The dawn of an era

At a threshold

The last 30 days, so the stats tell me, 27 of you have signed up here who weren’t here before. Welcome. I assume you read something that made you think I am interesting. I think I’m interesting, but everyone thinks they’re interesting don’t they? Anyway, I reckoned that, if you did sign up because you find me interesting, I ought really to write something of interest. Here it is.

It was many years ago that Gé and I found ourselves in Cologne. I say found ourselves, because, for whatever reason, I can’t remember the reason we were there. There’ll have been one, I’m sure, in our minds, at the time, but now the reason escapes me and the question I want to address, ultimately, at the end of the piece, is whether not now knowing any more what the reason was for being in Cologne matters, for the reason I’m telling you this has nothing to do with the reason we were there.

Gé and I were thick, then passing, and then thick friends again over more than 20 years. He’s dead now, passed away last October. But, at the time of the facts, such as they are, we were thick, and we were hungry and we wanted pizza, and nothing else.

The eternal quest of every living thing on this Earth is to satisfactorily unite that which he, she or it wants with him-, her- or itself. That Sunday in Cologne, Gé and I searched high and low for a pizzeria and, so fixated did we become on pizza, that no other point of restauration would suffice for our pangs. As if we had set for ourselves the single goal of securing possession of some holy grail.

Presently, Gé turned to me and said, “We must stop looking for a pizzeria. If there is one to be had, it will present itself to us.” It’s a statement that, at one and the same time, sounds as if it portends a wisdom of mystical depth and as being irrational bollocks. Which of those it is depends on you. In the moment, it struck me, who was the only person whom it required, in that moment, to strike at all, as palpably common sense. And, in a trice, the quest for the pizzeria was abandoned. A minute later, we stood before the pizzeria that would be our sojourn for the remainder of the afternoon.

If a law is to be drawn from this single instance, or indeed from this instance allied with a whole ream of other such instances, it is this: that he finds what he is searching for who does not search for it. And, because this law is simply an observation of such instances as from which it is deduced, it is empirical rather than rational in its nature. At least, so it may seem to us. For instance, the law that says that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west is drawn from the observation, day after day, that it is, with seasonal variances, at those two compass points that it does those two things. It has, to my knowledge, never within human experience done aught else. We therefore confidently extrapolate from these unerring observations and make of them a law. And in that law we place our confidence that we shall ourselves not have erred in our observations.

To understand what they portend, however, is something different. For it is relatively easy to adopt a name for a compass point and to describe what happens at that point on the horizon. It is something else to explain why what happens, happens. Up until the times of Galileo, the explanation comprised the sun encircles the Earth, which is immobile, and thus the sun describes an arc across our heavens over the course of the day. What Galileo propounded was slightly different to that, namely that the Earth encircles the sun, which is immobile, and thus the Earth turns on an axis, which seems to us to result in the sun describing an arc across our heavens over the course of the day. The problem is that the observations leading to these two, diametrically opposed, laws are the same. It was science that would later—purportedly—provide the solution to the contradiction and find unanimously—or almost—in favour of Galileo: rational science became the usurper of irrational … science. But, up until then and even since, rational science was and has been whatever a prevailing view reasoned is right. I think my law, as formulated above, will have some way to go before being embraced by the scientific community in particular and the general public at large, but—and here, were I giving a class, I’d be asking you to write down examples (for discussion) of instances and aspirations in your own life that you can recall, which were either the subject of fortuitous happenstance or which, by contrast, were sought, but in vain—I can guarantee to you that your entire life has consisted of a series comprising events of one of three such categories, plus one other for completeness, for, over an entire lifetime, only four such categories can be contemplated, to wit:

1. those you seek and achieve;

2. those you seek in vain;

3. those you do not seek but that happen anyway;

4. those you do not seek and that do not happen (for completeness).

Of these four propositions, none is more numerous than the fourth, even though I can adduce no rational argument and no empirical observation for a proposition that, I feel, will nonetheless be nodded to in assent by all of you: the things that you never wanted and that never happened by far outnumber those that did happen, even if only along the way, which, in turn, by far outnumber those you did want but that either did not happen or did. The order of the last two, the first and second of my list, will vary from one person to the next, who may not even be conscious themselves as to which ranks higher than the other: those things sought but never achieved, or those sought and also achieved.

I feel a little restlessness among the readership as to where this is headed, and I’m just as curious as you are. Perhaps I should try to draw a few conclusions, even if only of an interim nature, to see what direction we’re going in.

First, the Bible. The good old Bible. It contains a parable of Jesus in which he talks about a woman who lost a coin, a talent it is called in the story. She searches the whole house, from top to bottom, and, eventually, she finds it. But, in the story, that is not that. It’s what she does next that is so telling about the story: she runs out into the street and enjoins her neighbours to rejoice with her at the finding of the lost coin. It is an element of the story that passed me by when reading it in my youth. I grew up on a housing estate of detached and semi-detached homes. I replayed the events of the story in my mind, with me standing in for the old lady and Leeds standing in for biblical Judaea, and ran the storyboard past my internal producer. I felt it was not a winner, me knocking on neighbours’ doors to advise them I had found it. I felt they would find me strange. I felt I would find me strange.

The Lost Talent is one of three parables grouped together to illustrate the same point. The other two are The Prodigal Son and The Lost Sheep. All three are repeatedly cited in modern culture, often failing to home in on the point: the focus lies not on the errant, who return to the fold, but on the owner, who rejoices in the return. The stories tell the same basic facts: ownership, loss and recovery plus rejoicing from three different viewpoints.

In The Prodigal Son, a father entrusts property to his three sons, two of whom prove to be good stewards and the third of whom is profligate. He rejoices more over the return of the profligate son than over the two whose duty never failed them. In The Lost Sheep, a shepherd rejoices over the return of a sheep, an animal that knows no sense of duty, but that errs when the shepherd himself fails in his own. The Lost Talent concerns the loss of something that can only get lost by the inattention of its owner, that plays no part in its own return but whose recovery is tirelessly sought by the owner. The circumstances of the loss vary, therefore, in each story. Yet the joy of the owner upon recovery of the lost item is the same: unbounded.

Today, I had, by coincidence, occasion to revisit my analysis of The Lost Talent. I was at the store where I work and a gentleman approached to ask whether I had any idea of whether we had, and if so where it was, such a thing as ginger wine. It’s a pedestrian question, like many I get each day. I led him a few paces towards the entrance to the store and took a bottle of Stone’s Ginger Wine down from the shelf. “Oh, I never saw that,” he said as I did so. “The shelf is in your blind spot as you come in from the street, it’s not the best place,” I replied. Then it came: he didn’t so much as take the bottle from me as cradle it. He looked longingly at the label and a reminiscence caused a hint of a smile to appear on his face. “I haven’t had this for years. My mother used to drink it, and we would always take a glass together, around this time of year.” This sparked a recollection in my own mind: “My grandmother and I always drank it as a toast to the new year. She wasn’t a great drinker.”

It’s a lost-and-found story. I’m not sure which of the parables it mirrors, and I’m not even sure which of the four categories of life events it falls into. Into one of them, I’m sure. But it only makes sense as comprising a life event (an expression that I always smile at when it’s used by banks and photographers) when viewed from the owner’s perspective, not from that of the lost item, which didn’t even know it was lost, even if it could have: boundless joy, or, here, wistful memory. Today, they were the same thing.

Somebody in my distant past once said to me, whereby I knew in the depths of all my fears that he was right, that he never failed to get what he wanted. I didn’t ask him how he secured such certainty of achievement and the details are unimportant, to me at least, and to you. They say that life is cheap in some places, that the taking of it is like shooting fish in a barrel. Why on earth would one shoot a fish already entrapped in a barrel? Would that not simply make holes in the barrel and allow the water to run out? Instead of shooting fish in a barrel, it is in fact easier to destroy the barrel.

Want is a word of interesting etymology, just as interesting as that of need. Nowadays, the Americans use need in a way that implies command, and the consequences of disobedience to which imply a sanction far outweighing the supposed gentleness of the injunction. Aside from those somewhat clear parameters, mankind has, for the most part, lost all sense of proportion on the meaning of the word need. And, with that, it has lost all sense of proportion over what is meant by want.

We need what we we want, and we want what is lacking. But because we want more than we want, we end up wanting what we don’t need. We arrive at an impasse that fails to distinguish between want and need, in ourselves as in others. For some, this is a matter of circumstance, and is not to be altered. And, for others, circumstance is there to be made: they make their own luck. And, in all of this, words like need and want, and luck all tread the fine and indeterminable line that we draw through life between that which is within our power and that which must be acquiesced in as a circumstance of life. We are raised to believe that there are some things which it is within our power to change, as far as we are concerned, and that, with stalwart effort, we will go some, if not all the way to achieving them. And that our failure therein will not be a cause of disappointment for as long as we set our hearts to the task. Or that it will.

But, and I shall be candid: he who has never had cause to rejoice with his neighbours over a lost coin, a lost sheep or a prodigal son, and has therefore always had within his power the ability to make his own luck, is nothing less than evil, a danger to the world and to the society of which he forms no part.

They say a new era is about to begin. It will pass, as surely as all past eras have passed. Maybe because people realised they didn’t need what they thought they wanted. Or perhaps they thought they had another way to make their own luck. And perhaps that is what is interesting.