The Pages (20 page)

I reached across to switch on the lights. It would be better to slow down, the road being icy.

‘What do your philosophers say about that one? No, oh! Shit!'

Often I see the car swinging into a slide, and crossing the road it slid still faster, a dog on lino. Rosie gave a gasp. The stone bridge blocked the view. We hit, the car tilted forward and went over, and over again. Really, the thing was like a mad smashing animal. I was face down on the bank, my mouth filled with snow. The rented car upside-down floated away.

—
It would be better if I reviewed my life as a series of incidents, of sobering alterations – along with the observations, speculations and corrections, snatches of what had gone on in my mind,
thought-thinking
, and a few notes on what I have learnt more from study than ‘life', even if I have trouble saying exactly what I have learnt. A certain doggedness – is it necessary? Make note of the acts of oafish ignorance, the examples of blindness…how I had spent too long on a certain way of life, or following a single line of thought. (‘Tunnel vision.') The aims we set ourselves when young are still there but more and more out of reach. There would be a list of the good deeds and the bad deeds. Proper due can be given to my curiosity in general. Each entry need not be long. A single sentence should do it. One entry per page. These could be tossed up into the air and allowed to settle in any order, for they are random parts of a single life, mine. It is worth a try. For one thing it would avoid each small town and each and every river and sunset Rosie and I had seen in Germany; or the fact that my hair turned the colour of snow on the riverbank in Germany, and from that same moment I was a different, an altered, person. Or, ‘After he recovered in a
pension
in Vence, where for months he lay in a shuttered room like a dog, he returned to Sydney alone on 5 July, 2001, on news of the death of his father.'

28

WHAT ROGER Antill called his ‘philosophy' cannot be taken seriously. Unlike his brother he had not spent years in study or sustained thinking on the subject; aside from Wesley's drafts in blue ink he had hardly read a single sentence on a philosophical subject. Roger was a plain-thinking pastoralist running thousands of acres of merino sheep. He had dirt under his fingernails. Even the way his ‘philosophy' came to him out of the blue has an amateur ring to it. Driving with Erica into town, Roger slowed and stopped in the shade under a tree. For a moment he rested his hands over the steering wheel and said nothing (gathering his thoughts). Dirt road, nobody for miles. With her big-city experience, Erica expected the sudden clammy-hand moment. He did – in an unexpected way. He reached across and took Erica's hand in order, he said, to demonstrate what he considered to be, not just a philosophy, a practical philosophy.

He had noticed that the hand, everybody's hand, followed the wishes of the mind, that is, thoughts, theories, moral positions, the passions et cetera. The hand carries out the wishes of a decision; it is the practical rendition of a philosophy. The hand wields the sword, squeezes the trigger, does the strangling, signals the execution; both are raised in surrender. It waves goodbye. Any theory of the passions is eventually performed by the hand – hands and fingers wandering over the other body. How many bones in the hand? Twenty-seven. All at work in the service of a thought, a philosophical position. We shake hands. We work with our hands. Roger Antill didn't include agriculture, believing it is not philosophical enough. The pen is held in a hand. Philosophy depends for its creation on the hand. (Dreams and psychoanalysis do not! – Sophie.) Logic via medicine, the surgeon's hand. And music – the composing and conducting of it, and the playing, or holding the microphone. How is the camera aimed, clicked or rolled? Counting on fingers – I bet it was the source of arithmetic. Signing of documents, applying to the face ideals of beauty; zipping up our bloody trousers. The hands of the clock. Hands cut off as punishment.

Erica on the broad seat of the truck didn't know whether to listen politely or laugh or nod encouragement – or come in early, and demolish his idea, shoot it down in flames, even if it was tentative, for this theory of hands, or whatever it was, had no philosophical basis. It was little more than detailing the obvious. (In Sophie's opinion, Roger's theory revealed a condition of obsessive disorder. Please go find a therapist, now.) But at the moment when Roger took her hand, and she allowed it to rest in his, a small warm bird, Erica, for all her training and devotion to logic, which over time encouraged a certain severity, her remote and masculine side, softened, and she proceeded to listen. He went on listing examples of hand-movements. She felt different. Something was going on. And through the windscreen and at the side remained the landscape, warm, golden and still, which she hadn't until then seen before.

29

A PHILOSOPHER is a dissatisfied person.

Only small parts of the philosophical person are fully developed. A certain childishness.

‘Why is there something rather than nothing?'

The puzzle is whether to continue with the
puzzle
. The puzzle? What are we doing
here
? What can be described. Et cetera. Life is the intruder on thought. The impossibility of being true, of being good, of not inflicting harm, or altering another person – while at the same time retaining and reinforcing individuality.

A study of ethics is more difficult than the emotions.

All is separate; everything is divided; separateness is the general condition.

Don't say ‘philosophy', say ‘provisional'. A provisional philosophy, always provisional, a suggestion, nothing more.

I am incapable of distinguishing the truth. Nevertheless…

Philosophy is the modelling of imperfect materials.

The word
insofar
– attractive. To be used.

Sheep never stop their eating. The importance of leisure.

Philosophy doesn't ‘exist'.

Work to one side of the conventional forms.

Terrain
– useful word. The terrain of thinking, the shape of words.

The process of disturbing the mind is the mind.

There is nothing ordinary about any thing.

Philosophy as a natural force.

We end up becoming.

He picked up the word
overseeable.

How to make anything of all the sensations.

The puzzle can never change: ‘How do I relate to the world and to that which I call my life?'

Except it needs to be generalised.

Words are a recent addition to nature. A laconic culture is little more than one step above the oral culture.

Of course the philosopher can only despise photography. It is the enemy of philosophy, of what cannot be seen.

One emotion is replaced by another.

It has been said (Locke) that experience is like the furniture arriving in an empty house.

Because of the impossibility of living without experience, thoughts and ideas are not special in themselves.

From experience the emotions are activated.

The contest in the emotions between the cold and the warm. These are waverings of the mind.

Philosophy cannot exist without stubbornness.

‘Modesty is a species of ambition.'

Can there be such a thing as intellectual love?

Moral philosophy doesn't necessarily explain how we should live.

How is it possible to measure human thought against the fact, and the movement, of nature.

It was the surroundings, various bric-a-brac, appendages, attachments, not a commitment.

Is it anything more than self-absorption?

Why loyal to some, not to others?

‘Without isolation there is nothing Noble or Lofty to be obtained.'

Double, even triple, isolation. It begins to lead to indifference.

Ambition is the source of all emotions.

Many of the emotions are related to the past.

The desire to love is stronger than the desire to be loved.

Some emotions have no name.

Grief and melancholy are bodily functions. The woman weeps on a park bench. Love between two people is never equal. Love – a confusion. Loss is the greater one. We should never be surprised at our own emotions. Because of the emotions we can never really know the other person. We assume too much of ourselves and others. Memory – an interference. To let down, to be let down. Turning away.

Landscape and thought. It was cold in Germany. To be isolated and mind-cold.

By then I wanted, more than anything, numbness.

I may have had some sort of breakdown.

We are passive; only to a small extent can we be powerful.

How to remove subjectivity from
thought-thinking.

The effort of moving towards a philosophy becomes itself the philosophy.

Love is a recognition of unbalanced affinities. See the uneven harmonies in nature.

‘This creeping psychoanalysis of ordinary conduct.'

The vague and undefined needs of one mean a reduction in the other.

It is all given shape and described by words.

To live simply and quietly is almost a philosophy.

By keeping separate from people, I thought I could get on with my work.

We are philosophers; we cannot help being.