There he goes, the boy aged four or five, led by the orderly in the blue smock. The colour blue: the surgeon, the anaesthesiologist, all the nurses, the social worker. In their blue caps and scrubs, they look like a clutch of forget-me-nots…‘Children often become afraid of the color blue’…Then don’t go outside, little ones, don’t even look outside, because it’s all blue there, nothing but blue.
Later in the afternoon Michael Z drove me to the airport, and soon enough I was up in it, in the blue of the careless Southern sky.
*1 The godhead of boyhood doesn’t last long: they grow out of it by the age of three. King Lear, whose infant delusion has been prolonged by the accident of kingship, is asked to grow out of it in his eighties. And he does. ‘They flattered me like a dog…When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter, when the thunder would not cease at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. Go to, they are not men o’ their words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie…’
*2 Blaise Pascal’s pitiful dates are 1623 to 1662 (far back enough for his Wager to sound challenging). He was a spiritual prevaricator, and a sickly one; and I don’t know how well he was feeling when he put together his famous proposition. In it he argued that a rational (and presumably cynical) unbeliever, faced with the choice between God and godlessness, would in the end opt for God: if he wins the bet, he gains eternity in heaven as opposed to eternity in hell, and if he loses, the cost is nothing more than a minor sacrifice of some last-hour hedonism (and, we might add, a major sacrifice of last-hour dignity)…In a recent bulletin from the land of the sick Christopher had juxtaposed Pascal’s Wager with Bohr’s Tease – Niels Bohr, the Nobelist pioneer of the subatomic world. Bohr had a horseshoe suspended over his doorway; and when a fellow scientist incredulously asked him if he believed this would bring him good luck, Bohr answered: No, of course I don’t. But apparently it works whether you believe in it or not.
*3 In fact after Easter Sunday the crisis steadily worsened. At that point only about 16 per cent of Texas was affected; the figure would go on rising to about 70 per cent in mid-August. By then our sympathy for the South would be hypocritical no longer…The skies finally opened on October 9, almost six months after the Days of Prayer for Rain.
*4 At this stage in the primaries there were only five participants (and the last two were about to creep back into obscurity): Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Tom Pawlenty, and Gary Johnson. So no Mitt Romney, no Newt Gingrich, no Michele Bachmann, and no Rick Perry – not yet; but it was an encouraging start.
*5 The Zilkhas were originally a banking family based in Baghdad – something like the Rothschilds of Mesopotamia. I had always assumed that Selim Zilkha, Michael’s father, had emigrated as a result of Iraqi anti-Semitism; but Michael has informed me, in his soft Oxonian tones, that Selim went into exile (his first stop was Lebanon) when he was forty days old, in 1927, during the British mandate (he came to the UK in 1960, and founded Mothercare). Iraqi Judaeophobia became proactive in the 1940s, with the rise of Zionism; and after the establishment of Israel it assumed the character of a semi-permanent pogrom. Indigenous since the sixth century BCE, the Jewish community numbered 130,000 in 1948; today there aren’t enough Jews in Baghdad to form a minyan, for which the quorum is ten males over the age of thirteen.
*6 ‘Most despond-inducing and alarming of all [negative developments, or nasty surprises], so far, was the moment when my voice suddenly rose to a childish (or perhaps piglet-like) piping squeak. It then began to register all over the place, from a gruff and husky whisper to a papery, plaintive bleat. I used to be able to stop a New York cab at thirty paces.’ But one day, in Washington, ‘I made an attempt to hail a taxi outside my home – and nothing happened. I stood, frozen, like a silly cat that had abruptly lost its meow.’ In the space of a few lines Christopher compares himself to a child, a piglet, a goat, and a cat – all of them defenceless beings.
*7 The quotes are from Lorrie Moore’s ‘People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk’, as are all the unattributed quotes in the rest of this section. Moore’s story is to be found in Birds of America (1998). It is – or it feels like – an example of life-writing that firmly elevates this rather dubious genre.
How to Write The Mind’s Ear
‘He wasn’t just angry. He was beside himself.’
Modern readers would more or less skim the second sentence while perhaps casually noting the cliché. But beside himself is a startlingly vivid image, and all credit to whoever used it first (probably a late-medieval translator who vivified the French phrase hors de soi, or ‘out of self’). The same is true of another image, the mind’s eye, which had been knocking around for at least as long – but in this case everyone knows who gathered it in and made it immortal:
Ham.: My father – methinks I see my father.
Hor.: Where, my lord?
Ham.: In my mind’s eye, Horatio.
∗
If you’re struggling to describe a face or a landscape, try this: close your eyes and describe what your mind’s eye sees. The mind’s eye is a tool. And so is the mind’s ear.
I want to talk about the mind’s ear, but before I do that I want to say
