Dropped Threads 3 (2 page)

How can we know what we don’t know? What is it like to be someone else? Does cinammon taste the same to you as it does to me? When I see a round red fruit and call it an apple, are you seeing the same shape and colour? As a child, these were the questions that took my mind out to wander during long sermons at Sunday mass (along with fantasies of rappelling with rope and harness up the inside walls of the church) or at bedtime just after the lights went out, when thoughts of infinity (more circles) made me feel carsick. And in adolescence: how big are our individual circles? Are we doomed to be utterly alone in them? My skull is a circle: the ultimate prison. (See June Callwood’s piece for a wise antidote to adoloescent angst.) Now I take solace in a paradox: each of us is indeed alone, and it’s our awareness of this, along with our ability to empathize with the isolation of others, that allows us to become less so. Empathy is the raw material of compassion. Compassion is an act of imagination; a leap of faith into another’s closed circle.

This ability to extrapolate from one’s own limited experience to that of many unrelated others is a type of magic, no less than the transformation of a scarf into a bouquet of flowers. Compassion is the power to transform the base metal of mundane experience into a kind of universal gold, recognizable—valuable—to all; compassion is the ability to
see deeply enough into our own souls and memories that we glimpse a kind of
prima materia
, that elusive substance sought by alchemists, physicists and mystics from which all matter—including all life—is formed; that irreducible stuff or force (noun or verb) that we share with the merest particle in the farthest reaches of the universe. Surely we are all working with the same basic materials even when it comes to those carbon-based emanations we call thoughts and feelings. This means that, across great gulfs of time, experience, class, culture and gender, and more, we not only can, but must imagine ourselves into one another’s points of view. Not because “to understand all is to pardon all.” But because without understanding there can be no “fellow feeling,” which is what compassion is. And without compassion there can be no wisdom. No peace. Compassion implies humility. What could be humbler than the act of listening, of placing one’s imagination at the service of another’s point of view; even if on occasion we conclude that we must fight what we have heard and seen, or abandon someone we have put our heart and soul into understanding.

In this book there are grab bags stuffed with toothsome pearls of wisdom; there are cautionary tales by turns humorous and harrowing; there are finely distilled stories of loss and letting go, of redemption through contact with unlikely others (including and, at times especially, other animals); there are accounts of the struggle to balance personal fulfillment with the needs of others, of the mortal combat that precedes forgiveness. Epiphanies are shared in the bracing and irreverent tones of a kitchen-table conversation, and mundane moments are lit with lyricism such that the familiar is revealed as fleeting, and terribly precious. And there are striking contradictions. A piece by a mother of sons mourning the absence of daughters sits cheek by jowl with a
daughter’s account of the painful necessity of cutting her mother out of her life. Most of the pieces, however, inhabit the border zones: those uncertain territories where peace and strife are in constant negotiation.

The writers themselves are a diverse group: journalists, authors, athletes, homemakers, teachers, artists, office workers and entertainers, many of whom combine several of the above. Some inhabit very large social and professional circles, others trace a shorter radius of home and family, but these differences are, I believe, far from definitive when it comes to a highly evolved world view: the Brontës and Emily Dickinson are evidence of that, just as an adventurer like Jane Goodall makes of her journey, far from human culture, an illumination of what connects us most intimately. And, indeed, this book is concerned with relationships—personal, political, environmental. Some of the pieces are funny, others are angry, many are both; some are poetic, others are barbed with satire. All are earnest, even the ironic ones. Each writer has done her utmost to share a scrap of wisdom—something torn from experience and saved against the day when it will find its place in the quilt—along with her doubts, in a way that is unmediated by ego or apology (that false humility which is really a disguise for fear). At the centre of this collection is each writer’s struggle to articulate a unique point of view in such a way that it can be launched like a message in a bottle to innumerable other “islands;” or, more aptly, to cause a ripple that dilates and intersects with other circles until the circles disappear and we are left with something that resembles more of a web: interdependent, inextricable. The result is thirty-five acts of compassion and little leaps of faith.

In this book, confidences are shared that might not even be whispered otherwise, certainly not to a stranger in a
bookstore. But the page is different. When I write fiction, I imagine that I am speaking to one person: I can’t see the face, which is indistinct in any case, hovering just outside my peripheral vision; but I am aware of a benevolently inclined stranger, a tender ghost, politely yet eagerly haunting my left shoulder, trying for a glimpse of the page. I have compassion for this hopeful ghost. She or he is craving something true, something nourishing. Reading is among the few truly private and intimate acts left to us. As such, it has the paradoxical power to bring us closer to one another than any of our high-tech amenities. This book assumes complicity and understanding. It assumes imagination in its highest form: compassion. This book makes of the reader, a friend.

What advice would
I give the young? That is the question put to me by the editor of this book, and it’s one I have trouble answering. Here’s why.

Just before Christmas I was in a cheese store, purchasing some cheese, when a very young man of—oh, say between forty and fifty—entered, manifesting bewilderment. His wife had sent him out to get something called “meringue sugar,” with strict instructions to buy no other kind, and he didn’t know what the stuff was and couldn’t find it, and nobody in any of the shops he’d so far wandered into had any idea either.

He didn’t say this to me. He said it to the cheese shop person. She too appeared to be without a clue as to the meringue sugar mystery.

None of this was any concern of mine. I could have—should have—simply pursued my own personal goal of cheese acquisition. Instead I found myself saying, “Don’t buy icing sugar, that isn’t what your wife wants. What she probably wants is something like fruit sugar or berry sugar, which is sometimes called powdered sugar but it isn’t really powdered, it’s a finer grind than ordinary white sugar, though you’ll have a hard time finding it at this time of year. But really, ordinary white sugar works just fine for meringues as long as you beat it in very slowly. I use it all the time
myself, and it helps if you add just a tiny bit of cream of tartar and maybe a half teaspoon of white vinegar, and …”

At this point my daughter—who’d succeeded in identifying the required cheese—got me in a hammerlock and dragged me over to the cash register, where a lineup was building. “The white vinegar, not the brown,” I called in closing. But I was already appalled at myself. Why had I spewed out all this unasked-for advice to a complete stranger, albeit a helpless and confused one?

It’s an age thing. There’s a hormone in the brain that kicks in when you see a younger person in a state of shell shock over meringue sugar, or how to get the lids off jars or the beet stains out of tablecloths, or the right way of dumping the bad boyfriend who should be disposed of immediately because as anyone with half a wit can see the man is a psychopath, or which candidate is the best bet in the local election, or any number of other things on which you appear to yourself to have an overflowing fund of useful knowledge that may vanish from the planet unless you dish it out right and left, on the spot, to those in need. This hormone automatically takes over—like the hormone in a mother robin that forces her to cram worms and grubs down the gaping maws of plaintively cheeping nestlings—and reams of helpful hints unscroll out of your mouth like a runaway roll of toilet paper falling down the stairs. You have no way of stopping this process. It just happens.

It’s been happening for centuries; no, for millennia. Ever since we developed what is loosely called human culture, the young have been on the receiving end of instruction from their elders whether they liked it or not. Where are the best roots and berries? How do you make an arrowhead? What fish are plentiful, where and when? Which mushrooms are poisonous? The instruction must have taken pleasant forms
(“Great arrowhead! Now try it this way!”) or unpleasant ones (“You idiot! That’s no way to skin a mastodon! Do it like this!”) Since we’ve still got the same hardware as Cro-Magnon man, or so we’re told, it’s merely the details that have changed, not the process. (Hands up, everyone who’s ever taped laundry instructions to the washer-dryer for the benefit of their teenaged kids.)

There are mountains of self-help books testifying to the fact that the young—and not only the young—are fond of securing advice on every possible subject, from how to get rid of pimples, to the suave way of manoeuvring some youth with commitment issues into marriage, to the management of colic in infants, to the making of the perfect waffle, to the negotiation of an improved salary, to the purchase of a rewarding retirement property, to the planning of a really knock-out funeral. The cookbook is one of the earliest forms of self-help book. Mrs. Beeton’s enormous nineteenth-century tome,
The Book of Household Management
, expands the tradition, and includes not only recipes but advice on everything, from how to tell a real fainting fit from a sham one, to the proper colour choices for blondes and brunettes, to which topics of conversation are safe for afternoon visits. (Stay away from religious controversy. The weather is always acceptable.) Martha Stewart, Ann Landers and Miss Manners are Mrs. Beeton’s great-granddaughters, as is Mrs. Rombauer-Becker of
Joy of Cooking
fame and every home handywoman, interior decorator and sex expert you’ve ever watched on television. Look at the shows and read the books and authors quickly, in sequence, and you’ll feel the need of some cotton wool to stuff in your ears as a defence against the endless stream of what would sound like relentless finger-waving, hectoring and nagging if you hadn’t chosen to let these folks in the door yourself.

With how-to books and self-help shows you can absorb the advice if and when you want it, but relatives or friends or acquaintances or mothers cannot be so easily opened and then closed and put back on the shelf. Over the centuries, novels and plays have given us a stock character: the older female—or male, both versions exist—who’s a voluble interfering busybody, deluging the young folk with unasked-for tips on how to conduct their lives, coupled with sharp-tongued criticisms when the advice is not heeded. Mrs. Rachel Lynde in
Anne of Green Gables
is a case in point. Sometimes this type of person will have a good heart—Mrs. Lynde does—although, just as often, he or she will be a sinister control freak like the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s
Magic Flute
. But good or bad, the meddlesome busybody is seldom entirely sympathetic. Why? Because we like other people—well-meaning or not—to mind their own business, not ours. Even helpful advice can be indistinguishable from bossiness when you’re on the receiving end.

My own mother was of the non-interference school unless it was a matter of life and death. If we children were doing something truly dangerous and she knew about it, she would stop us. Otherwise she let us learn by experience. Less work for her, come to think about it, though there was of course the work of self-restraint. She later said that she had to leave the kitchen when I was making my first pie crust, the sight was so painful to her. I’ve come to appreciate these silences of my mother’s, though she could always produce a condensed pill of sensible advice when asked for it. All the more puzzling, then, that I have taken to blurting out instructions to strangers in cheese stores. Perhaps I take after my father, who was relentlessly informative, though he always tempered the force of his utterances by beginning, “As I’m sure you know …”

•    •    •

I went to high school at a time when students were required to learn things off by heart. This work formed part of the exam: you were expected not only to recite the set pieces out loud but to regurgitate them onto the page, with marks off for faults in spelling. One standard item was the speech made in
Hamlet
by the old court counsellor, Polonius, to his son, Laertes, who is departing for a trip to France. Here’s the speech, in case you may have forgotten it, as I found I had when I tried for total recall.