway buildings where the stationmasters obviously felt under no obligation to come out. Parts of the sky had cleared, cheerful patches of sunlight lit up the country here and there, and the train, which had often seemed to be having difficulty in making any progress on the Czech side of the border, was now suddenly racing along with almost improbable ease. Around midday we reached Nuremberg, and when I saw the name on a signal box in its German spelling of Niimberg, which was unfamiliar to me, I remembered what Vera had said about my father’s account of the National Socialist Party rally of 1936 and the roars of acclamation rising from the people who had gathered here at the time. Although I had really meant to do no more than ask about my next connections, said Austerlitz, that recollection may have been why I walked out of Nuremberg Station without pausing to think, and on into that unknown city. I had never before set foot on German soil, I had always avoided learning anything at all about German topography, German history, or modern German life, and so, said Austerlitz, Germany was probably more unfamiliar to me than any other country in the world, more foreign even than Afghanistan or Paraguay. As soon as I had emerged from the underpass in front of the station I was swept along by a huge crowd of people who were streaming down the entire breadth of the street, rather like water in a riverbed, going in not just one but both directions, as if flowing simultaneously up and down stream. I think it was a Saturday, the day when people go to shop in town, inundating these pedestrian zones which apparently, as I was told later, said Austerlitz, exist in more or less

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Linguists point out that in day-to-day communication, when we hear a statement that at first seems odd or false, we automatically try to find a context in which it makes sense, because we want to understand what is being said to us. The same mechanism is at work when we try to translate a text written in a foreign language. Linguists have called this epistemological law the “principle of charity”; it requires that when we are confronted with discourse that is strange to us, we seek an “interpretation which, in the light of what it knows of the facts, will maximise truth among the sentences of the corpus.” 11 In other words, when making an effort to understand something strange and alien to you, it is important to assume that the speaker shares the same human nature as yourself and that, even though your belief systems may differ, you both have the same idea of what constitutes truth. As Donald Davidson (1917–2003), professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, explains, “Making sense of the utterances and behaviour of others, even their most aberrant behaviour, requires us to find a great deal of truth and reason in them.” 12 If we cannot do that, we will dismiss the speaker as irrational, nonsensical, and basically inhuman. “Charity,” Davidson continues, “is forced on us, whether we like it or not; if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters.” 13 This is how Jews such as Philo of Alexandria (c. 30 BCE to c. 45 CE), who were trained in Greek philosophy, approached the Torah. Instead of dismissing these ancient Hebrew texts as barbaric, they devised an allegorical interpretation that made them right according to their own Hellenistic standards, translating them into a more familiar idiom. They could not have achieved this had they not made a charitable assumption when studying these scriptures and finding thus a good deal of truth and reason in them. 14 The “principle of charity” and the “science of compassion” are both crucial to any attempt to understand discourse and ideas that initially seem baffling, distressing, and alien; we have to re-create the entire context in which such words are spoken—historical, cultural, political, intellectual—question them deeply, and, as the footnote on the “science of compassion” advised, drive our understanding to the point where we have “an immediate human grasp of what a given position meant.” With this new empathetic understanding of the context, we will find that we can imagine ourselves, in similar circumstances, feeling the same. In other words, we have to see where people are coming from. In this way, we can broaden our perspective and “make place for the other.” We can ignore this compassionate imperative only if we do not wish to understand other people—an ethically problematic position.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  There is thus an inevitable provisionality to scientific theorising. Certain things can clearly be proved scientifically – for example, that the chemical formula of water is H2O. But many others remain frustratingly elusive and uncertain – not because of any failure of the scientific method, but because of the limits that arise from its specific nature. As the scientific method is historically situated, it is necessarily provisional in some of its conclusions, in that it is restricted by the evidence that is available at that moment in time. This is not a problem; it’s just the way things are. With most serious forms of human understanding we must appreciate that our knowledge is located at a particular moment in history, and that the passing of time will bring new pressures – such as theoretical advance or the availability of new evidence – that require us to adjust our ideas in their light. The real problem is that we don’t know what the future will hold, and thus cannot predict how our ideas will change. What may seem to be epistemically secure today may thus be abandoned in the future, in the light of the emergence of new evidence and more sophisticated theoretical reflection. The bleak imagery of Arthur Koestler’s narrative of scientific progress highlights the need to recognise the unpredictability of science: ‘The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.’22 The phlogiston hypothesis is a good example of such a ‘discarded theory’. ‘Phlogiston’ was proposed during the late seventeenth century as a fire-like element contained within combustible bodies which was released during the process of burning. The discovery of oxygen by Joseph Priestley in the 1770s led to the abandonment of this hypothesis. Phlogiston was thus a stepping stone on the way to a firmer grasp of reality, which we have now left behind in the relentless march of scientific progress. We need to be ready to let go of a theory if something better comes along in the future – no matter how secure it may appear at the time. As the philosopher Michael Polanyi suggests in Personal Knowledge, science is on a journey, and we have no way of knowing where it will go and what it will leave behind in the future. Many scientific theories that once commanded widespread support have now been displaced by alternatives. So, what will happen to these new theories in the future? They might be better than those they had supplanted; but are they right? Might they simply be transient staging-posts to something else, at present unknown, rather than final resting places?

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  EMPERORS Thus from the 300s, the constructions of sex made in the mainstream Church over the three centuries from the death of Jesus suddenly ceased to be the private concern of a relatively small set of inward-looking groupings around the Mediterranean and west Asia. Through the first three centuries of Christianity, its sacred, theological and pastoral writings generally (let alone their treatment of sex) were the work of people who regarded themselves as an elite, who nevertheless lacked any worldly or coercive power. From the fourth century, Christian beliefs and practices affected the whole population of the Roman Empire and became the basis for norms that still shape the lives of millions around the world, although to call these ‘norms’ is a little misleading because the variety and clashes of Christian opinions and customs in sex and non-sex continued to proliferate and shape-shift, and still do. Behind that cacophony of voices, the arguments of pre-Constantinian Christians echo down to the present day. [2] The transformed status of Christianity in the Mediterranean contains mysteries now incapable of solution, because they lay in the minds of a trio of energetic emperors: Diocletian, Galerius and Constantine. The first two came to make it their business as imperial colleagues to renew the Empire not merely in administration but in observance of traditional religion and morality, as we have seen in the decree against incestuous marriages issued by Diocletian and his co-Emperor Maximian in 295 (above, Chapter 3). In this task, they identified Christianity as a major enemy, launching a systematic persecution of clergy and laity. This action did build on previous occasional bouts of official hostility towards Christian practice over the previous century, but its intensity remains surprising, perhaps reflecting a new moral seriousness in traditional Roman religion. Even more difficult to explain is Constantine’s extreme reaction against their policy of persecution. That was rapidly visible after his initial bid for power in 306, when the army in Britannia at Eboracum (York) proclaimed him as successor to his father Constantius, to join the imperial team of four co- emperors that Diocletian had created. Over the next two decades, Constantine came to be at odds with his co-Emperor Licinius, who as their alliance broke down in mutual suspicion turned against Christians in his entourage. In 324, now sole Emperor with Licinius murdered, Constantine reaffirmed the promises of ‘peace and undisturbed concord’ to his subjects that the two emperors had made at Milan ( Mediolanum ) in 313. For the moment that continued to mean toleration for both traditional religion and a newly favoured Christian episcopal organization, but Constantine was already deeply involved in the internal business of the Christian Church. [3] Constantine had in fact made unmistakeable his alliance with the Christian faith only six years from his accession, when in 312 he crushingly defeated and killed another rival imperial claimant, Maxentius, meeting him on the northward road from Rome at the Milvian Bridge.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I have suggested that I came to meet Éric having got to know his friends, and heard what they had to say about him. Amongst these friends was Robert whom I met while putting together a piece on art foundries. In the event, he took me to Le Creusot where he was having a monumental sculpture cast. We travelled back at night and, during the trip, Robert joined me in the back of the car and lay full length on top of me. I didn’t turn a hair. It was a narrow car and I was sitting sideways in my seat with Robert’s head resting on my abdomen, and my pelvis over the edge to facilitate his groping. From time to time I would put my head down and he would give me little kisses. Glancing in the rear view mirror, the driver commented that I didn’t seem to be on top of things. In fact the situation left me as dumbfounded as the visits to the foundries with their gigantic ovens. I saw Robert almost daily for quite a long time and he introduced me to a lot of people. I could instinctively distinguish between those with whom the relationship could take a sexual turn and those with whom it could not. An instinct that Robert also had; as a way of putting some of them off, he had come up with the idea of warning them that, as an art critic, I was beginning to wield some power. It was Robert who told me about that myth of Parisian life, Madame Claude. I have fantasised a great deal about being a high-class prostitute although I knew I was neither tall or beautiful, which I had been told you needed to be, nor distinguished enough for the job. Robert used to joke about the combination of my sexual appetite and my professional curiosity; he would say that I would be able to write a piece about plumbing if I went out with a plumber. And he always maintained that, given my personality, the person I had to meet was Éric. But in the end, I met the latter through a mutual friend of theirs, a very edgy boy, one of those men who pounds into you with mechanical power and regularity, and someone with whom I had spent exhausting nights. In the morning, as if that wasn’t enough, he would take me to the huge studio he shared with his work partner, and there, languidly tired, I would let this other man come over and take me in a silent, almost serious way. One evening this friend invited me to go and have dinner with him and Éric. As we already know, Éric introduced me to more men than anyone else, friends, colleagues and strangers. For the sake of accuracy, I must add that, at the same time, he introduced me to a rigorous way of working to which I still adhere.