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=mc2.
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.
*1 We had sculleries in those days. I like them.
A GENUINE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR
Inaugural Professorial Lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, 4 November 2010
I like Trinity College. I hope to go there again one day, although they have someone new at the top these days, since Professor David Lloyd is now in charge at the University of South Australia—a very long way from Dublin. When they asked me to be a professor I said, “Are you mad?”
They said, “Yes. We’re Irish.”
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.