It's not only philosophy and psychology, politics and sociology that I've been reading these last weeks and months. I've read novels too. Notably, I've reread Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies in preparation for the final in the trilogy The Mirror and the Light.
One thing I can't help considering is the analogy between Brexit and England's break from Rome in the sixteenth century*. One sees the machinations of Dominic Cummings and thinks of the background manoeuvres of Thomas Cromwell on behalf of King Henry VIII. And hopes that this transition won't be quite so bloody.
Mantel is such a good writer. The opening lines of Wolf Hall - which I doubt I can quote for copyright reasons - are among the best opening lines in fiction. And there's a lot of competition - see here for one list, if you're interested.
Now, I've also been ploughing through Diarmaid MacCulloch's mammoth Thomas Cromwell: A Life and one gets the impression that good old Crumb wasn't quite so appealing a character as he appears to be in Mantel's novels - indeed more like Cummings than in his fictional doppelganger. Never mind. I like the Cromwell I've become familiar with in the fiction. He was certainly an incredible, a remarkable man. A self-made man, a multi-talented man. Powerful, charismatic and intelligent.
In the novels he has a level of psychological insight that is educative - one assumes that Mantel herself is this intuitive. She must be. She must be. You couldn't make this up. I've read a couple of her other novels and found the same profundity, the same ability to piece through vagueness to a clarity of feeling and expression. The woman may not have the charisma of Cromwell, but she shares many of his characteristics, I think.
There's a great line in Wolf Hall where Cromwell has a flash of understanding - the vision of truth comes and goes, it's fleeting. But the text says that these intuitions cannot be taken back. You can't return to the moment before you had that insight. These glimmers change you, your world view, your conception of the situation. Once nocent, you cannot return to innocence. I loved that.
In another passage, he explains why he keeps his past and his motives a mystery. He says that telling these stories that explain you, the justifications, they make you look weak. Your presence is best felt when it is only half-seen. The absence of knowledge frightens people; and the gap they feel inside you leads them to fill it up. They pour into it their fears, fantasies and desires. It's a wonderful explanation of what intrigues us about others, and how they can maintain that allure. If people don't know you, they can't work you out, they can fit you into a neat box, they can't ever feel comfortable. But also in your silence, others talk.
In a conversation with the King, Cromwell imagines telling him what fortitude is - not courage in battle, but having a fixed purpose and enduring, being strong enough to cope with the constraints of life and society. That is a relevant lesson for me as I prepare to return to work.
Cromwell has advice for dealing with the young, too: don't crush their pride or snub them, but ask them what it is they can do in the world that no one else can do. And plan for tomorrow - because those dreams for the future will never come to fruition if you don't deal with tomorrow.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein relates a similar message in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, though these words may come from an unreliable character. He is making a point that aligns with a Sartrian concept of the self when he says we're not born into the self, just as we're not born into the truth - it takes work and love. And that is why so many, according to this character, are effectively walking zombies, with only emptiness within.
Nietzsche said in Twilight of the Idols that the deepest truths cannot be spoken in words. Perhaps we have to live them. In great novels, where the characters are made out of words, somehow they do manage to exhibit those deep truths. They live, not as zombies, but as creations as rich as our consciousnesses and those of their authors can combine to make them.
I was going to say, more real, perhaps, than some of the zombies around us. But then I think of Heidegger, of being in the world, of the reality of existence as a truth that can only exist in existence. Cromwell tells us he feels the silkiness of silk, and we imagine the slippery fabric sliding, quicksilver, trough our fingers. A rustling of neuronal activity in the act of imagining. And yet... and yet... can the memory of stroking the rough greasy hide of a bullock, the smell of cattle and their shit, the sound of a cow's mournful lowing, ever match the reality?
NOTES
*Added 15th August 2020 - on this podcast from David Runciman's series Talking Politics they discuss this analogy between the Reformation and the current move toward populism in politics.
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