To be honest, Chloe gave me the occasional doubt herself. One night, I remember her sitting in my living room reading while we listened to a Bach cantata I had put on. The music sang of heavenly fires, Lord's blessings, and beloved companions, while Chloe's face, tired, but happy, bathed by a streak of light crossing the darkened room from the desk lamp, seemed as though it belonged to an angel, an angel who was only elaborately pretending (with trips to Safeway or the post office) that she was an ordinary mortal, but whose mind was in fact filled with delicate and divine thoughts.
Because only the body is open to the eye, the hope of the infatuated lover is that the soul is faithful to its casing, that the body owns an appropriate soul, that what the skin represents turns out to be what it is. I did not love Chloe for her body, I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise.
Yet what if her face was only a trompe l'oeil? 'By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,' wrote George Orwell, but Chloe was only just twenty-four – and even if she had been older, we are in truth, despite Orwell's optimistic belief in natural justice, as unlikely to be given the face we deserve as the money or the opportunities.
16. 'Can't you turn off this impossible yodelling,' said the angel all of a sudden.
'What impossible yodelling?'
'You know, the music'
'It's Bach.'
'I know, but it sounds so silly, I can't concentrate on Cosmo.'
Is it really her I love, I thought to myself as I looked again at Chloe reading on the sofa across the room, or simply an idea that collects itself around her mouth, her eyes, her face? In using her face as a guide to her soul, was I not perhaps guilty of mistaken metonymy, whereby an attribute of an entity is substituted for the entity itself (the crown for the monarchy, the wheel for the car, the White House for the US government, Chloe's angelic expression for Chloe…)?
In the oasis complex, the thirsty man imagines he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
19 Was I not victim of a similar delusion, alone in a room with a woman who wore the face of someone composing The Divine Comedy while working her way through the Cosmopolitan astrology column?
12
Scepticism and Faith
By contrast with the history of love, the history of philosophy shows a relentless concern with the discrepancy between appearance and reality. 'I think I see a tree outside,' the philosopher mutters, 'but is it not possible that this is just an optical illusion behind my own retina?' 'I think I see my wife,' mutters the philosopher, adding hopefully, 'but is it not possible that she too is just an optical illusion?'
Philosophers tend to limit epistemological doubt to the existence of tables, chairs, the courtyards of Cambridge colleges, and the occasional unwanted wife. But to extend these questions to things that matter to us, to love, for instance, is to raise the frightening possibility that the loved one is but an inner fantasy, with little connection to any objective reality.
Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survivaclass="underline" we are as sceptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be sceptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table, it is hell to doubt the legitimacy of love.
At the start of Western philosophical thinking, the progress from ignorance to knowledge finds itself likened by Plato to a glorious journey from a dark cave into bright sunlight. Men are born unable to perceive reality, Plato tells us, much like cave dwellers who mistake shadows of objects thrown up on the walls for the objects themselves. Only with much effort may illusions be thrown off, and the journey made from the shadowy world into bright sunlight, where things can at last be seen for what they truly are. As with all allegories, this is a tale with a moraclass="underline" that truth is always superior to illusion.
It takes another twenty-three centuries or so until the Socratic assumption about the benefits of pursuing truth is challenged from a practical rather than simply a moral or epistemological standpoint. Everyone from Aristotle to Kant had criticized Plato on the way to reach the truth, but no one had seriously questioned the value of the undertaking. But in his Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Friedrich Nietzsche finally took the bull by the horns and asked:
What in us really wants 'truth'? . . . We ask the value of this . . . Why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance? . . . The falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to it. . . the question is to what extent it is life-advancing; and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgements ... are the most indispensable to us . . . that to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life.*
From a religious point of view, the value of truth had of course been placed into question many centuries before. The philosopher Pascal (1623-62, hunchback Jansenist and author of the Pensées) had talked of a choice facing every Christian in a world unevenly divided between the horror of a universe without God and the blissful – but infinitely more remote - alternative that God did exist. Even though the odds were in favour of God not existing, Pascal argued that religious faith could still be justified because the joys of the slimmer probability so far outweighed the abomination of the larger one. And so it should perhaps be with love. Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long, they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as opposed to the philosophic impulse, which is to doubt and enquire. They should prefer the risk of being wrong and in love to being in doubt and without love.
Such thoughts were running through my mind one evening, sitting on Chloe's bed playing with her toy elephant Guppy. She'd told me that when she was a child, Guppy had played an enormous role in her life. He was a character as real as members of her family, and a lot more sympathetic. He had his own routines, his favourite foods, his own way of sleeping and talking – and yet, from a more dispassionate position, it was evident that Guppy was entirely her creation and had no existence outside her imagination. But if there was one thing that would have been ruinous to Chloe's relationship with the elephant, it would have been to ask her whether or not the creature really existed: Does this furry thing actually live independently of you, or did you not simply invent him? And it occurred to me then that perhaps a similar discretion should be applied to lovers and their beloveds, that one should never ask a lover, Does this love-stuffed person actually exist or are you simply imagining them?