Annette felt the lure of anecdote and digression, resisted for a few seconds, and then caved in. ‘We used to have a trainee shaman with a shall I say “challenging” personality, and he was in the habit of having about a dozen Ah-ha moments a day. Many of them turned out to be covert, or not so covert, attacks on other people in the Foundation. Well, one evening when we had all waded through at least ten of his so-called epiphanies, Seamus said, in his incomparably humorous way, “You know, Dennis, one man’s Ah-ha moment is another man’s Ho-ho moment.” And I remember Eleanor simply cracking up. I can still see her now. She covered her mouth because she thought it would be unkind to laugh too much, but she couldn’t help herself. I don’t think any portrait of Eleanor would be complete without that naughty giggle and that quick, trusting smile.
‘Anyhow,’ said Annette, recovering her sense of direction for a final assault, ‘as I was saying: one day, after her first stroke but before she moved into the French nursing home, we found this amazing note from Eleanor in the Ah-ha Box. The note said that she had been on a vision quest and she had seen that she would be returning to Saint-Nazaire in her next lifetime. She would come back as a young shaman and Seamus and I would be very old by then, and we would hand the Foundation back to her as she had handed it to us in what she called a “seamless continuity”. And I would like to end by asking you to hold that phrase, “seamless continuity”, in your minds, while we sit here for a few moments in silence and pray for Eleanor’s swift return.’
Standing behind the lectern, Annette lowered her head, exhaled solemnly and shut her eyes.
8
Mary thought that ‘swift return’ was going a bit far. She glanced nervously at the coffin, as if Eleanor might fling off the lid and hop out at any moment, throwing open her arms to embrace the world, with the awkward theatricality of the photograph on the order of service. Sensing Patrick’s radiant embarrassment, she regretted asking Annette to make an address, but it was hard to think of anyone who could have spoken instead. Eleanor’s slash and burn social life had destroyed continuity and deep friendship, especially after the lonely years of dementia and the fractured relationship with Seamus.
Mary had asked Johnny to read a poem and she had even been desperate enough to get Erasmus to read a passage. Nancy, the only alternative, had been hysterical with self-pity and unclear about when she was getting in from New York. The rather strained choice of readers was balanced (or made worse) by the familiarity of the passages she had chosen. Two great biblical staples were coming up next, and she now felt that it was intolerably boring of her to have picked them. On the other hand, nobody knew anything about death, except that it was unavoidable, and since everyone was terrified by that uncertain certainty, perhaps the opaque magnificence of the Bible, or even the vague Asiatic immensities that Annette obviously preferred, were better than a wilful show of novelty. Besides, Eleanor had been a Christian, amongst so many other things.
As soon as Annette sat down it would be Mary’s turn to replace her at the front of the room. The truth was, she was feeling slightly mad. She got up with a reluctance that cunningly disguised itself as a feeling of unbearable urgency, squeezed past Patrick without looking him in the eye and made her way to the lectern. When she told people how nervous she was about any kind of public appearance, they said incredibly annoying things like, ‘Don’t forget to breathe.’ Now she knew why. First she felt that she was going to faint and then, as she started to read the passage she had rehearsed a hundred times, she felt that she was choking as well.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
Mary felt a scratching sensation in her throat, but she tried to persevere without coughing.
Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not: love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth:
Mary cleared her throat and turned her head aside to cough. Now she had ruined everything. She couldn’t help feeling that there was a psychological connection between this part of the passage and her coughing fit. When she had read it yet again this morning, it had struck her as the zenith of false modesty: love boasting about not boasting, love unbelievably pleased with itself for not being puffed up. Until then, it had seemed to be an expression of the highest ideals, but now she was so tired and nervous she couldn’t quite shake off the feeling that it was one of the most pompous things ever written. Where was she? She looked at the page with a kind of swimming panic. Then she spotted where she had left off, and pressed forward, feeling that her voice did not quite belong to her.
but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Erasmus had not listened to Mary’s reading of St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians. Ever since Annette’s address, he had been lost in speculation about the doctrine of reincarnation and whether it deserved to be called ‘literally nonsensical’. It was a phrase that reminded him of Victor Eisen, the Melrose family’s philosopher friend of the sixties and seventies. In philosophical discussions, after a series of vigorous proofs, ‘literally nonsensical’ used to rush out of him like salt from a cellar that suddenly loses its top. Although he was now a rather faded figure without any enduring work to his name, Eisen had been a fluent and conceited public intellectual during Erasmus’s youth. In his eagerness to dismiss, which in the end may have secured his own dismissal, he would certainly have found reincarnation ‘literally nonsensical’: its evidence-free, memory-free, discarnate narrative failed to satisfy the Parfittian criteria of personal identity. Who is being reincarnated? That was the devastating question, unless the person who was asked happened to be a Buddhist. For him the answer was ‘Nobody’. Nobody was reincarnated because nobody had been incarnated in the first place. Something much looser, like a stream of thought, had taken human form. Neither a soul nor a personal identity was needed to precipitate a human life, just a cluster of habits clinging to the hollow concept of independent existence, like a crowd of grasping passengers sinking the lifeboat they imagined would save them. In the background was the ever-present opportunity to slip away into the glittering ocean of a true nature that was not personal either. From this point of view, it was Parfitt and Eisen who were literally nonsensical. Still, Erasmus had no problem with a rejection of reincarnation on the grounds that there was no good reason to believe that it was true — as long as the implicit physicalism of such a rejection was also rejected! The correlation between brain activity and consciousness could be evidence, after all, that the brain was a receiver of consciousness, like a transistor, or a transceiver, and not the skull-bound generator of a private display. The…