Jenna’s mother wants me to know that she is happy that her daughter has found a replacement for Tilly’s father. ‘That one was about as much use as a blind guide dog,’ she tells me. William is a level-headed and dependable chap, I assure her. ‘So he lived with you for how long?’ she asks, with the suggestion that something does not quite add up. ‘Not for very long,’ I answer, unsure as to how much of William’s back story she knows. ‘But you’ve known him for years,’ she reminds me. I explain that I had happened to get talking to him one day, and from that point on we had always stopped for a chat whenever our paths had crossed. ‘He has some funny ideas, doesn’t he?’ she says, when William and Jenna, clasped in a dance, have passed out of earshot. I feign curiosity as to what she might mean. William has introduced her to his research on black holes. He has a lively imagination, I agree. ‘One way of putting it,’ says her husband – his first contribution for many minutes. He is on his third or fourth pint. ‘So,’ he says, ‘you’re not wearing the yoke yourself?’ I am divorced, I tell him. Putting an arm around my shoulder, he promises me that it’s better second time round. ‘First time, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing,’ he says.
Jenna points her phone at us, then shows me the result. I look like a melting candle. A slow song is playing; as with most of the evening’s music, I don’t recognise it. Jenna thinks I should dance with her; the parents too think I should dance with her; I am excusing myself when William intervenes, as if to protect a visiting dignitary from excessive attention. The parents are summoned to the other side of the room. A friend of Jenna’s, an attractive and burly young woman in a short strapless dress, slaloms across the dancefloor, huge cocktail in hand, to tell me that her mum likes the look of me. She takes a deep drink, then points across the room at a woman who is making wiping motions with her hands, to disassociate herself from whatever it is that her daughter is saying to me. ‘Thank you,’ I answer, and Jenna’s friend gives me a wink.
Time to go. I give a goodbye kiss to Jenna and another to Tilly, who is clinging to William’s back while he dances. William puts his stepdaughter down, in order to execute a manly embrace. Promises are made.
Seneca reports that in the garden in which Epicurus taught his pupils the following words were carved: ‘Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.’ (Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, Book I, Epistle XXI.) These words are well known, but are widely misunderstood, Francesca explained; Epicurus was no hedonist. Her favourite tutor was an authority on Epicurus, and was working on a translation of the letters. His keenest students were occasionally invited to join him and his wife, a professor of archaeology, at their riverside house. The garden of this house had a reputation, as did the wine cellar. In the sunset hour the chosen few would sip fine wines and admire the prospect. Though Epicurus is commonly taken to be an advocate of self-indulgence, he was nothing of the sort, her tutor impressed on her. What Epicurus meant by ‘pleasure’ is not what we generally mean by the word. ‘I am more of a sybarite than Epicurus ever was,’ he told her as he replenished her glass; this man cultivated a roguish manner that was almost camp, but was turning out to be a camouflage for real roguishness. Epicurean pleasure, he explained, was rather the elimination of pain and suffering, both physical and mental; it was the achievement of a state of tranquillity – ataraxia – that was free from covetousness, desire and the fear of death. There should be a bust of Epicurus in the museum, by the front door, Francesca suggested; nothing should be believed, he had argued, except what has been tested by observation and analysis.
The people presented here are word-puppets, imperfectly controlled; the writer included.
‘Bill’s just like you,’ my father once remarked. ‘He likes looking at things,’ he said, as if looking at things were a small peculiarity, like a preference for overcast days.
DECEMBER
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations iii 11: Make for thyself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to thee, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell thyself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so productive of elevation of the mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to thee in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole.
Looking into a mirror, I see a face that is scrutinising the scrutinising face, and reacting to being scrutinised. Confronting oneself, one begins to play the part of the examiner, the judge.
To love truly, wrote Simone Weil, is to consent to the distance that separates us from the object of our love. Attention, as she uses the word, is a receptivity in which one’s self is suspended; it is open and passive, not active and focused. What people mean by ‘love’ is usually appropriation, sometimes camouflaged with tenderness, but sometimes barely camouflaged at all, as Imogen said. The life that I sometimes allowed myself to imagine, a life shared for many years with Imogen, was not a life that she could have lived.
Sight is the only sense that responds to the assertion of the will; we impose our will on what we see. But at the maison de maître it was necessary to suspend the wilclass="underline" I possessed Imogen only in so far as my eyes received the sight of her.
Val writes of a conversation with a woman – not a client, she is at pains to point out – whose ‘every waking moment’ is consumed by her resentment of her ex-husband, a man from whom she separated more than ten years ago. This man treated her abominably. Of this there is no doubt, we are told. He was a philanderer. His business, unspecified, brought him into regular contact with alluring young women, a temptation to which he all too willingly surrendered. Since the divorce his career has taken a steeper upward trajectory. Every year there’s a new car; his girlfriend is startling. It is all so unfair. Val’s acquaintance, the wronged woman, revisits every day the crimes this man committed against her. She replenishes her grievances. The woman is in the right, but there can be no resolution if she continues this way. She must, says Val, ‘let it go’, even if this means living with the acceptance that the wrongdoer has, in a sense, won. Anger is a ‘barrier against the present’. Sometimes one must forget, if not forgive. George Santayana is quoted: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ But Santayana was wrong, Val proposes. Recollection of past injustices rarely helps to bring about reconciliation. Our culture is obsessed with commemoration, with demands for apology for events that occurred many lifetimes ago. Perhaps it is best not to reopen old wounds. Forgetting is good for us; indeed, it is essential to our well-being, ‘just like sleep’.