What We Can Know

by Ian McEwan

The varieties of silence are as numerous as those of speech or thought. Or of listening.

I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.

As was noted long ago, we are all innocent children in the tall forest of our clever inventions.

The imagined lords it over the actual – no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.

In human psychology, anything worth studying has multiple causes.

‘what’s so lovely is that basically, in a quiet way, he’s simply glad he exists. Whatever the difficulty, the baseline isn’t disturbed. Then that line becomes mine too.’

But at least this ridiculous humiliating episode taught me what madness is, what a psychotic paranoid delusion is. The entire universe of objects and people are threatening you with hateful messages. Everything makes horrible sense. You see patterns of dark significance where there are no patterns, no significance, no darkness. You shrink before the world. No good art can come of that. So I bless sanity, and I don’t care about the definitions. We know sanity when we can think about and act coherently in the real world, the one that we share. To hell with relativism.’

To be elsewhere! It was not true that travel was a false god and that you took your troubles with you and nothing could change. There was the unimaginable and unforeseen thrill of being away, of renewal, and remembering that the world was huge and various, and you and your concerns were small.

I did not complain, and later I was glad I hadn’t, for this was a vanishing process. It was me when I saw the proof, then me and not me when I saw my first finished copy, until finally, diluted and disseminated in multiple thousands of printed versions of myself, I faded into the typeface, and it was no longer me at all. What remained was not even a woman but a poetic convention, the shadow of a woman on the cave walls of a man’s imagination.