10. But there wasn't much adventure or struggle around to be had. The world that Chloe and I lived in had largely been stripped of capacities for epic conflict. Our parents didn't care, the jungle had been tamed, society hid its disapproval behind universal tolerance, restaurants stayed open late, credit cards were accepted almost everywhere, and sex was a duty, not a crime. Yet Chloe and I did have a modest story of our own, a set of common experiences that bonded us together. What is an experience? Something that breaks a polite routine and for a brief period allows us to witness things with the heightened sensitivity afforded to us by novelty, danger, or beauty - and it's on the basis of shared experiences that intimacy is given an opportunity to grow. Friendships nourished solely by occasional dinners will never have the depth of those forged on a trek or at a university. Two people who are surprised by a lion in a jungle clearing
will – unless one of them is eaten – be effectively bonded by what they have seen.
Chloe and I were never surprised by a predator, but we lived through a host of small urban experiences. Returning from a party one warm summer's night, we came across a dead body. The corpse lay on the corner of Charlwood Street and Belgrave Road. It was a beautiful young woman who looked at first as though she had collapsed drunk on the pavement. But as we were about to pass her, Chloe noticed the handle of a knife sticking out of her stomach. How much does one know of someone till one has seen a corpse with them? We kneeled down over the body, Chloe took on the voice of a pilot commandeering an agitated or plain hysterical crew (me) during an emergency landing, told me not to look, got me to call the police, checked the woman's pulse, and carefully left everything as she had found it. I felt in awe of her professionalism, though in the middle of police questioning she broke into uncontrollable sobbing and was unable to banish the image of the knife handle for several weeks. It was a barbaric incident, but one that served to unite us. We spent the rest of the night awake, drinking whisky in my apartment, telling each other a series of increasingly macabre and silly stories, impersonating policemen and corpses with kitchen knives in order to exorcize our fears.
A few months later, we were in a bagel shop in Brick Lane, when an elegant man in a pinstripe suit next to us in the queue silently handed Chloe a crumpled note, on which was scrawled in large letters the words: T love you.' Chloe opened the piece of paper, swallowed hard on reading it, then looked back at the man who had given it to her. But he had chosen to act as though nothing had happened and simply stared out at the street with the dignified expression of a man in a pinstripe suit. So just as innocently, Chloe folded the note and slipped it into her pocket. The bizarreness of the incident meant that, as with the corpse only more light-heartedly, it became something of a leitmotif in our relationship, an incident in our story to which we constantly alluded. In restaurants, we would occasionally silently slip one another notes with all the mystery of the man in the bagel shop, but with only the message Please pass the salt written on them. For anyone watching, it must have seemed odd and incomprehensible to see us collapsing into giggles. But the essence of leitmotifs is that they refer back to incidents others cannot understand because they were absent from the founding scene. No wonder if such self-referential, egotistical behaviour drives those standing on the sidelines to distraction.
13. There were plenty of other joint experiences – people we had encountered or things we had seen, done, or heard - which helped to create a common heritage. There was a psychoanalyst we met at a dinner who told Chloe that he was currently sleeping with two of his patients. There was my friend Will Knott who, having initially taken little interest in Chloe, started sending her obscure books on architecture accompanied by quizzical notes ('Who can say how long each of us will stand??!' ran one, appended to Steel - the Material of the Future). There was the toy giraffe we bought in Bath to keep Chloe's elephant company on the bed and ended up calling Geoffrey after a long-necked colleague of Chloe's at work. And there was a meeting with an accountant on a train who confessed she always carried a gun in her handbag.
14. Interest did not naturally belong to such anecdotes. For the most part, only Chloe and I appreciated them, because of the subsidiary associations we attached to them. Yet these leitmotifs were important because they gave us the feeling that we were far from strangers to one another, that we had lived through things together, and remembered the joint meanings we had derived from them. However slight these leitmotifs were, they acted like cement. The language of intimacy they helped to create was a reminder that (without clearing our way through jungles, slaying dragons, or even sharing apartments) Chloe and I had created something of a world together.
14
‘I’-Confirmation
1. Late one Sunday in the middle of July, we were sitting in a cafe at the unkempt end of the Portobello Road. It had been a beautiful day, spent largely in Hyde Park, tanning and reading books. But since around five o'clock, I had been sliding into depression. I felt like going home to hide under the bedclothes. Sunday evenings had long saddened me, reminders of death, unfinished business, guilt, and loss. We had been sitting in silence, Chloe reading the papers, I gazing through the window at the traffic and people outside. Suddenly she leaned over, gave me a kiss, and whispered, 'You're wearing your lost orphan boy look again.' No one had ever ascribed such an expression to me before, though when Chloe mentioned it, it at once accorded with and alleviated the confused sadness I happened to be feeling at the time. I felt an intense (and perhaps disproportionate) love for her on account of that remark, because of her awareness of what I had been feeling but had been unable to formulate myself, for her willingness to enter my world and objectify it for me - a gratefulness for reminding the orphan that he is an orphan, and hence returning him home.
Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
What does it mean that man is a 'social animal? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that molluscs or earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren't others around to show us what we're like. 'A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,' wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to our words and actions. Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbours. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well, sometimes better, than we know ourselves.
Without love, we lose the ability to possess a proper identity, within love, there is a constant confirmation of our selves. It is no wonder that the concept of a God who can see us has been central to many religions: to be seen is to be assured that we exist, all the better if one is dealing with a God (or partner) who loves us. Surrounded by people who precisely do not remember who we are, people to whom we often relate our stories and yet who will repeatedly forget how many times we have been married, how many children we have, and whether our name is Brad or Bill, Catrina or Catherine (and we forget much the same about them), is it not comforting to be able to find refuge from the dangers of invisibility in the arms of someone who has our identity firmly in mind?