I wrote an article and was utterly dissatisfied, so A.I. has now rewritten it for me twice. Once as a poor imitation of C.S. Lewis, and once as a poor imitation of Friedrich Nietzsche. Enjoy or hate whichever one you choose.
On Being Overtaken
The Lewis variant
Not long ago my wife and I were carrying the washing out to the car. Our machine had given up the ghost some days before, and the heap in the corner had passed by degrees from a nuisance into a scandal, so that the laundromat was no longer a choice but a sentence. My wife stepped into the room, saw the whole of it at once, and was — as we say — overwhelmed. And being overwhelmed, she was short with the people nearest to hand, who were unluckily ourselves.
Some while later, with the business half done, she apologised and explained that she had been overwhelmed. I accepted the apology and told her that she was annoying. What I actually said was, "I agree; it's annoying" — a sentence which, I now perceive, can be taken in at least two ways, and she was obliged to stop and ask me which I had meant. I leave the reader to form his own opinion of the sort of husband who says such a thing. My concern here is not with my character, which is bad, but with the puzzle the whole affair turned up, like a spade turning up a stone in a garden one thought was quite ordinary.
The puzzle is about responsibility. And it comes in three parts, which we may as well set down plainly.
First: when something happens in me, what am I to do about it? Second: since whatever I do about it will land on other people, what do I owe them? And third: when I stand by and watch it happening in someone else, what is required of me?
Put back into the laundry room, the questions become these. My wife was overwhelmed. Was she bound to swallow it? To announce it? To ignore it, or magnify it, or make something else of it? Her way of handling it altered my afternoon considerably — was she obliged to handle it for my sake, and if so, at what depth? Was she to change the feeling, or merely to hide it? And I, watching: was I obliged to be patient? Where exactly does her account end and mine begin?
I believe we are all far too confident about these boundaries. We behave, most days, as men who have the map in their pocket. I doubt we have so much as seen the country.
Begin here. She did not decide to be overwhelmed. She arrived at it. You do not resolve to be overtaken by weather; you step out of doors and the rain is already falling, and there you are, wet. Suppose I had said what my stomach wished me to say — that the room was not really so bad, and that she ought to look at it differently. What on earth was she to do with such an instruction? It was overwhelming, in fact, to her. The tide was already over the tops of her boots. The only thing left to do with a thing that has happened is to stifle it, or redirect it, or pretend it happened otherwise. And that is a strange sort of request to make of a person. When we ask a man to have reacted differently, we are asking him to have been a different man — which is to say, we are asking him to have had a different childhood, different friends, a different set of small cruelties and kindnesses to have grown up under. We say "you should not feel that." We mean "you should not be you."
Notice, too, what such impatience quietly claims for itself. To say a man ought not to have responded so is to say that I know precisely what befell him — the whole weight and colour of the collision, from the inside — and that I know every turning he might have taken in twenty years to have arrived at the crossroads better prepared. Stated aloud, this is plain nonsense. We would blush to say it. We say it hourly.
And so the ought arrives always too late, like the doctor after the funeral. We are very fond of it. One man says God requires it, another says psychology requires it, a third says the economy requires it, and they argue amongst themselves without observing that the argument was settled before it began. There never was, in the moment, a "you ought to do this." There was only ever a "you ought to have been someone else."
Now some will object that there is a pause. And so there is — for some. Between the wave and the word, certain men have a small quiet room in which to stand and consider. Others have no such room at all; the sea comes in at the front door and goes out at the back and takes the furniture with it. There are as many reasons for having the room as for lacking it. A few can be taught to build one. But at the moment of the event the room is either there or it is not, and wishing it otherwise is about as useful as wishing it were Tuesday.
Very well, says someone: then let us stop fretting over what we are and set about what we might become. That has a brisk and hopeful sound. But consider what is actually being proposed. Between what a man is and what he might be there lies a gap which cannot be measured, because there is as yet nothing on the far side to measure to. If I train myself to pause, I am labouring to bring about a state of affairs I have never once observed and cannot describe. I think of this when I am out running and mean to go farther than I went last time. I know there will come a point at which I shall want to stop. Whether I stop is not settled here, in the planning, where I feel so resolute; it is settled out there, where I shall not feel resolute at all. A man may train for the moment, may add a little each week, may drill what he calls his will — and the moment will still be a leap in the dark, with nothing to carry him but an intention formed by somebody he no longer quite is.
I can hear the sergeant-major now, with his fifteen books on Efficiency under his arm, telling me that the will can be trained. He is right, and I have just admitted as much. What I want to say is that it is a far queerer business than his books allow. We reach forward and lay hold of something that is not yet there.
And there is a sadder half to it, which the books never mention. A great deal of what passes for iron will is only a trained deafness. If a man can shut down enough of himself, he may get through the hour by being, for the length of it, nearly absent — his body carrying on while nobody is at home to notice that it is alive. That is not mastery. It is a tidy sort of vanishing, and we hand out medals for it.
There is another road, and it is stranger still. A man might be trained not to endure the painful thing but to delight in it. But how is that crossing made? Some idea must carry him over — before, during, and after; he must have re-written the country before he ever walks into it. How such a thing is possible I do not know. I only know that it does happen, now and then, to people no cleverer than ourselves; and that when it happens it looks a great deal less like machinery than like a gift.
Which brings me back, at last, to the laundry.
For if some idea must carry a man across, we are entitled to ask where he is to get one. Not, as a rule, out of himself; a man drowning does not invent a rope. It comes from outside him — from a book, or a sentence he heard once as a boy, or, most often and most despised, from another person standing near him and behaving well. And here the three questions I set out with, which I had supposed to be three, turn out to be one, and to have been standing in a particular order all along.
Observe. The first question — what a man owes his own event — can hardly be answered while the event is going on, since by then he is inside it and the answer is required of a man who no longer exists. The second — what he owes the people it lands upon — can be answered chiefly beforehand and afterwards: by what he has made of himself over years, and by the apology he offers when it is over. Both are settled outside the moment. Only the third can be answered now, in the room, while the thing is actually happening. The onlooker is the only party in the whole affair who still has any freedom left.
And that, I take it, is what patience is for. We speak of it as a mild social lubricant, a way of not making scenes. But if a man has no pause of his own — if the sea comes in at the front door and out at the back — then the pause must be built for him, outside, by somebody who has one to spare. That is not politeness. That is lending out the only faculty in the room that is still working. The quiet man beside the loud one is not merely refraining from adding to the noise; he is standing in for a room the other has not got.
So the account was not where I had supposed it was. My wife owed me nothing she was in any position to deliver; she was overtaken in a laundry room, which is a thing that happens to human beings and will go on happening until the last shirt is folded. I, who had been given the whole hour to build a pause in and had built nothing whatever, owed her the one thing that could still be handed over at the time — and spent it instead on a witticism so clever that I had to explain it to her.
I do not think much of myself in this story. But I notice this: if the gift ever does come to a man, and he is carried over from what he is to what he might be, it very seldom arrives with trumpets. It commonly comes wearing somebody else's ordinary patience, and looking so like an accident that nobody thinks to say thank you.
Event & Responsibility
The Nietzsche variant
Aphorisms on the event, the collision, and responsibility
1. The lightning and its flash. — We say a man lost his temper, as though he had been keeping it somewhere. The grammar is the whole superstition: first a self, then its states, and between them a transaction for which the self may be billed. There is no proprietor. There is the flash — and afterwards a language that invents a lightning to have made it.
2. Arrival. — An event does not present itself to a consciousness standing ready to receive it. It arrives as weather arrives: already local, already inside the coat. By the time one can say I am overwhelmed, the one who says it has been manufactured by the thing he is reporting. This is why look at it differently is not unkind but ungrammatical. It addresses a man who has not existed since a moment ago.
3. Where does the collision take place? — Not in the world: the room is only enamel, cotton, and light. Not in the person: asleep, she would have passed through untouched. The event is neither within nor without — it is the between briefly becoming real, a history and a Tuesday striking each other and producing heat. Every psychology that files it under the interior is writing a police report: it wants an address, so that someone may be found at home.
4. Responsibility. — Once: the capacity to answer. Now: the capacity to be invoiced.
5. The belatedness of the ought. — The ought has never once arrived before an event, and its lateness is its function. It does not say do this; it cannot. It says only you ought to have been someone else — an order shouted into a body that has already spent itself.
6. Against being angry at weather. — To resent a reaction is to resent a sleep, a blood, a mother, twenty years of small trainings, and the angle at which the light entered the room. One has objected to an ancestry and demanded a different sentence. This is the content of all indignation: the discovery that another creature has had the effrontery to already be finished.
7. The two omnisciences of the judge. — He must know what the collision felt like from inside a nervous system he has never occupied, and which of a thousand forkings behind it would have delivered a better animal to that doorway. Spoken aloud, charlatanry. Performed with an eyebrow, maturity.
8. The interval. — Between the strike and the cry, certain organisms possess a small silence in which something may be decided. Others have none: the sea enters at the front, leaves at the back, and takes the furniture. We award medals for the shape of nerves — and instruct those without the silence to try harder, which is to say: be constituted otherwise, at once, by the very faculty you were not issued.
9. The impossible gap. — Nobody has ever willed a new species out of himself. The will prepares soil; the growth arrives as an accident; the gardener then claims to have planted it. One trains in order to be lucky more often — and must do it daily, in the dark, on no evidence.
10. The strong man who is not at home. — Much of what is celebrated as will is a trained absence. He has taught himself not to answer when pain knocks. The hour passes; the house is very quiet; nobody is in it. The ascetics did this in cells and were called holy; their descendants do it on roads at dawn and are called disciplined. In neither case was the event mastered. It was evaded from within — the most ingenious of all evasions, since it leaves the body standing there as an alibi.
11. Transfiguration. — The one possibility worth its danger: that a man come to want what wounds him — not to endure the storm, not to sleep through it, but to develop an appetite for salt. No ethics has ever managed this crossing, and none will, because it is not a decision but a rewriting: the country must be redrawn before one sets foot in it. The moralist tells the wave it ought to have been a ripple. The artist produces men capable of surf.