Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

  As Coleman read each verse so the one-legged translator read the Italian version. Knowing both languages, each blow struck twice.

  Se distribuissi anche tutti i miei beni ai poveri, e dessi il mio corpo ad essere bruciato, se non ho la carità, tutto questo non mi giova nulla.

  What did it mean ‘though I give my body to be burned’? Why would anyone do that? I was right back in the world of words and angry questions, the world of my young self pitted against my dad’s preaching, against every form of proselytising and coercion and mystery-mongering.

  Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.

  It was odd. I was furious with Coleman for reading this passage, for bringing back my father, my embattled adolescence, furious with him for ruining what I had supposed would be another long, peaceful emptying of the mind into the spell of the present. At the same time, how could I not assent to these words? How could I not see that they were in line with all I had been thinking? Charity vaunteth not itself. It is not forever preparing prize acceptance speeches. Ergo, self-regard is uncharitable. How right that was! And though I sell a billion copies of my next novel, though I win the Nobel twice over and join the holy canon of literary greats, and have not charity, I am nothing.

  Charity doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

  This was mad. How can you believe all things, hope all things? For some reason I was on the brink of tears. I tried to remember a sermon where my father had explained the different words for love in the Bible, told his congregation why the word here had been translated as charity rather than love. I couldn’t. I couldn’t recall it. I must swallow down these emotions. The storm had blown up so quickly. There had been no warning.

  Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

  Right, all this was so right! Whether there be novels, they shall disappear from the shelves. Only a month after publication most likely. And essays and articles and newspapers and websites and even the most beautiful poems. Though your book last a thousand years, though it last a hundred thousand, it will vanish. You are nothing.

  But wouldn’t charity vanish too? a cool voice remarked. What did it mean, charity never faileth? That was empty piety.

  For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

  Listening to Coleman’s deep voice, listening to the translator’s lame echo, I realised I had never really taken in this passage before. It had always been one of those irritating parts of the Bible that obliged you to acknowledge that Christianity wasn’t all silly, that St Paul wasn’t just an anal retentive. Here we know ‘in part’. That was exactly the problem. Knowledge comes in parts. The urologist, the neurologist, the psychologist. And the mathematician, the linguist, the climatologist. Even in daily conversation, every word divides the world in parts. But when that which is perfect is come . . .

  What? What is perfect? And when?

  I opened my eyes and watched Coleman read. Like my father, he knew the text so well he barely needed to look at it.

  When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

  Did I ever become a man? I wondered. And what would it mean, to know as one was known? Who really knows me anyway? Nobody. Despite all your novels and half confessions, nobody knows you. There was something very fine about the words ‘through a glass darkly’, so fine that you hardly wanted to know things any other way. Through a glass darkly was OK by me. Or through a glass brightly, like the waterseller and the young boy.

  Coleman paused and launched into the last great verse:

  For now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

  Why, I demanded – my head shaking slowly from side to side – why why why wasn’t it possible for me to have the benefits I had no doubt obtained from this retreat, from this meditative practice, the mindful breathing, the exploration of the body, the growing awareness and equanimity, without bringing in these religious imponderables that always shake me up so badly? Why couldn’t Coleman have done one last session of Vipassana and sent us off happily home?

  The guru was talking now. By the end of our ten-day retreat, he was saying, we should have reached the stage known as sotapanna, ‘he who has entered the stream’, sometimes also called sotapatti, ‘stream-winner’. He smiled blandly. He hoped it would be clear how these words related to the discipline we had been following. We had been learning to enter the stream. Anicca. But we hadn’t done this exclusively for our own benefit. We weren’t here to gaze at our navels. The very hard work we had done, he said, had accumulated for each of us a large number of merits. Every moment’s escape from the confines of our narrow egos was transformed into a wealth of merits. Now, if we shared these merits with others, we could help them, we could improve the world.

  How beautiful St Paul was, I thought. At least in that one passage on charity. At least in the King James version. And what drivel Coleman was talking.

  There followed one of those strange half-hours where the intellect is hopelessly at war with the emotions. Our guru rambled on about merits and how, by sharing them with others, they actually multiplied for you too, so the more you shared your merits the more merits you had to share. We would embark now, he said, on the Metta bhavana, or meditation of loving kindness, which involved thinking intensely first of those closest to us, wishing them well, then the wider family, then, gradually, those we knew less well, those we didn’t know at all, those who suffered in every corner of the globe, and those who killed and tortured and raped, even those who pushed destruction’s buttons in the Pentagon, the Kremlin. We would share our merits with them and improve their lives and ours.

  Crap. If one could save the world thinking good thoughts, it would have been done time ago.

  While Coleman spoke, people fidgeted, nodding their heads, or shaking them, swaying from side to side, shifting their weight here and there. It was interesting that the moment you lost the concentration of Anapana and Vipassana it became impossible to maintain the meditation position. You had to move. I wondered if the others felt as embarrassed as I did by all this.

  Coleman invited us to think of our parents. We were to close our eyes again, to concentrate on our parents, to recall their faces, to recall all they had done for us, to share our merits with our father and mother, to wish them well. ‘May they be free from all attachment. May their lives be full of happiness and sympathetic joy. I gladly share all my merits with them.’

  I thought of my dead father, my ageing, sick, but still sprightly mother. Naturally I couldn’t wish my father well, because he was dead.

  Could I?

  Or could I?

  I mean logically I couldn’t, but what if I did wish him well anyway? What harm could it do for me to wish my father well? It was meaningless because Dad was beyond harm and beyond being well. He was beyond being. On the other hand, it couldn’t harm, could it, for Christ’s sake? Is it such a problem to do something meaningless?

  Why was this bothering me so much?

  I wished my mother well.

  Wish your father well, a voice said. I resisted. It makes no fucking sense to wish my father well. He’s dead. I won’t have anything to do with this mumbo-jumbo and he wouldn’t want me to, or rather, wouldn’t have wanted me to. In fact, he would have been t
he first person to tell me to get up and walk out of this pagan bullshit right away. I smiled. Anglican through and through, Dad loathed the Catholic practice of praying for the dead. ‘Paganism!’ he would shake his head. ‘Sheer, unadulterated paganism!’ If I couldn’t remember his face clearly, I had his voice spot on.

  I wish my mother well because I always wish my mother well. I won’t share my merits with her because I can’t possibly believe in the claptrap of metaphysical accountancy. Next we’ll be selling indulgences. Next we’ll be lighting candles by photos of the dear departed.

  Jesus!

  I was stuck. Why? Why was all this emotional stuff happening? Why couldn’t I just have sorted out my bellyaches and peeing problems and got right back to work?

  I wish my father well, I thought.

  How strange it seemed to say those words in my head! Dad has been dead so long. We argued before he died. I wish him well. We argued because I would not say, standing beside his bed, his deathbed, I would not say that I believed in God, that I was a Christian, to please him. ‘I’m sure you do believe, Timothy,’ he said. His face was grey, spectral. ‘Tell me you do.’ His lips barely moved. It was two days before he died. He stank. ‘No.’ I stood my ground. I wouldn’t say the words for him because they weren’t true. I wasn’t a Christian. ‘You shouldn’t ask me to say such things.’ I had been furious. It was the most underhand coercion.

  Dad, I wish you well.

  Then I sensed a stirring of the mind, a deep well-wishing in the mind, in the belly, in the bowels, that wasn’t the words I was rehearsing, but that had been awakened or revealed by those words. Light had fallen on a dark place. I really did wish my father well, enormously. I was bursting with well-wishing for my father. There was a rolling ocean of well-wishing in me. Where had it come from?

  ‘Maybe we have issues with those close to us. They have made us suffer. How we have suffered for the way they have behaved! And we have made them suffer. No doubt they too have suffered a great deal.’ Coleman paused and sighed. ‘All the same, I willingly share my merits with them. I share my merits with them gladly. May their lives be full of happiness and sympathetic joy.’

  It was really too bad I couldn’t believe in this merits claptrap. There was such a deep ring of sincerity in Coleman’s voice. I began to have a little respect for him, even though it was intellectually disqualifying to hold such nutty points of view. I fell to thinking of my wife. How we had made each other suffer!

  Don’t go there.

  Our children. Our three children. My brother. My sister.

  Faces appeared. I remembered those moments on the terrace at Maroggia. It was the same story, more controlled now, but the same. Something in this business of sitting still, emptying the mind of self-regard, settling into your flesh and blood, something in the soft breathing and the long hours just being there, just accepting that you really were here, here today and gone tomorrow that is; at some point it opened your heart.

  There. I have used words that normally make me cringe. It opened your heart to the people around you. Suddenly you wished them well. Even people you really did not wish well. Now you did. However briefly. It brought down barriers and blurred boundaries. In your muscles, first, and your mind. Inside you. Rigidities, routines. They broke down. The mind melted in the flesh. The gap between you and the breakfast utensils shrank, between you and the landscape, between you and the people sitting beside you. We were all on a level. On the eighth or ninth day I had found myself sitting on a bench in the garden, a cup of herb tea in my hand, when the man who had talked about shaving his moustache to feel the breath on his lip came and sat down beside me. It was the only bench in the shade. He was a big athletic man in his early forties, I suppose. The sun was hot. We were sitting a foot or two apart, on the bench, and did not look at each other. We observed the Noble Silence. Yet at once there was an uncanny communion between us. I felt it instantly, intensely, and I knew he was feeling it too. We both knew, without having looked for it or wanted it, that the other was feeling a deep sympathy, a knowledge, but devoid of content. A knowledge of each other. We were both surprised and knew we were surprised. We were both glad, quietly. It must have lasted some minutes. I didn’t know him from Adam. But, crazy as it will seem, I do believe that if some old man had poured us a glass of water from an earthenware pot, with a fig in the bottom of course, and offered it to us, we would both have put a hand on that glass, myself and the man who hadn’t shaved his moustache, and held it there, on the shady bench in the sunny garden, held it perfectly still, without looking at the water, without looking at each other.

  Was this charity?

  How can you, I wondered, as Coleman shared his merits now with American generals and Iraqi suicide bombers, how can you pretend to escape from the compartmentalisation of Western medicine and then complain when people go the whole hog and talk spirituality and aura and reincarnation?

  How can you? Where draw the line?

  Believeth all things. Hopeth all things.

  Perhaps it’s impossible to integrate mind and body without integrating both with everything.

  Would it have been charity to tell my father I believed in God, even if I didn’t? I don’t.

  Suffereth long, and is kind.

  I wish you well, Dad.

  I couldn’t listen to Coleman. ‘How they must suffer for their crimes,’ he was saying of Bush and Blair and Putin and bin Laden. ‘I gladly share all my merits with them.’ Coleman was mad. I went back to St Paul, to Dad’s first love. If I have all those wonderful skills, he says, which are just a part, or parts, and have not charity, then I am nothing. It profiteth nothing. Because incomplete, transitory. The part is nothing. Charity is beyond parts, beyond boundaries, beyond time. Hence beyond words. Defined by negatives. It vaunteth not. It faileth not. Or by the absence of exclusions. Beareth believeth hopeth endureth all things. Perhaps it was charity, then, that I had been learning through Vipassana. The knowledge that you are one with the whole. Perhaps the day will come, I thought, when the water snakes rise beside my little boat and I will bless them with all my heart.

  ‘Your vow of silence is lifted,’ Coleman said. ‘You may talk.’

  At once there was movement in the meditation room, there was noise, commotion. I was astonished how eager everyone was to speak, to know each other, how loudly they cried out their names. People jumped from their mats and were shaking hands, saying hello, introducing themselves. Shrill voices, deep voices. Eye contact, gestures, multiplicity. A camera flashed.

  In a daze I had just reached the door when a young woman danced up to me, barefoot, beaming.

  ‘Are you, by any chance,’ this pretty woman asked, ‘Tim Parks, the writer?’

  Cathedral

  ‘THE AIR CONDITIONING is out.’

  ‘Damn!’

  The caretaker shrugs: ‘I’ve opened everything I can.’

  On the fourth floor the students are already in the classroom. A wall of windows faces south-east over a small park in the industrial suburbs of Milan. Rising through a polluted haze, the sun sends girders of glare through the open window. Forty desktop computers add to the heat.

  Emanuela tells me she’s afraid she’ll faint. She has blood pressure problems. I sit her near the door. Maybe there’ll be a nice draught. I apologise profusely for the situation. ‘The only way out would be to move to the main building where the air conditioning is working, but that will mean doing the exam on paper. No computers.’

  Without exception the students opt for the computers. ‘I barely know how to write by hand,’ Silvia giggles. One of three Silvias. She’s nervous.

  Everyone is sitting next to his or her best friend. The back row is packed. I rearrange them. It’s an old-fashioned, rather English obsession of mine that exams must be rigorously fair: absolutely no talking, no exchanging notes, no glancing at one another’s work. The students resist this. A certain assumption of authority is required. I break up the gang of four and send them to the four c
orners of the room. The others laugh. I split the twins. I don’t call them by name since it’s impossible to tell them apart. Leaving one space between every two students there are exactly the right number of seats. Then Francesco arrives. Francesco is always late, always polite, vague, as if surprised to find himself here. The only thing to do is to put him on the teacher’s computer behind the big desk. This leaves me with the one chair that isn’t screwed to the floor and no writing surface to sit at.

  I distribute photocopies and repeat instructions. ‘Remember to save regularly on your pen-drives. It’s nine ten. You have until twelve ten. Let’s go.’

  Understandably, some of them gripe. It’s already stifling in the room. It’s humid. Since we need the door open for air, there’s noise when people walk down the corridor, chatting, laughing. A teacher yells in a distant classroom. Everything echoes. These are not great conditions for a final exam. All the same, the moment I give the order to start, the students get their heads down. As though some powerful appliance had been turned on, there is a tension in the room. If it were audible, it would be a steady hum; twenty-three kids thinking as hard as they can; and me watching, protecting, on guard.

  They have three tasks. Translation of an article by Christopher Hitchens. Translation of a passage from Beckett. Critical analysis of the published translation of a paragraph from Woolf. Barely ten minutes have passed when a strimmer begins to whine in the park across the road.

  I suffer for them. A couple of years ago, I would have been in a frenzy of irritation. I remember one afternoon exam during which a rock band started playing in the forecourt, warming up for the university’s end-of-year party. In my head I had composed an outraged letter to the rector. Throughout the exam I was editing this letter and recomposing it and correcting it and composing it all over. Even as I did so, I knew there was no point in sending it.