When I was at Cambridge, reading Russell and Gödel, tackling them both, I used to think about that class—you know, the Class of All Thinkable Things, it being a member of itself and therefore non-normal and so on. And it struck me, now, that there was all the time the possibility of another class, the Class of All Unthinkable Things, in precisely the sense I’ve outlined, June—a determinism you’re not let in on, a SECRET SOCIETY! “I can’t think about it, it can’t occur to me, so I’m no worse off.” Completely fair.
But Mr. Pryor, said Hamish (his name), you do know about us, as we know about you, and we are watching you, and I am telling you we are. Good point, I said. (I like him. He was complimentary about the sponge cake, too.) I know you are, but I like to pretend that I am not merely a creature of punitive regulation, just as certain people know full well what homosexuality is but would prefer not to think about it.
Of course that is why I defend machines, too. Anyone can see that intelligent machinery is possible, they just don’t want to have to admit it.
I could see Max’s eyes narrowing and Hamish going slightly red, so I left it at that.
The funny thing is that I’m no longer sure what the relationship is between what people do or say and what they think. Look at that young man. He is upholding the law and he would have sent me to prison if need be, but he likes coming to dinner and is amiable. Who knows what he really thinks? Who needs secret societies when you have society’s secrecy? Plenty of those who condemn me probably do not feel, deep down, I’ve done much wrong, or care particularly one way or the other. We all know sex is ungovernable. It is a matter of energy, like most things. The costs go up as we get older.
Some will have said “how revolting.” Are they revolted? Truly? Which of us has not felt betrayed by the words that come out of our mouths, even when they are spoken with utmost sincerity? Doesn’t saying something evoke in most of us a wrinkle of suspicion that what we want to communicate is often much deeper, more complex and subtle, than the dilute words we use? That is why we smile while speaking, or cry, or shudder, or touch. These are eloquent gestures, as silence may also be eloquent.
I’m reading Austen again. I used to think Anne’s kindly cast of mind was everywhere demonstrated by her actions. Now I don’t know. I suppose the irony is that she went along with things she didn’t actually agree with and in the end it didn’t matter.
I went to Stallbrook with some of this, and a tantalizing dream I can’t remember. I spent ages before our session trying to retrieve it, but my system of recall is imperfect. I reach for something—a boy I knew at Cambridge who was kind to me and turned out to be a Nomad himself—and the whole thing crashes like a lot of junk falling off a shelf. I’m finding it hard to concentrate, anyway.
Stallbrook recommended meditation—one of those Eastern traditions your husband so wisely values. So I have been looking at the gray poplar in front of my window, here on the common, and I watch the motion of the leaves, only yesterday it was very misty and the leaves were but hints of leaves, and I remembered the dream had fog in it.
Fog interests me. It hides things. Sometimes you know they are there (they are thinkable). Sometimes you don’t…
Don’t worry about Trentham. He is a creature of the university, no doubt, but there’s no harm in him. Princeton, naturally. Our paths hardly cross, though I appreciate your concern. And yes, I remember the chess set. The pieces in pieces. Alas!
One can never know that one has not made a mistake.
The Forester’s Orders
After a restless night, the Forester awakes to solid things—his half-doored house on Chapel Hill, its deep windows, the beams and stairs built from a merchant ship, the iron kettle on the range, a cottage loaf, the hunting knife.
His heart thuds like a fence post going in. How soon the morning turns over and spoils! That knife is wrong. It glows ingeniously. It has been cut into the scene.
As it shimmers, the Forester remembers his instructions like a fever, how the Great Queen summoned her servant and said, “Now is the time to go about your daily work as if nothing had changed. To tend the coppice, plant your Sitka spruce, your larch and pine. Now kill your friend, the one who gives your life meaning, beneath an oak. Bring me the Fair One’s troubled heart. Whet your routine with my design, the call of justice, and forget…”
“I don’t know why I brought the subject up. I didn’t mean to ask you about God.”
“I know,” says June, whose father is a priest. We’re on a stile above Lewes and looking out over the gorse and bee ripple toward the sea. “But don’t worry. It comes of making out the hidden meaning of things all day long, and being bound to secrecy. We live with codes, we speak in them. One ends up being almost too discreet.”
“I meant to ask if you would marry me.”
Brown admirals flick by, a flipbook pattering of states. June points.
“Look at those cattle ponds. Aren’t they magnificent? From here they look like little pieces of the sky. Mother-of-pearl.”
“Flakes of mica?”
“Perhaps.” June smiles. “Probably shell. On most beaches, mica’s less prevalent than shell, because of all the mussels, barnacles, and what have you…”
“I see. Doubly enciphered pond!”
“And yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I will marry you.”
“That’s good. You’re sure?”
“I can say anything to you, Alec. And you can say, well, anything you like to me. Of course I’m sure. Besides, who else will ask?”
“You wouldn’t find me too unorthodox, as husbands go?”
June ducks her chin. Fine hair escapes a messy chignon and floats sideways in the breeze. “As husbands go, I’d rather you didn’t. And anyway, I’d hoped not to be forced to make comparisons.”
“But then…” The wind is getting up, which helps me to be brave. My nerves are scrambling themselves. “I should like to have children, June. A pair of each, to balance things. It’s difficult, to bring oneself—”
“Turning blowy.”
“—to be clear what it is one needs. I should be very loath to feel I’d shortchanged you. Inveigled you into a sort of… social pact.”
“And isn’t that what marriage is, a pact?”
“It is, of course. But inside marriage, people are still separate. I don’t want to live by appearances. False ones, I mean. If only we were all allowed to be…”
June sighs, “Oh, let me guess. Transparent? Who we are? Then what? Why bother with the pacts and marriages? We’d not be separate at all. Just wandering spirits. I think I see why you were mixing up your proposal with God.”
“I’ve had lovers—I’ve been in love before.”
“I’d gathered that. You reach out when you doze. With a woman?”
She smiles through hair. Clouds flee the ridge. The red flash of a goldfinch darts up from a thistle clump. It is an art to be fearless. June’s like a guelder rose, the dogwood’s umbels, and the bark of the elder, all plants that mark these hills with centuries of growth and form. Unpretty, strong. They’ve no opinion of me, or anyone.
I hear my blood above the wind, the thud of alertness in sleep. And then the coming to, the smells of grass and mud, carbolic soap on skin and clothes. The blossoms of the wayfarer that turn in June’s right hand. A flower wheel.