Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

He preferred to do business standing up; it gave the transaction a temporary air, helping to convince the other party that bargaining time was short.

There was a high-backed armchair, in which Tante Mathilde sat to catch the light from the candlesticks above the fire; a glass-fronted corner cupboard with some dusty crystal glasses, unused, reserved for a future occasion of unspecified grandeur.

He had been—Tante Mathilde reminded him—an inexhaustibly curious child, and although he could no longer remember the questions that had irritated her, he recognized a feeling that continued from that time: his amazement that anyone could be so lacking in curiosity as his stepmother.

There was silence in the room, and Jacques could feel a question rising up in him that he fought with all his strength to batten down.

His face was illuminated, even in the gloom of his bedroom, by the light of

discovery.

Jacques became suddenly aware that he was sounding like a child and not the man of science he aspired to be;

If you are too passionate and too hasty, you will never become a true scientist.”

Life was a challenge, a hill he felt vigorous enough to climb.

She was not, in herself, the point; she was the sign, she was the doorway through which he would enter a grander life.

And are not some of the greatest truths in the universe quite simple?

It doesn’t seem right that you walk from one to the other. It doesn’t feel like a short journey you make with your feet. It feels as though you’ve passed into a different existence.”

“All such afflictions are part of the divine plan. God in the end is merciful.

“Of course not. As you said, I barely know him. But Mother says that love will come.” “Love will come?” “Yes. She said it came to her after she was married to Father.” “I see. And did it stay?” “I did not ask.”

their awareness of the moment, was so individual, it seemed to Thomas, that it could find no true expression, let alone response or comprehension; it was so individual, in fact, that it could only be seen as part of a mass—a “mass of lunatics,” he reflected, the most heterogeneous entity you could imagine, a perfect oxymoron.

they were hereafter free to relinquish their struggles with the life outside and battle only with their several realities.

You would do well not to forget what the word ‘asylum’ means. From the Latin: a—without, sylum—cure. Get down, Captain.”

“Though the seas threaten, they are merciful”;

So many sentences in the conversations of students began with the words, “Apparently, they…” “They” were the masters, those who had gone before and probably sought, for no clear reason, to obstruct the young; and “apparently” showed how little students knew at first hand, how much of what they dealt in was hearsay.

he felt the gloom of his humble home envelop him like a flag that said “impostor.”

The “variation” that transformed them from pre-human into human entailed weaknesses that made them mad.

The hypothesis that underlay religion was merely an argument from necessity, because there was no need for faith unless there was absence. The interesting question, then, was whether that “absence” was a caprice of an all-powerful deity or a real vacuum that followed a real presence: had someone or something actually vanished?

But suppose, he thought, that there was a simpler and more credible explanation: that the absence was real; that the conditions of life did not comprise some infantile test of “faith,” but that something once present had genuinely disappeared. Suppose that what had disappeared was the capacity to hear the voice or voices of the god.

the ability to hear instructions, to produce under the influence of stress or fear the voice of the absent leader or god, had once been a necessary tool of survival;

though she represented something universal; that she belonged to a world that existed beside his own, a place whose natural laws were transparent and where there was no yearning, only tranquillity and fulfillment. The curse of being human was to be granted glimpses of this place, in music, in dreams and through the power of imagination—but only glimpses because the reality, like the Promised Land from Moses, was forever withheld.

When he was alive and Jacques was in Paris, he was not there. When they were both in Saint Agnès, but Jacques was out in the fields, he was equally missing. Most of the days and hours of Jacques’s life had been spent away from him, so in what significant sense had death made his father more absent than before?

“Pretty good is what they were, Doctor. I aimed for transcendence and I ended with some ‘pretty good’ paintings.”

the baroque dream of a homesick European exiled in California.

not sidetracked exactly, because that implied that there was a path from which she had been diverted

the idea that if humans were the only creatures to be mad, then perhaps it was the very thing that differentiated them from the apes that predisposed them to mental illness.

He felt as though he had joined the roll of ordinary doctors, the pessimists content to manage rather than cure—the carpenters and plumbers of the human who did repairs only; he felt he had been forced to sign his name to the doctors’ universal declaration of impotence, which said: We Do Not Know.

They say it is infantile to expect to feel happy. It is just an emotion, a transitory feeling, not an adequate purpose for a life.

there were many kinds of pre-human species before Homo sapiens triumphed.”

It was the acquisition of the ability to introspect that made a leap in our species, and that faculty depended on our development of language.”

And that is why all religion is about absence. Because once, the gods were there. And that is why all poetry and music strike us with this awful longing for what once was ours—because it begins in regions of the brain where once the gods made themselves heard.”

I think consciousness is like an extra sense—the equivalent of sight, perhaps. It gives us a way of reading the world. Sight uses light waves, hearing uses sound waves, consciousness uses language to help us construct a reduced model of the universe, in which we can picture ourselves as actors in a simplified version of time.

We are frustrated by the limits of our capacity to answer what we think of as the big or important questions. But we should not be. The failure is not in the answers, but in the questions.

We can only wonder at the tiny mysteries thrown up by this blindly evolved faculty.

“When another faculty, as great as consciousness, has also evolved in us. This is how the great mysteries are solved, not by answers, but because the changes in the way we apprehend the world make the questions irrelevant.

Evolution is a passage from the most automatic to the most voluntary.

he saw no need for caution because he saw no danger.

“What it left,” Thomas continued, “was this heartrending desire in humanity for something it has lost: its gods, its vanished Eden.

is how the insoluble knots and mysteries of life are eventually resolved, not by the finding of an ‘answer,’ but by the development of a perspective in which the problems no longer exist.

I am going into a dark country and I very much wanted to say goodbye to those that I have loved before I go.

And I will not let you tell yourself that you have failed because you didn’t do what no man has ever done before or since. Do you understand me?”

“Though I suppose he has not achieved all that he wanted.” “Well, that is a different matter. No one ever does. No one who truly dares and hopes.”