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Sir Walter Scott, with whose work, as you will read, the Reverend Gideon Mack was intimately familiar, once described publishing as ‘the most ticklish and unsafe and hazardous of all professions scarcely with the exception of horse-jockeyship’.
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This is the hard lesson of my life: love is not in us from the beginning, like an instinct; love is no more original to human beings than sin. Like sin, it has to be learned.
am at the gates of the realm of knowledge, and one day soon I will pass through them.
Centuries of rain and wind, it seemed, had in some places smoothed and in others wrinkled the surfaces.
I was sure of it.
os he Rrusfworthg nDratorodjjst full of himzelf
Yes, running filled me with joy, contentment, as nothing else did. It took me out of myself. Also, it was how I released the energy inside me: as if the fire blazing away in there was my fuel. If I went four days without a run, I grew hot and tense and felt as if my chest was about to explode. I needed to run.
To be eccentric is to be a ‘character’, and every institution needs characters.
I am not the face the Kirk wishes to show to the modern world. The most plausible way of dealing with me, then, is to find me insane.
Did my father love me? Was he capable of love at all? I think he loved the idea of a son more than he loved the actuality. He wanted a Gideon, but what he got was a Gideon Mack.
Austerity is not highly regarded these days: not to have things is considered a mark of poverty. But there is more than one kind of poverty, and I have not seen more wretchedly impoverished people than the desperate crowds shopping for the sake of shopping in the post-Christmas sales.
But it was not just a clash of eras or generations, it was a clash of cultures too. The sixties was an American decade: the Americans might have gone home after the war but they were back in these years, influencing the form of music, books, art, fashion, social attitudes. British pop groups sang with American accents, teenagers dressed in denim, Marvel comics filled the racks in station newsagents, and American shows and the American war in Vietnam filled the staid black-and-white screens in homes which had television.
My father hated all this: the triumph of stupidity. He saw it too as an invasion of privacy, which it was. The sixties demolished privacy, encouraging people to explore their inner selves and lay them out for all to see. To my father, this was like passing a law permitting indecent exposure in public places.
His old anger still boiled up once in a while, but the big things he wanted to oppose were too big, and he was left to rail against trivialities.
Even the wicked have to rest, in spite of the proverb, and if they do it gives everybody else a break too.
I’d been one of the best students of my intake. I’d worked hard, but I’d enjoyed it too, the biblical analysis, the theological arguments, the history of the Christian Church: my brain was stimulated by the greatest story ever told and the greatest philosophical and metaphysical questions ever posed. I believed none of it, but intellectually I had thrived.
I preached on the utter immorality not just of the so-called first-strike capability, but of the possession of nuclear weapons at all. There were no circumstances, I said, when their use could be justified.
My time in Leith had taught me that it was possible to be a Christian without involving Christ very much.
I raised £800 in sponsorship from the London marathon, and I learned a simple truth about campaigning over that summer: once something begins to roll, everybody wants to jump on board.
We hardly spoke all the way back to Monimaskit. John drove with infinite care, as if somehow that would help. I thought, someone is killed in one of these things, and the first thing we do is get in another one and drive to see the body, then drive away again. We have no option: our lives depend on machines that kill us.
He had the bitterness and boldness of a home-grown boy on his own territory; but under that boldness was insecurity and a sense of failure.
‘I’m interested in the spaces people occupy and how the spaces affect them and how they affect the spaces.
‘But why would he make it up? Are you saying he made up all the stories in his book?’ ‘A number. You can tell which ones from the style. The genuine items are often incomplete, ragged at the edges, they lack precise details, they are quite unsatisfactory as crafted stories. The fakes are the highly polished ones.
I got off my knees and folded the map, thinking as I did so how total is our trust in maps. We believe what they tell us about solid ground, about earth, rock, water, forests, buildings. We trust in maps because when we test them out, on a walk or a drive, we find, generally speaking, that they are telling the truth. Even if some detail is wrong it doesn’t shake our general confidence in maps. And yet they are only pictures. They are not the real terrain, only representations of it. But our inclination is nearly always to believe the map.
She wrote my name on an envelope, dropped the film in and handed me the tear-off collection slip. ‘Any time after four then, Mr Mack.’
When you walk that space between land and sea, you get a proper perspective on your own insignificance.
Our daily lives are so much less physical than they would have been a generation or two ago. Not just us – most people in this country, at this juncture in history. Hardly any of us do real jobs any more – I mean hard physical labour. We don’t get a grip on the world – a hard, sweaty, actual grip on it. We don’t feel it. I’m not trying to demean the work any of us does but it’s not how it was fifty or even thirty years ago.’
‘All right,’ John said, ‘maybe the lack of physical work is only a symptom. I just feel that we’re not connecting with reality any more.
But we still have to make sense of our lives. If we don’t do it through politics or religion we have to do it some other way.’
Life is a story. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a book or a film, it’s still a story.’
‘A lot of people just can’t accept the idea of God any more. It’s not because they don’t want to, it’s because intellectually they can’t.
‘One doesn’t abandon it all on a whim. The kirk, the kirkyard, my family, me, you – there’s something much bigger than religion going on in all that. Much bigger. The religion was just a phase, and it’s coming to an end. Do you understand what I’m saying?’ ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Like the Picts putting Christian signs on their ancient stones, but the stones surviving the Picts and their new religion.’
Mexico made a huge impression on me. Everything there is loaded with symbolism, weighed down with it. The ancient ruins loom over the whole country, or at least they did for me. I went to Chichen Hza and Uxmal and Palenque, and seeing those places changed my life. Human beings are at one and the same time utterly splendid and utterly insignificant. I got a sense that everybody in Mexico understands that in some deep way. We were there on the first of November, when they celebrate the Day of the Dead. It was unforgettable. I gather it’s become something of a tourist attraction nowadays in
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‘I’ve always liked graveyards. They’re peaceful, unrushed places. The pace of change in a graveyard is very gradual. I’ve never thought of graveyards as gloomy, and I don’t like the idea that they’re places one should only visit out of a sense of obligation, or when there’s a funeral.
‘That’s the trouble with funerals, isn’t it? One of the biggest days in your life and you can’t be there.’
Kite-flying is a double-edged experience, at once liberating and a reminder of your earthbound nature. The kite is a part of you and yet not a part of you, it is like having your soul on a long string tugging at you, attached to your body and yet with a life of its own. The temptation, of course, is to let go.
But I do like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the negativity, the violence that’s always just below the surface. And I like the way you deal with religion. One century you’re up to your lugs in it, the next you’re trading the whole apparatus in for Sunday superstores. Praise the Lord and thrash the bairns. Ask and ye shall have the door shut in your face. Blessed are they that shop on the Sabbath, for they shall get the best bargains. Oh, yes, this is a very fine country.’
He knew what I was talking about almost before I said it. He was so in tune with me, in fact, that I felt I hardly needed to voice my thoughts at all.
‘Then you don’t blame me? I mean, me the Devil. If that’s who I am.’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t blame you. You’re just doing what you do. What do you do?’ ‘That’s another good question,’ the Devil said. ‘I used to have a purpose. We both had a purpose, God and me. Now? I just go from one window to another and stare out. Or stare in. Sometimes I do a few conjuring-tricks, push a button here, pull a lever there. But my heart’s not in it. Basically, I don’t do anything any more. I despair, if you want the honest truth. I mean, the world doesn’t need me. It’s going to hell on a handcart, if you’ll
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‘Surely the way you think about death totally determines the way you live your life? If you don’t ever think about it can you really be alive in any meaningful way?’
It was one more charade scarcely worth keeping up.
The town itself was very quiet and seemed a bit sorry for itself, as if a majority of its inhabitants had drunk too much at New Year and were keeping their heads down till spring.
So I don’t know the answer, but I don’t think he lied. He might not have been well by that stage, but he wasn’t a liar.’ ‘But he lied about being a Christian, about believing in God.’ ‘That’s different. Everybody lies about that.’
‘Did he go strange?’ I asked. ‘Oh, he couldn’t help himself,’ she said. ‘He was religious. It’s something I’ve noticed with the residents since I’ve been working here. The more religious they are, the more daft they go.
‘That’s what I think more and more. There’s nothing. No God, no Devil, nothing. No damnation, no redemption. There’s just us and what we do. The things we achieve or the mess we make.’
