Thinks...

by David Lodge

  And yet, as somebody said, the idea of the universe existing without a Creator seems just as far-fetched as the idea that a God created it, especially when you’re looking up at the stars at night. We know they weren’t always there. You can trace everything back to the Big Bang, but where did the ingredients for the Big Bang come from?

  Perhaps our mistake is to imagine that the God behind it all must be like us, that ‘He made us in his own image and likeness,’ as the Catechism has it. Suppose God is omnipotent and eternal, but has no more self-consciousness than a lion? Or an ocean? That would explain a lot – the existence of evil, for instance. Perhaps God didn’t intend it because He, or rather It, didn’t intend anything. Suppose we are the only creatures in the universe with self-consciousness and intentionality and guilt? A chilling thought. Yet one would be loath to renounce self-consciousness, to return to the unreflective animal existence of pre-lapsarian hominids, swinging from the trees or loping though the broad savannahs, responding simply to the imperatives of the four Fs.

  for who would lose,

  Though full of pain, this intellectual being

  as Milton put it. Satan speaking, of course. Or as John Stuart Mill said, ‘better to be a dissatisfied man than a satisfied pig.’ It was one of Martin’s favourite quotations.

  Martin. Do I think he has ceased to exist? No, but he seems to be getting somehow . . . fainter, more distant. In the weeks after he died I used to talk to him a lot, sometimes aloud. I would be reading the newspaper over breakfast and come across something that would have interested or amused him and I’d say, ‘Listen to this’ – and then look up and see the empty chair on the other side of the table. But I’d read it out anyway, as if he could hear, wherever he was. And I’d have conversations with him in my head, and sometimes out loud. If some decision that had to be made was worrying me, about money or repairs to the house, for instance, I’d ask him what I should do. I’d say, ‘Shall I take the lump sum or convert it into an annuity? Shall I get three estimates for the re-roofing or will two be enough?’ Martin was always the one who looked after those things, and I found it useful to work out decisions in this way, like a child discussing its problems with an imaginary friend. But one day Lucy came home early from school, let herself into the house and heard me talking in the kitchen about renewing an insurance premium. She gave me a worried look when she came into the room and found I was alone. After that I was more careful.

  One reason why I found it hard to accept, really accept that Martin was dead, was that he died so suddenly, utterly without warning. One minute he was there, and the next he was gone. It was as if he’d just left the room on some trivial errand and not come back: you kept thinking there must be some mistake, some misunderstanding, and he’d soon reappear, smiling and apologizing . . .

  Another reason was the ghastly funeral. Martin was an agnostic, his parents are nominally C of E, but not churchgoers, and his sister Joanna is a militant atheist who works in Family Planning and deeply disapproved of our having the children baptized and sending them to a Catholic primary school. ‘I hope you’re not going to have a religious service,’ she said sharply, when I phoned her to tell her the time and place of the cremation. ‘Martin wouldn’t have wanted it.’ ‘Well, not a Catholic one, if that’s what you mean,’ I said with equal sharpness (Joanna and I never got on). There was no question of that, anyway, since neither I nor the children had been practising Catholics for years and I wasn’t in touch with any friendly priest who might have stretched a point and agreed to officiate. We decided on a small private family funeral, with a memorial service later for his friends and colleagues. But, in spite of Joanna, we agreed that Martin’s parents, not to mention mine, would be upset by a totally secular occasion, so settled for a very basic Christian service conducted by a minister provided, for a fee, by the undertakers. He didn’t know Martin from Adam, of course, and made no attempt to disguise his boredom with the occasion and his impatience to get it over with. The undertakers were polite and efficient, but you could sense a certain professional disappointment at the meagreness of our numbers and the austerity of our service (with only eight mourners, one of whom announced that she would take no part in the service, we didn’t attempt any hymns; and I had requested donations to medical research instead of flowers). It was a dark, wet, November day. The crematorium looked exactly like what it was for, a grim structure of sooty brick, with sodden wreaths and bunches of flowers from previous funerals wrapped in plastic spread out over the forecourt for mourners to admire and evaluate. The chapel was overheated but cheerless, bare of any religious decoration which might exclude or offend. The service was got through with almost indecent haste. The minister gabbled out the prayers, we muttered the occasional ‘Amen’, and then he pressed the button, the piped music came on and the coffin began slowly to descend, like an old-fashioned cinema organ. Lucy burst into tears, and I put my arm round her to comfort her, but I felt nothing. I was only able to endure the whole horrible experience by distancing myself from it, so it did absolutely nothing to help me with the grieving process.

  A few months later, Martin’s friends at the BBC organized a memorial service in a Wren church in the City, and I went to that more hopefully, even eagerly. But it was a dissatisfying occasion, a queer mixture of the sacred and the profane: the sounds of Martin’s favourite modern jazz tracks bouncing off the white and gold walls and Ionian columns, reminiscences by colleagues full of in-jokes and allusions which I couldn’t follow, extracts from Martin’s award-winning documentaries on pollution and deep-sea fishing, a rendering of ‘Ave Maria’ by a well-known soprano who had figured in his programme about Covent Garden . . . It was a large gathering, but I had never met many of the people present before. Afterwards there was a sort of party in the upstairs room of a nearby pub, and several people got drunk, including Lucy, who was sick in the car on the way home . . . I didn’t feel that the occasion had been much more efficacious than the funeral in reconciling me to Martin’s death, or allowing his spirit to rest in peace.

  TUESDAY 11TH MARCH. Good seminar this afternoon: readings and discussion of the ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’ pieces. Lots of laughter and general good humour. I think people feel less anxious, less sensitive about having their work dissected in public when it’s a set exercise. Real writing is inevitably a kind of self-exposure. Even if it’s not overtly autobiographical, it reveals indirectly your fears, desires, fantasies, priorities. That’s why hostile reviews are always so wounding, so difficult to shrug off. You wonder, even if they’re wrong about your book, whether they might be right about you. The students must feel the same in the workshop sessions, but there is much less at stake in a set exercise. And the parody-pastiche element gets them to stretch their literary muscles – trying things they wouldn’t risk in their own work. It seemed worth repeating, so I told them the story of Mary the colour scientist coming out of her monochrome world, and asked them to do something similar with that. Only this time there are to be no clues to the models – I’ve got to be able to identify them from the style alone. (Groans.)

  I happened to hear Ralph Messenger on the radio this morning – some kind of popular science magazine programme. He was being interviewed about ‘wearable computers’. I switched on in the middle of the discussion, but as far as I could gather somebody’s just written a book suggesting that as computers get smaller and cheaper in the future they could easily be worn on the person or actually implanted in the body, to monitor your pulse rate, temperature, blood pressure, muscular tension, blood sugar level, etc., etc., and anyone with access to this information on their own wearable computers could tell from it what you were thinking and feeling. Is this feasible? he was asked. ‘Well, it’s technically feasible,’ he said. ‘Computer chips are getting smaller and smaller and more and more powerful all the time. They’re improving faster than any other machine in history. It’s been calculated that if cars had developed at the same rate as computers over the last thirty years, you�
��d be able to buy a Rolls-Royce today for under a pound, and it would do three million miles to the gallon . . . So there’s no reason why wearables shouldn’t become cheaply available in the not-too-distant future.’ But why would anybody submit to being fitted with them? he was asked. ‘Well, one suggestion is that domestic appliances could respond to the information and anticipate your needs – when you came in tired from work, say, the Teasmaid would make you a cup of tea and the TV find you a suitably relaxing programme without your having to lift a finger,’ he said. ‘But wearables could also be made compulsory in certain contexts. For instance, suppose there was a wearable that triggered a red light on the roof of your car when your blood-pressure and pulse rate went above a certain level.’ A sort of road-rage meter? ‘Exactly. It could prevent a lot of accidents. Wearing one might be made a condition of holding a driving licence.’ But could these wearables allow us to know what other people are actually thinking? ‘No,’ Ralph said, ‘because our thoughts have a semantic content that is much too complex and fine-grained to be identified through physical symptoms. The proposal is based on a rather simplistic behaviourist psychology.’

  Interesting that he was so dismissive of the wearables. Perhaps he doesn’t like the idea that philandering might be electronically monitored in the future – that Carrie might be able to tell by glancing at a little gadget like a wristwatch exactly the level of lust he felt for another woman at a dinner party. If they are feasible, these wearables could put an end to adultery.

  11

  ONE, TWO, BUCKLE my shoe . . . It’s Wednesday 12th March, 5.30 p.m. . . . I’ve got the Voicemaster up and running and it’s brilliant, not only does it take direct dictation, but I can also feed pre-recorded tapes directly into it by wire, which means I can still use the old Pearlcorder, anywhere I like. I’m dictating this while driving home from the University, or rather while being stuck in a traffic jam on the A435, some kind of bottleneck ahead, roadworks or an accident . . . So there’s no need for me to go into the Centre on Sunday mornings any more to continue the experiment, which will improve relations with Carrie no end . . . and in any case it no longer seems such a secure and private place for the purpose since I met Duggers entering the building last Sunday just as I was leaving . . . We clocked each other simultaneously through the glass doors, he was outside, using his swipe card to open them, as I approached from inside . . . we were equally taken by surprise, glared at each other like two burglars coming face to face on the stairs of an empty house . . . he looked slightly flustered . . . no doubt I did too, but by the time he got the door open we’d recovered our poise . . . Hello Duggers, I said, what are you doing here on a Sunday morning? ‘I often come in at the weekend to catch up on work,’ he said frostily. ‘It’s the only time you can be sure of getting some peace in this place.’ I know what you mean, I said, with false camaraderie. ‘And what about you, Messenger?’ he said. ‘Escaping from the joys of domesticity?’ What would you know about them? I nearly asked him. Duggers lives with his widowed mother and unmarried sister in a square redbrick Victorian villa in one of the few villages in this part of the world that are totally devoid of charm. Not many people have ever been invited inside this house, certainly not us, but I have driven past occasionally, and ‘joy’ and ‘domesticity’ are not words you would immediately associate with it. Oh no, just collecting some papers I forgot to take home, I said, patting the briefcase I was carrying. I instinctively concealed the fact that I’d been in my office for the past hour, perhaps because I was thinking queasily that he might easily have arrived earlier and been in the building without my knowledge . . . pausing outside my office as he heard the murmur of my voice . . . pressing his ear to the door . . . no, he wouldn’t stoop to that, but he gives me the creeps, Duggers, always did from the first day I met him, when I came to look the place over and be looked over in my turn, they flew me from California, I spent two days meeting the faculty and graduate students, I gave a lecture, the VC gave a dinner . . . the usual drill . . . I remember the cold dislike in Duggers’ eyes behind his round schoolboy spectacles when we were introduced . . . I knew at once that he must be the leading internal candidate for the job, and he knew at once that I was going to get it . . . well, I understand how he felt, still feels, up to a point, his research record is outstanding, narrower than mine, but more original . . . but this isn’t just a research job, it’s just as much a financial management job, and a leadership job and a PR job – it requires charisma as well as brainpower . . . and Duggers has got about as much charisma as the adolescent schoolboy swot he resembles . . . poor old Duggers . . . I wonder what he’s working on that’s so interesting he can’t stay away from it on a Sunday morning, eh? Of course I know in general terms, evolutionary systems that can teach agents how to use them, write their own instruction manuals, so to speak, because that’s what he’s been into for the last two years . . . but has he made a really important breakthrough . . . ? If so, it could have huge commercial potential as well as theoretical significance . . . That would be a test of my professional objectivity, I have to admit – if Duggers were to hit the headlines with a sensational new discovery . . . it would be good for the Centre, it could be decisive in preserving our identity as an élite research institute, so I ought to be delighted . . . but could I bear such glory going to him? Suppose he got an FRS out of it . . . No, I don’t think I could bear that . . . My God, just the thought of having to congratulate him, forcing the words through your teeth when you’d like to bite his ear off, shaking his hand when you’d like to dislocate his arm . . . No, no, not an FRS for Duggers, please . . . I’m pretty well resigned to not getting one myself . . . well not really resigned, but I know what they say about me, ‘a popularizer, a media don, one flashy book to his credit but no serious original research . . .’ it’s partly envy of course . . . and very few people in cognitive science are Fellows anyway . . . The subject is too amorphous, perhaps, overlaps with too many other disciplines to have an identity of its own . . . is it maths, is it philosophy, or psychology . . . or engineering? All those things actually, that’s what makes it so fascinating, but it’s regarded with suspicion by the scientific establishment, as a kind of mongrel subject . . . hard to imagine a cognitive scientist ever getting a Nobel Prize . . . even if somebody cracked the problem of consciousness tomorrow, what prize would they give him? Physics? Chemistry? Physiology? It doesn’t fit any of the categories . . . wonder what it’s like, really like, to win a Nobel . . . the qualia of Nobelness . . . it must be like, what’s the word for becoming a god . . . apotheosis, yes . . . suddenly you become invulnerable, immortal . . . not literally of course, but you’ve achieved something that death can’t take away from you . . . and you don’t have to struggle any more while you live . . . any further achievement is a bonus, your cup overflowing . . . you have nothing to fear from others . . . you are above competition . . . let Duggers have his FRS by all means, let everybody in the Science Faculty have an FRS . . . there is only one Nobel . . . You simply bask in its glory, its glamour surrounds you like a halo wherever you go . . . you fall asleep every night smiling with the knowledge that you are a Nobel prizewinner and you wake happy, not knowing why immediately, but then remembering . . . every day of your life that is your first conscious thought . . . I won the Nobel . . . Is that what it’s really like, I wonder? Or are Nobel prizewinners just like the rest of us, still dissatisfied, still ambitious, always hankering after more discoveries, more honours, more fame? Well, I’ll never know . . . not even an FRS in realistic prospect . . . Perhaps I love the life of the body too much, women, food, wine . . . especially women . . . your true scientist only thinks about his science, he lives and breathes it, he begrudges every moment that he is distracted from it . . . that story about the scientist whose wife knocks on the door of his study . . . WIFE: Alfred, we must talk. SCIENTIST: (looks up from desk, frowns): What about? WIFE: I have a lover. I’m leaving you. I want a divorce. SCIENTIST: Oh. (pause) How long will it take? If you coul
d imagine Duggers married you could imagine him behaving like that . . . if he were to dictate his stream of consciousness into the Voicemaster it would be all genetic algorithms . . . algorithms and the occasional gripe about the Centre in general and me in particular . . . Or take Turing, a truly great mind, a genius, changed the course of civilization, well accelerated it anyway, somebody else would have invented the computer sooner or later, but he was incredibly ahead of his time . . . but a totally screwed-up human being, a lonely, repressed, unhappy homosexual, eventually killed himself in a dreary flat in Manchester . . . if I was offered the chance of coming back to live my life again either as Turing or Ralph Messenger, I wouldn’t hesitate . . . Would anyone choose to be a homosexual I wonder, if they had the choice? It’s not that I’m homophobic, I just feel sorry for them. What a deprivation, not to find the bodies of women attractive, their curves and their cunts and all the other fascinating differences from men . . . to be constantly lusting after bodies just like one’s own seems so . . . boring . . . And then, let’s face it, the adult male arsehole is not a thing of beauty . . . no wonder Nicholas Beck is celibate . . .

  Ah, good, the traffic’s beginning to move at last . . . a blue light flashing up there so it must be an accident . . . looks like it’s the crossroads where I take the shortcut to Horseshoes . . . I kissed her . . . Helen . . . after the others had gone back to the house we stayed on in the tub chatting, or rather discussing, quite heavy stuff actually . . . that’s what I like about her, she doesn’t think it’s pretentious to talk about serious subjects . . . until eventually Carrie called us to come in for tea, and as we were climbing the steps I kissed her . . . I took a chance, but my instinct is usually right with these things . . . like when I kissed Carrie in the elevator at MIT . . . I could tell she was having a good time, liked the house, loved the hot tub . . . her body in a swimming costume fulfilled every expectation, I had time for a quick appraisal as she shrugged off her robe and climbed into the tub, poor Carrie enviously eyeing her slender waist and sleek thighs . . . the tits are a little low slung and wide apart, but shapely and firm . . . they bounced perceptibly – with their own elasticity, not the cotton latex, as she stepped down into the tub . . . when she clambered out I had an excellent view of her bottom . . . and a very nice bottom it is, ample but not wobbly . . . just ample enough for the cheeks to escape in two plump crescents from the costume, which was cut high at the leg . . . in fact only a tiny strip of material, not much more than an inch wide, prevented me from staring right up her fanny . . . Funny things, swimming costumes . . . how little they cover, and yet what a difference they make. It’s always a complete surprise when you see a woman naked for the first time . . . sometimes a pleasant one, sometimes a disappointment . . . I wonder if she would be up for a nude tub one day, not en famille of course, but an adults-only session like people used to have sometimes in California . . . sipping beakers of Napa Valley Zinfandel with the smell of barbecue smoke in the air and the strains of a raga coming from the portable stereo . . . great times . . . Carrie won’t go nude in the tub when the kids are around . . . fair enough I suppose, they’d be embarrassed as hell, the boys would anyway . . . And we’re all so conscious these days of sexual abuse, terrified of giving any grounds for suspicion or feeding a future false memory syndrome . . . and Emily not being my daughter complicates matters . . . though I’m not sure it would bother her . . . That time I saw her naked about a year ago, when I walked into the family bathroom, looking for something, and she was having a bath, ‘Oh! Sorry!’ Just glimpsed her taut adolescent breasts gleaming wet with big brown aureoles and pointed nipples before I turned on my heel and walked out, yelling through the door, ‘Lock the door when you take a bath, please’ . . . She grinned at me a little sheepishly when she came out of the bathroom later, ‘Sorry about that, Messenger’ . . . but she didn’t seem upset . . . I was, though . . . because I’d like to fuck Emily . . . I’m not going to, of course, it would be unthinkable – no, that’s exactly what it is, thinkable . . . there’s no sexual act however perverse or bizarre that can’t be thought, that hasn’t been thought by somebody . . . but I have no intention of doing it, none at all . . . Even though the idea of that acne-ravaged, gangling boyfriend of hers, Greg, having the privilege is almost unbearable . . . I’d never do it . . . It’s one of those thoughts that we keep locked in the confidential filing cabinet of our minds . . . no use trying to shred it or burn it, or deny its existence, you can only hide it, from your own sight as well as other people’s . . . which isn’t made any easier when you surprise your nubile step-daughter in her bath . . .