I once tried to write a novel but lacking any ear for dialogue or skill at characterisation, I abandoned the attempt.
The plot, though, was quite good. A couple on a smallholding are facing hard times. Their farm is failing. Daily life is shot through with anxiety, and they retreat increasingly into their interior worlds. Alone at night the husband keeps dreaming he’s in another place, a farm where he and his wife are happier, things go better, and life is crowded with incident. Gradually he finds himself living for nightfall, retreating from domestic misery and awaiting only the next episode in a different life unfolding in his dreams: a life marred only by the nightmare that afflicts him when he goes to sleep: a recurring story about a failing couple on a failing smallholding.
Driven by his solipsism, Jesus has made what philosophers call a category mistake
One day at breakfast he mentions his dreamworld to his wife. To their shock, they realise they’re having the same dream, and they recount shared memories of the life they’re living in another place: a place where they both are in their dreams.
‘Dreams’? Or dream? Which shared world is the real one?
In philosophy, ‘solipsism’ means the belief that only your own experiences and existence can be known. This is hard-core stuff, more for the lecture theatre than the living room. But in real life I think that there’s a weaker solipsism which inhabits us all. This isn’t really a belief, more a feeling: a feeling that places us at the centre of the world around us and – to some degree – relegates other people, other things, to the status of a sideshow, backdrop or supporting cast.
This needn’t make us horrible or selfish people, but does make us susceptible to a suspicion that, if one day a great hand should pluck us from the street and a celestial voice boom ‘None of this was real – time to come home’, then we wouldn’t be altogether surprised. How else to explain the enduring popularity of that weirdly compelling 1998 film The Truman Show? In it, the eponymous central character comes (correctly) to suspect that his whole life is actually a TV reality show of which he is the star, and his town, his job, even his wife, are all actors hired as background.
I do entreat you to read carefully this authorial comment in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: densely written but keenly thought.
‘Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable…’
Eliot puts her finger on what I mean. Each of us is that lighted candle, each of us surveying and experiencing a world that is necessarily arranged around the eye – ours – that sees it.
Jesus (Matthew 26:11) reprimands his followers for complaining that a woman who poured expensive oil on him should instead have given the money to the poor. ‘Ye have the poor always with you,’ he chides, ‘but me ye have not always.’ Indeed not, and he is to be crucified. The solipsism, however, is to see ‘the poor’ as background: and of course as background we do have ‘the poor’ always with us. But place Eliot’s candle in the hands of an individual poor person, and place Jesus in the category of religious teachers, and the concentricity shifts. This pauper has religious teachers always with him, but religious teachers and their followers do not have this pauper with them always. Driven by his solipsism, Jesus has made what philosophers call a category mistake.
In the autumn, in a column on this page, I described meeting the governor of Cyprus when I was a small boy, and mentioned that he and Lady Harding had escaped assassination by Greek Cypriot terrorists because (I said) a bomb under the couple’s bed failed to detonate. On our letters page a week later, this, from Elisabeth Beeley, appeared:
‘Sir: Matthew Parris’s heartwarming column (“The engine’s pitch has changed”, 8 November) contains a small error. The bomb under General Harding’s bed didn’t fail to detonate. Far from it. As it ticked, the bomb was removed by the Commander of the Guard, 2nd Lt Michael Buckley, using a shovel, and put in a sandbagged dugout, where it exploded harmlessly a few minutes later. Michael was my brother.’
I was thrilled to read this, if a touch embarrassed. Embarrassed at getting it slightly wrong. But thrilled because… well, I struggle to explain. I’ve been telling that story for 70 years. I’ve visualised meeting the governor and visualised the report about (I thought) the bomb failing to go off. I’ve visualised my parents telling me. The whole scene has become a place in my world, my life, my story. All the other people in it – even Sir John and Lady Harding, whom I’ve visualised as being very short, and she in a flowery hat – have become a supporting cast of extras: a backdrop, almost unreal: I the candle, they the concentric rings.
But when I read Mrs Beeley’s letter it came home to me that, firstly, what happened to me really did happen; and secondly, that everyone else there was real, some of them still alive today, with their own memories of the same events, candles, every one of them, with me (if noticed at all) just an outer concentric ring. ‘You know what you know,’ as my fellow writer David Aaronovitch likes to say, ‘and they know what they know.’
This isn’t a movie. I’m not the director, film editor or star actor. And it isn’t about me. It’s the story of everyone. Billions of candles. Billions of concentric rings. And each as real as the others.
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