of God’s love for us. I can even go further: in his life and death, Jesus emphasised the necessity of loving others without regard to our own self-interest. In a way, when we love fictional characters, knowing that they can never love us in return, is that not a method of practising in miniature the kind of personally disinterested love to which Jesus calls us? I mean that sympathetic engagement is a form of desire with an object but without a subject, a way of wanting without wanting; desiring for others not what I want for myself but the way I want for myself.
I suppose the point I’m making is that there’s no end of fun to be had once you get into the Christian mindset. For you and me it’s harder, because we can’t seem to shake the conviction that nothing matters, life is random, our sincerest feelings are reducible to chemical reactions, and no objective moral law structures the universe. It’s possible to live with those convictions, of course, but not really possible, I don’t think, to believe the things that you and I say we believe. That some experiences of beauty are serious and others trivial. Or that some things are right and others wrong. To what standard are we appealing? Before what judge do we argue our case? I’m not trying to tear you down, by the way – I occupy what I suspect is exactly your position. I can’t believe that the difference between right and wrong is simply a matter of taste or preference; but I also can’t bring myself to believe in absolute morality, which is to say, in God. This leaves me in a philosophical nowhere place, lacking the courage of my convictions on both sides. I can’t have the satisfaction of feeling that I serve God by doing right, and yet the idea of doing wrong disgusts me. Even more to the point, I find my own work morally and politically worthless, and yet it’s what I do with my life, the only thing I want to do.
When I was younger, I think what I wanted was to travel the world, to lead a glamorous life, to be celebrated for my work, to marry a great intellectual, to reject everything I had been raised with, to cut myself off from the narrow world. I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness. Maybe if I had understood that, as I think I do now, at least a little bit, I would never have written those books, I would never have become this person. I don’t know. I know that I couldn’t write them again, or feel the way I felt about myself at that time. It was important to me then to prove that I was a special person. And in my attempt to prove it, I made it true. Only afterwards, when I had received the money and acclaim which I believed I deserved, did I understand that it was not possible for anyone to deserve these things, and by then it was too late. I had already become the person I had once longed to be, and now energetically despised. I don’t say this to slight my work. But why should anyone be rich and famous while other people live in desperate poverty?
The last time I fell in love, it ended badly, as you know, and then in the aftermath I wrote two novels. While I was in love, I tried to write a little here and there, but my thoughts always returned to the object of my affection, and my feelings ran back inexorably toward her, so my work could never develop any substance of its own, and I had no meaningful place for it in my life. We were happy, and then we were unhappy, and after some misery and recrimination, we broke up – and only then could I start giving myself to my work in a serious way. It was like I had cleared a space inside myself, and I had to fill it up somehow, and that’s how I came to sit down and write. I had to empty my life out first and begin from there. Looking back now on the period
when I wrote the books, I feel like it was a good time in my life, because I had work I needed to do, and I did it. I was perennially broke, and lonely, and anxious about money, but I also had this other thing, this part of my life which was secret and protected, and my thoughts returned to it all the time, and my feelings orbited around it, and it belonged to me completely. In a way it was like a love affair, or an infatuation, except that it only involved myself and it was all within my own control. (The opposite of a love affair, then.) For all the frustration and difficulty of writing a novel, I knew from the beginning of the process that I had been given something very important, a special gift, a blessing. It was like God had put his hand on my head and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt, not desire for another person, but desire to bring something into being that had never existed before. When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all.
Other than a little criticism and some very long emails, I haven’t written anything now for almost two years. And I think the space in my life has been cleared out at this stage, and it’s empty, and maybe for that reason it’s time for me to fall in love again. I need to feel that my life has some kind of centre, somewhere for my thoughts to return and rest.
I know, by the way, that most people don’t need any such thing, and I would be much healthier if I didn’t. Felix doesn’t feel the need to arrange his life around a central principle, and I don’t think you do either. Simon does, but he has God. When it comes to putting something at the centre of life, God strikes me as a good option – better at least than making up stories about people who don’t exist, or falling in love with people who hate me. But here we are. It’s still better to love something than nothing, better to love someone than no one, and I’m here, living in the world, not wishing for a moment
that I wasn’t. Isn’t that in its own way a special gift, a blessing, something very important? Eileen, I am sorry, and I do miss you. When we see each other after all these emails I’m going to get very shy and hide my head under my wing like a little bird.
Give your sister and her groom my best wishes this weekend – and then, if it’s not too much trouble, come and see me, please.
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