A Slip of the Keyboard (27 page)

There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that
they
exist.

But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should. It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I’m not used to this.

As a fantasy writer I create fresh gods and philosophies almost with every new book (I’m rather pleased with Anoia, the goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers, whose temple is hung about with the bent remains of egg whisks and spatulas. She actually appears to work in this world, too). But since contracting Alzheimer’s disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is, if anything, that I really believe.

I read the Old Testament all the way through when I was about thirteen and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read the
Origin of Species
, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that or because of that, it all made perfect sense. As soon as I was allowed out again I went and borrowed the sequel and even then it struck me that Darwin had missed a trick with the title. If only a good publicist had pointed out to him that the
Ascent of Man
had more reader appeal, perhaps there wouldn’t have been quite as much fuss.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

The New Testament, now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work on wood—a material that couldn’t have been widely available in Palestine.

But I could never see the two testaments as one coherent narrative. Besides, by then I was reading mythology for fun, and had run into Sir George Frazer’s
Folklore in the Old Testament
, a
velvet-gloved hatchet job if ever there was one. By the time I was fourteen I was too smart for my own god.

I could never find the answers, you see. Perhaps I asked the wrong kind of question, or was the wrong kind of kid, even back in primary school.

I was puzzled by the fact that, according to the hymn, there was a green hill far away “without a city wall.” What was so unusual about a hill not having a wall? If only someone had explained … And that is how it went—there was never the explanation.

I asked a teacher what the opposite of a miracle was and she, without thinking, I assume, said it was an act of god. You shouldn’t say something like that to the kind of kid who will grow up to be a writer; we have long memories. But I’d asked the question because my mother had told me about two families she knew in the East End of London. They lived in a pair of semidetached houses. The daughter of one was due to get married to the son of the other and on the night before the wedding a German bomb destroyed all the members of both families who were staying in those houses in one go, except for the sailor brother of the groom who arrived in time to help scrabble through the wreckage with his bare hands. Like many of the stories she told me, this had an enormous effect on me. I thought it was a miracle. It was exactly the same shape as a miracle. It was just … reversed.

Did the sailor thank his god that the bomb had missed him? Or did he curse because it had not missed his family? If the sailor had given thanks, wouldn’t he be betraying his family? If God saved one, he could have saved the rest, couldn’t he? After all, isn’t God in charge? Why does he act as if he isn’t? Does he want us to act as if he isn’t, too? (As a kid I had a very clear image of the Almighty: he had a tail coat and pinstriped trousers, black, slicked-down hair, and an aquiline nose. On the whole, I was probably a rather strange child, and I wonder what
my life might have been like if I’d met a decent theologian when I was nine.)

About five years ago that child rose up in me again, and I began work on a book, soon to see the light of day as
Nation
. It came to me overnight, in all but the fine detail.

It is set on a world very like this one, at the time of an explosion very like that of Krakatoa, and in the centre of my book, a thirteen-year-old boy, now orphaned, screams at his gods for answers when he hasn’t fully understood what the questions are. He hates them too much not to believe. He has had to bury his own family; he is not going to give thanks to
anyone
. And I watched him try to build a new nation and a new philosophy. “The creator gave us the brains to prove he doesn’t exist,” he says as an old man. “It is better to build a seismograph than to worship the volcano.”

I agree. I don’t believe. I never have, not in big beards in the sky. But I was brought up traditionally Church of England, which is to say that while churchgoing did not figure in my family’s plans for the Sabbath, practically all the Ten Commandments were obeyed by instinct and a general air of reason, kindness, and decency prevailed. Belief was never mentioned at home, but right actions were taught by daily example.

Possibly because of this, I’ve never
disliked
religion. I think it has some purpose in our evolution. I don’t have much truck with the “religion is the cause of most of our wars” school of thought, because in fact that’s manifestly done by mad, manipulative, and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God.

I number believers of all sorts among my friends. Some of them are praying for me. I’m happy that they wish to do this, I really am, but I think science may be a better bet.

So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat show sofa? More accurately it was the memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was okay and things were happening
as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?

Me, actually—the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis’s
Spem in alium
, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it’s what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that
E=mc
²
.

It’s that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Hawking. It doesn’t require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation, and inquiring minds. I don’t think I’ve found God but I may have seen where gods come from.

Inaugural Professorial Lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, 4 November 2010

Ladies and Gentlemen of the University, and distinguished guests.

Much to my astonishment, I find myself addressing you as your latest and most disreputable professor. Only a little while ago I couldn’t even spell
academic
and now I am one.

I greet you as the author of the notorious Discworld series,
written over three decades by a man with only one A level to his name, and since that was for journalism, it probably doesn’t count. Although, oddly, I am occasionally presented with evidence that I am the creator of academics; over the years I have received a fairly large number of letters from grateful parents telling me that their son, and it is usually their son, would not pick up a book at all until he found Discworld and suddenly started reading like a demon and is now tearing his way through university, and I get embarrassed, but cheerful when professors tell me that they recall lining up to have me sign a book when they were nineteen. Embarrassed and cheerful, that is, and feeling very, very old.

Tonight may be a very interesting experiment for all of us, because what you have done now, ladies and gentlemen, is gone and got yourselves a genuine absent-minded professor. It is common knowledge, because I took great pains to make it so, that I have a weird form of Alzheimer’s called posterior cortical atrophy, which I may describe as a topological version of the traditional disease. In short, I am topologically disadvantaged when it comes to complexities like revolving doors with mirrors, whereat I have to work hard to know if I’m coming or going, although in truth I have spent most of my life not knowing if I was coming or going. Putting on my pants in the morning, too, had also begun to be a problem until I realized that the solution was to turn the situation on its head and look at it from another direction; like all sensible men of my age I wear stout Y-fronts (I hope you’re writing this down) but try as I might, the chances of getting them on right first time is 50-50. It’s not that I don’t know where the legs go, and they never end up on my head, but which way round they are, that’s another story. It took some time to realize that there was no point in mucking about with the pants because somehow my eye/brain coordination has difficulty in deconstructing pants. Should the Y therefore be in the wrong place, i.e., back to front, just lower the damn things to the ground,
walk around them, and put them on again from the opposite direction—it works every time. Plus, of course, provides healthy exercise.

I make no apology for telling you this, especially since several elderly gentlemen hearing this confession will be thinking, “Bloody good idea! I’ll give it a try!”

However, I must, for the sake of exactitude, tell you that yesterday, which again started with a healthy stroll around my pants, I walked, correctly aligned in the groinal region, into my office where I worked on the second draft of my next book, and it was goddam literature, so it was, and by now I know when I am on improved form; I was nearly flying.

Usually, if there is no warm body to assist me with my early drafts, I dictate most letters by talking to my computer, something which comes so easily to anybody descended from chattering monkeys. It’s not perfect, because Pratchett’s First Law of Digital Systems is that when they are sufficiently complex they act very much like analogue systems and get ideas of their own. The situation is like riding a good-but-nervous racehorse: you learn when it’s ready to gallop, and when you should slow down a little. Nevertheless, even if my touch-typing ability miraculously came back to me, I would still talk the stories, because stories should be spoken.

While I am here with you in Dublin I will be talking to young people—that is to say, younger than me—who, at the risk of their souls, wish to write for a living, and they all have a wonderful opportunity to find out that my writing, at least for the first draft, is entirely instinctive as I watch the movie in my head and only during the second draft do I close in on what I mean to say.

That reminds me: many years ago I said publicly that I didn’t really know how I wrote, and would leave discussion of that (and I quote) “to the clever buggers in universities,” and it has since been quoted back to me by your dean of Research, a decent guy, but in
my opinion not fat enough for the position, with the observation that I was now one of those clever buggers! Officially! I was astonished, and indeed my whole life has been one of astonishment, as I shall now recount.…

However, there has to be a regrettable caveat. PCA messes with the memory, and also makes it almost impossible to read from a written speech. Doing so means, if the speaker has a hope of holding the audience, that their gaze should flick effortlessly between the painstakingly written text and the audience themselves. I have been robbed of the power to do that. Therefore I shall endeavour to give my speech from memory and assisted by my estimable PA Rob Wilkins, with whom I have agreed that he will occasionally, given that we are all friends here, interject as he sees fit with comments like “You didn’t tell them about the hippopotamus, you daft old fart,” in which case I will have to say, “Thank you for that but please remember next time that it is in fact ‘Prof. Sir Daft Old Fart, OBE, and Blackboard Monitor,’ thank you so very much.”

And why should I subject you to this charade? It is because it is the truth of the world and the world is growing older, and I am luckier, with my technology, than many others.

Twice, when I have spoken out on subjects like Alzheimer’s and assisted dying, helpful Christians have told me that I should try considering my affliction as a gift from God. Now, personally I would have preferred a box of chocolates. Nevertheless, there may be some truth, a curiously convoluted truth, in that because it has made me look at the world, just like my pants, from a new perspective, which, according to G. K. Chesterton, is the role of fantasy anyway. And now I am living in a kind of fantasy, and I have found that growing within me is a steeliness that I never knew was there, the view of the world that might make Bob Dylan look like a man who was only slightly annoyed about the government. Whereas, not so long ago, I used to drift gently through the world, occasionally rebounding softly from
the side. I began to open my eyes which led to a terrible tendency to question authority, because authority that cannot be questioned is tyranny and I will not accept any tyranny, even that of heaven.