What We Can Know

by Ian McEwan

As requested, he brought to my desk the twelve volumes of Vivien Blundy’s journals from her archive, which, for reasons scholars have never resolved, once rested marsupially within her husband’s.

She would never have guessed that she would abandon a career, a vocation even, to serve another’s genius.

A woman friend said in an interview years later, ‘It was medieval serfdom out at their place and after a while you got used to it. If you offered to help, Vivien cheerfully refused. Francis never stirred from his chair, never did a thing. I don’t think it crossed his mind that the household, the meals or even the state of his underwear might have something to do with him. He was, after all, a genius.’

It was not the poetry that fascinated people at first, it was the guest list. Most barely noticed or cared, but a minority took issue. They did not like the ‘Barn set’ – straight, white, an influential and comfortable literary elite drawn from the London–Oxford axis. Why, journalists and bloggers asked themselves, this preoccupation with a gathering of elderly, self-satisfied mediocrities?

The issue was not a lost birthday poem read after dinner, it was what the poem by its non-existence had become: a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective anger and a focus of unhinged reverence.

I could have been there. I am there. I know all that they knew – and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths. That they are both vivid and absent is painful. They can move me and touch me, but I cannot touch them. Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love, and there are still two guests to arrive.

Interesting to note that in the mid-2030s, ‘the Derangement’, respectfully capitalised, came into general usage as shorthand for the usual list of global heating’s consequences – a litany that wearied activists and sceptics alike.

To drink as they had, then listen to fifteen sonnets in Blundy’s condensed style was a cruel demand. Helpless daydreaming was inevitable. But the sense of a serious historic occasion was not diminished. Everyone loved the poem.

Poetry had a lowering effect on him. Classical music too. Their cultural weight and solemnity and self-importance oppressed him. He suspected that people were subtly bullied into faking appreciation in order not to appear uneducated fools.

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.

The diagnosis was clear, and his future was set – Alzheimer’s, a case of early onset. He was forty-three. In retrospect it was not clear which time was worse, when he lived in anguish about his future and discussed suicide with her, or when he crossed the line into vacancy and no longer understood what was happening.

I prefer teaching the post-2015 period, when social media were beginning to be drawn into the currency of private lives, when waves of fantastical or malevolent or silly rumours began to shape the nature not only of politics but of human understanding. Fascinating!

A literary work, like a small child, may take a long time to achieve a fully independent life. Or it might have no life at all.

Professionally, I’ve spent a lifetime getting on intimate terms with people I can never meet, people who really existed and are therefore far more alive to me than characters in a novel.

Memory is a sponge. It soaks up material from other times, other places and leaks it all over the moment in question. Its unreliability was one of the discoveries of twentieth-century psychology. That did not stop people from relying on their own or from believing in the recollections of others, if it suited.

The best thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were troubled by a world in love with war and its technologies, and they wrote well about it. As for us, all that kept us from each other’s throats was seawater and a shortage of metals to make decent weapons.

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.

Our students are permitted limited access to NAI. To prevent over-dependence, they must sit before an approved desktop. They also need to wait five days before they get their next shot. The kids mostly want advice on relationships, parents, music, fashion and money. They murmur their confessions and questions and get an immediate response. The Machine, as they like to call it, knows when it is being asked to write a student essay and will terminate the session.

NAI knows about a respondent’s life in intimate detail and its memory, of course, is long. The kids like that. They feel important, known and cared for. They are proud of an accumulating dossier that tells of their escapades, successes, disasters and growth.

Young newlyweds can destroy a marriage by swapping files, but many insist on it. People continue their consultations through life and seem reassured that neither the state nor commercial entities have access to the material. But confess to a crime and NAI will turn you in.

A scholarly project extending over years involves much drudgery and boredom, easily forgotten when the entire undertaking is over. Only amnesia permits the folly of a fresh undertaking.

years. I was almost forty-five, a time when maturity and accumulated knowledge intersect with the last of youth’s lingering strength and quickness of mind.

I had rehearsed a muscular notion: only by being together, sharing difficulties as we had yesterday and today and solving them, could we act out, rather than analyse, our best path into the future.

In 500 years there might still be a Literature Department somewhere on the planet. In 5,000? Five million?

Guilt is an accommodating emotion. It can sit comfortably alongside happier feelings, asking only to be softened or eradicated by a kind act.

A significant portion of all possible worlds, real or imagined, is touched on or explored in the earth’s total accumulation of books.

There should have been something both dark and grand, even dramatic, in witnessing the person you love cast off, piece by piece, all the elements of their being in relentless disintegration. But the day-to-day reality of the process was its banality.

It was an unexpected way to begin an idyll, but I was content. Precious, to have time alone to read or browse, or kick off my shoes, lie back and stare at the brown stains on the ceiling and think of nothing much. I felt at home in this scruffy serious room.

We were an irreligious crowd, but conventional in our acceptance of what must be gone through. It often happened when a faithless friend died without leaving instructions, church rituals were the default, and the godless living were relieved.

Grief is a dream-state. The linear markers of ordinary time and daily obligations are wrenched apart. All significant ties lead to the recent past, to a sudden absence and to a struggle with what could or should have been.