Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The story is usually regarded as an amazing narrative of the experience of dying, a search for the meaning of death. It is all that, and more: it’s a great questioning of what is and what ought to be, in a human life.

  What did Ivan Ilyich die of?

  He was fatally sickened by his times.

  2005

  Susan Sontag

  Going back to my shelf of Susan Sontag books it’s as if, although I’ve known them so well, it has taken her death to make me realise the extraordinary range of her achievement. Seven volumes of essays, six novels, two film scripts, several plays, all the outstanding insight, great searching intelligence and imaginative power.

  Of her fiction she said: ‘To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.’ To her non-fiction writing and her personal philosophy one had best apply her own words rather than attempt a lame summing up. She said: ‘To be a moral human being is to be obliged to pay certain kinds of attention.’

  Hers was the unsparing attention of a brilliant mind interpreting in the many modes she commanded, our times, our world. It was a scrutiny, an empathy unmatched. Sontag was one of a handful of universal intellectuals who represent and create contemporary thought at the highest essential level. Sontag matters; through her writings she will continue to matter in our era of conflict and bewildering ambiguity of values from which she did not flinch but took on responsibilities with her talents as an artist and her qualities as a human being.

  Sontag was never satisfied with what she had achieved if changing circumstances meant that she must return with a further perspective to the implications of the accomplished work. Her 1973 book, On Photography, is a classic on the claims of photography as an art and, in history, the most influential interchange between reality and the image. She was not content to leave it at that. Her experiences in Vietnam, and more recently in Sarajevo, where she produced a play to keep alive the defiant survival of the spirit under bombardment, returned her to the extremes of the significance of turning the camera on human experience. In 2003, her most recent work daringly and controversially returned her to the role of photography and its ultimate viewers in Regarding the Pain of Others.

  An accusation? To herself and the rest of us? ‘Non-stop imagery (television, streaming videos, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite … Images of the sufferings endured are so widely disseminated now that it is easy to forget how recently such images became what is expected from photographers.’ This short book, written as if with one deep breath taken, questions whether in any claim to be moral human beings we are paying ‘certain kinds of moral attention’ to our reception of horrifying images.

  Sontag never turned her strong, beautiful face from any aspect of human life. Her gaze did not spare herself. In 1978, after cancer, she wrote Illness As Metaphor. Her subject was not physical illness itself but stigma and socio-religious metaphors representing the condition as punishment for misdemeanour of some kind. In 1989, with consciousness that Aids as an epidemic with primary sexual associations had become a new metaphor, she needed the alertness of profound thought to add to the earlier book. Beginning Aids and its Metaphors, she says: ‘Metaphor, Aristotle wrote, consists in giving the things a name that belongs to something else … Of course, all thinking is interpretation. But that does not mean it isn’t something correct to be against interpretation.’ To use the metaphor ‘plague’ for Aids is to stigmatise its sufferers with the image of the untouchable, as for victims of the medieval bubonic plague. She makes me aware that I myself am guilty of this … Isn’t it the special quality of a marvellously original mind to shake up one’s thinking? To personify illness as a curse is, in a sense, primitive, when the reality is nurturing the spirit of people to resist disease physically while under treatment, and for medical science to find the cure. That is her thesis. She was to meet her own death by illness, with fighting courage.

  I had the immense good luck to be Sontag’s friend. In her exhilarating presence you came alive with new zest. Along with formidable intellectual drive, her familiarity with many cultures, the arts and politics, she was a warm and loving person, quick with a witty riposte to stupidity but sensitive to the feeling of others. She certainly would challenge me now: and what about my novels? She often felt she had been drawn away, by her own convictions of how life should be taken on, from her vocation of the imagination: fiction. She wrote, ‘Many things in my world have not been named … even if they have been named, have never been described.’

  The last day I talked to her, on the telephone to her bed in hospital, she told me two things most important to her. If she recovered once again from cancer she had beaten twice before, she wanted to come back to South Africa, the people and the landscapes with which she had immediately bonded in 2004. That her time with us was to be her last of many ventures to understand and interpret the world so meaningfully is something for us to be glad of.

  The second important thing was that she must survive to continue a new work begun. I am sure it was the novel she wanted to write – the novel that was still to come from her. I hope that her adored son, David Reiff, himself a fine writer, will find what she had already written and we shall hold, published, the proof of a marvel of creative force that was Sontag, until the end. We shall not see her like again. But her unique writings exist, as her being.

  2005

  Home Truths from the Past

  Machiavelli or Erasmus?

  Signposts to the human condition lie toppled down all over the past, from the stele marking Roman military bases to the rubble of what were once homes, relic of the latest conflict in – you name which country comes to mind.

  It’s a given cliché that we have only the past to learn from. At least, the opposition of great thinkers who took boldly contending different directions may have relevance to our human condition in the brave new millennium. For example, Machiavelli or Erasmus, who has most to say to us in the twenty-first century? Each was committed to the situation between the ruler and the ruled; the empowered (to use contemporary jargon) and the disempowerable (to invent my own), which term carries a present condition of powerlessness further.

  Machiavelli and Erasmus – are they really dead? In speaking of the perceptions of their own shared era, they could be speaking of ours. The century we’ve only just left behind and the one we’ve only recently begun. No reminder needed of the bloodstains of the twentieth which are appearing afresh on the twenty-first, from Iraq to the Sudan. And every week, new bloodshed elsewhere. The world is as beautiful and as ugly as it was nearly six centuries ago, albeit transformed in many ways by scientific achievements.

  I turn first to Machiavelli because he seems to have had no less than prescience of our time when he was analysing human aspirations in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Italy. His title The Prince is simply another nomenclature for the presidents and prime ministers, the dictators, fanatical religious leaders, the families ennobled by ownership of corporations – our cast on the globalised stage. Machiavelli’s premise that ‘the end which every man keeps before him is glory and riches’ is as evident today as it was in his day. His most famous work The Prince is a manual for politicians that proves to have six centuries of shelf-life. His ‘principalities’ stand for the national states of this, our era spanning the twentieth century and its heritage in the twenty-first. He advocates the absolute necessity of war to defend principalities and provides the methodology to gain support of the people who lose their lives in war. The prince, he says, must himself have a warrior image. He must uphold that if the principality is not fully armed it will be despised by other principalities. Machiavelli certainly would have been Bush’s ally in the invasion of Iraq. He would have appreciated the phrase ‘axis of evil’. What would he have thought of nuclear capability? Welcomed it as the ultimate in arms, refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty? With
grim subtlety accepted nuclear power as the end of power, in its power of annihilation?

  As for the pandemic wars largely fought by mercenaries, going on around us fired by religious differences and fuelled by the resources of oil fields rival principalities want to secure for themselves – he gives timely warning: the prince who relies on mercenaries to shore up his power must know ‘they are ambitious and unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowards before enemies’.

  The Machiavellian rules for a prince’s conduct if he is to keep himself in power domestically as well as at war are practised in some of our principalities at present. It is recognised, as he says ‘that how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live’. Yes, but let’s be practical. For a prince to hold his own it is ‘necessary for him to know how to do wrong … for if everything is considered carefully, it will be found that something which looks like virtue, if followed, would be his ruin; whilst something else, which looks like vice, yet followed brings him security and prosperity’.

  Machiavelli’s concept of liberalism is not as we understand liberalism politically in terms of freedom of expression and tolerance. His liberalism refers to material possessions, land grants and money buying loyalty to the prince; and surely this concept is followed today while liberal bribes are the recognised process of arms deals brokered by government ministers?

  As for statecraft, tackling whether it is better to be loved than feared by the people, he advises ‘every prince ought to be considered clement and not cruel’, but because it is difficult to unite ferocity and love in one prince: ‘it is much safer to be feared than loved when one of either must be dispensed with’.

  He was wrong about the either/or: think of the adoring crowds worshipping Hitler at the same time that he was murdering Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. Saddam Hussein had his share of adulation. We have new principalities that have hard-won their freedom from colonialist princes in the twentieth century; some now have their Idi Amins both loved and feared at once.

  Should we accept for the new princes Machiavelli’s dictum that it is impossible for them to avoid imputation of cruelty, owing to the new states, wherever in our world, being full of dangers threatening their power? This posits that if the world’s tolerance of oppression is immoral, it is also realistic. That’s Machiavelli. What of the prince’s fear of the people who have experienced his salutary cruelty? There’s a precept for that eventuality: ‘Men ought to be well treated or crushed, because they can revenge themselves for lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.’

  Seize the people’s incipient revolt by the jugular, with all the powers of decimation in forced population removals, indefinite detention and torture, whose practice the new millennium’s princes have inherited from the twentieth century when they themselves suffered these methods.

  Machiavelli still shocks, six centuries later. But when he is at his most machiavellian his unsparing vision of humankind pokes a forefinger into one’s own probable moral ambiguity. It’s not easy to feel innocent of this in relation to public life and the princes one votes for, as one reads: ‘It is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities … but it is very necessary to appear to have them … to appear to have them is useful.’

  God’s principality – in Machiavelli’s dealings with his time – is approached much as the secular principalities are. He details the historical machinations of the popes and those who made use of the power of religious authority in worldly struggles for power and wealth. He comments almost jealously, as a statesman in and out of favour of princes, that ‘religious leaders alone have states and do not defend them … subjects and do not rule them … such principalities are secure and happy … being exalted and maintained by God’.

  So God is not invoked in Machiavelli’s morality. Only when this may be – Machiavelli’s prime criterion – useful. As when writing of Pope Leo he manages to link the Pope’s power to the secular might of armaments: ‘Pope Leo found the pontificate most powerful and it is to be hoped that if others made it great in arms, he will make it still greater … by his goodness and other virtues.’ A papal post-blessing on the arms trade. We certainly do not have that, but we still have with us protagonists of war who claim God’s or Allah’s blessing for their sides in conflict. God is useful.

  In the mind and spirit, the values and actions of Erasmus, God is paramount.

  While taking the great risk of criticising and castigating as a departure from that faith the outward pomp of church practices, Erasmus’s concept of the relation of the ruler to the ruled is measured by the founding religious principle of the power of ultimate morality coming from on high. That authority is Christianity, of course, through God’s endowment of Christ to the world. Erasmus’s enterprise was the regeneration of Christendom. Neither Erasmus nor his direct opponent in the view of human conduct, Machiavelli, considers the power of other faiths over the human condition. Here, neither the man of transcendent religious values nor the cynical pragmatist offers much relevance to the world we are attempting to create now, where the validity of many different faiths, held by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and others, has to be recognised as an absolute human right, honoured and respected equally if there is to be survival of anything like what we call civilisation. As I write of civilisation, this morning, comes the news of attacks on the underground transport system that takes the people of London to work every day. So far, about forty reported dead and over seven hundred injured. There is immediate debate of whether the source of this savage show of destructive power is religious fervour against Britain’s involvement with the United States’ war in Iraq and its aftermath, or whether it is directed at the G8 summit as a ghastly alternative form of protest to that of concerts demonstrating with music and song the failure of the rich countries to ‘make poverty history’. Either/or; there is a connection in the state of our present human condition.

  ‘How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live.’

  If Machiavelli confronts us with some home truths about how we live in our own times, Erasmus offers the possibility of how we ought to live. It is natural to be drawn to him on the positive side of the relevance of these thinkers to our times. Machiavelli determined it was the foremost duty of princes to make war. Erasmus determined it was the foremost duty of princes to avoid war. We know there is no question of which is the only future for humankind in our era, since we have means of destruction unknown to past ages.

  Erasmus was so brilliant that it is difficult to single out one quality, one advocation from another in his grasp of the moral complexity of human affairs. That he was virtually the inventor of the concept of arbitration is perhaps, for us, his most relevant. Whether domestically in a trade union dispute with the bosses or the conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, the solution we look to, strive for now in desperate pursuit of peace and justice is arbitration. His presence surely sits with sessions at the UN, with the commissions on human rights. We share with him in our time his restless preoccupation with the welfare of society, measure this against the professed ideals of those responsible for it.

  Erasmus’s lifelong great enterprise in the regeneration of Christendom was not, is not, fundamentalism in the sense we know and fear it today. His early support for the young Luther ended significantly in his rejection of Luther on grounds of the need for a humanistic intellectual culture as well as, and within, return to the basic faith of Christ’s life and teaching. How relevant to our age when we experience that vital movements for change we support can become in turn oppressive.

  His belief in a humanistic culture included educational methods we’re still trying to advance today – he would applaud computer competency for the young, but as a writer who saw literature as a basic component of humanist culture would deplore the decline of reading. In an age of specialisation such as ours, his intellectual sweep is challenging. He was
not content to be the subject of academic debate; his dazzling use of satire (In Praise of Folly) as a non-violent cauterising of hypocrisy made him a best-seller centuries before ours. The great scholar and philologist didn’t refrain, either, from controversial opinions on such apparently diverse matters as the correct pronunciation of Greek, ‘abstinence from meat’, and sharp observation on Christian marriage.

  About the latter, he of the glorious open mind might just have been biased, as a homosexual. But that’s an aside.

  Machiavelli and Erasmus, contentious beings – aren’t they both men of our time?

  2005