In the Light of What We Know (40 page)

These, my mother’s words, insofar as I remember them, come back not infrequently when I talk to my father. At times, I have caught myself expecting the kind of conversation I might have with intimate friends or colleagues—caught myself, I say, because I become aware of the expectation when it confronts and is defeated by that curious mix of distancing and intimacy that is the essence of my father’s language. And yet, more often than not I have found some kind of solace in what he says.

You are faced with certain choices, continued my father. Or so you think. But you have other choices also, choices you might have overlooked. You have an overabundance of choice.

And now I remember Zafar’s words from a long time ago. For most men, he said, the choices they make are determined by their constraints, but for the very rich, their constraints are determined by the choices they make. As I think of my father and recall those words of my friend, it is little wonder that I grew so fond of Zafar so quickly—and perhaps little wonder also that I often found him infuriating.

Don’t you chaps think choice is an illusion?

You chaps
? said my father.

Scientists. Free will is an illusion and all that.

The word
choice
means different things, said my father. There’s a fork in the road whether or not the traveler has any choice about which to take. I’ve always been a little puzzled by this popular notion that scientists reject free will.

It’s a break in causation, I interjected.

A break in causation indeed. But physicists have been happy with breaks in causation ever since quantum mechanics entered the scene.

Yes, but quantum mechanics is pretty esoteric, don’t you think?

There was an article in
Scientific American
in 2001 in which the author stated that quantum mechanics underpins thirty percent of U.S. gross national product, from semiconductors to lasers and magnetic resonance imaging. I’m not sure how he came to that figure, I have to say. In fact, I wrote to the fellow to ask him about it but got a most unsatisfactory reply. He couldn’t remember where he’d found the figure. In any case, when quantum physics conceived particles ruled by uncertainty and indeterminism, that was the day science called a truce and breaks in causation reentered its domain. Yet people still think free will an unscientific concept because it involves such a break. I think this misconception is related to another misconception about science, one I often come across in arts and humanities scholars, which is that they think we deal with certainties and definite knowledge. That’s wrong in fourteen different ways, but at the very least it demonstrates a lack of understanding of what scientists actually do. They work at the frontier of science, which is where the fun is, and which is also where there is anything but certainty. It is about adventure, even for theoretical physicists like me. Which neatly leads me to ask you if you’ve thought about taking risks.

That’s what my job involves, I replied.

You’re only taking a risk if there’s really something at stake. Why not set off on a completely different angle?

You mean quit finance?

There’s a great study Daniel Kahneman talks about in his Nobel lecture. Patients are more likely to agree to a treatment if its effectiveness is described in terms of survival rates rather than in terms of mortality rates, even though the two are the same thing, in the end—so to speak. Actually, it turns out that even doctors are more likely to recommend the treatment if it’s described in terms of survival rates. And you’d think they’d know better. If you call it quitting your job, it doesn’t sound so good. How about striking out on a new adventure?

You think
striking out
sounds better? Tell that to the last batter at the bottom of the ninth, with bases loaded, I said.

See? Language matters.

Whatever you want to call it. I’m not finding all this very helpful, I have to say.

Have you considered writing things down?

For what purpose?

I find mind maps quite useful.

You think I need to draw mind maps?

A common mistake about religion is that belief comes before practice.

Why would you practice if you didn’t have belief?

Here’s a little experiment. Make a sad face. Actually, it works better when you’re on your own. Try making a sad face.

I did as he suggested.

Now imagine you’re very happy.

Again, I did as he suggested.

It’s difficult, no?

Okay. But so what?

There’s a great study in which subjects were shown slapstick cartoons and asked to rate how funny they were. One cohort was asked to hold a pencil in their mouths, sideways between their teeth, while watching. That group reported the cartoons as being funnier than the other group did.

Why should holding a pencil in your mouth make a difference?

Exactly. Why should it? The speculation—a perfectly sensible speculation, it seems to me—is that holding the pencil that way puts your face in something like the smiling configuration. Matter over mind, you see. How you behave affects how you feel. Religious people who value praxis, rituals, and performance, they understand this. Buddhists have long known the benefits of meditation and, by the way, that’s one religion not overburdened with beliefs. I think writing can be a meditation, a praxis, a mode of prayer. Sometimes the discipline of putting things down on paper can help you overcome constraints just a little, and a little might be all you need. You could write in prose or draw a table. Even thinking about column headings could be useful.

Mind maps and matrices, I said.

It might help. You don’t know until you’ve tried it.

Right, I said. I’m sure I looked unconvinced.

I’m sorry, he said. Another beer?

My father got up to go but, taking another look at me, he sat back down. He gave me a huge smile.

It may surprise you to learn, he said, but I have in the past wondered whether I should be more worried than I was about you and your future. I even wondered if my failure to worry made me a bad father.

Really?

Yes, he said, apparently pondering it, but added: In the last century, 1986, I think it was. I forget the day.

You’ve never worried about me?

No, not really. I used to think it was because of our advantages. There’s not much to worry about, I suppose, if you know that short of nuclear devastation or worldwide Communist revolution, your son will live comfortably. But that wasn’t it. After all, your mother worried and she also grew up with every advantage. In fact, isn’t it understood that the lot of parents is to worry? It’s part of the job description.

So why didn’t you?

I don’t know. Disposition, probably. People are different. Maybe when you have children, you won’t worry either. Don’t misunderstand me. I appreciate things are tough now, but I believe you are equal to the challenges.

Why have neither of you ever encouraged me and Meena to have children?

Because we only had one child. You have enough expectations to carry around.

What expectations?

Inevitable ones. Your mother and I don’t have to do anything for you to form your notions of what we expect.

I should leave finance, you think?

Your grandfather talks about his foundation. You could go and knock that into shape.

That’s not the kind of thing I’m into.

Perhaps you could make it the kind of thing you’re into. Why not? I’m not suggesting you should, mind, but just wondering aloud. You know, I may be stuck on this question, but I can’t tell where you chaps in finance actually take on risk. I mean you all seem to stay in the business even when you don’t make your firms big bucks. Even when you do lose your job in one place, a friend hires you into some other firm. You’ve told me so yourself. It rather tickles me that this business that involves gambling—socially useful gambling, I daresay, but gambling nonetheless—this business doesn’t require its participants themselves to take on very much risk.

You don’t approve of finance, do you?

On the contrary. If you wanted, say, to make the world a better place—and don’t for a moment think that I think you should, but it’s impossible to say some things without suggesting an ethical stance—if you wanted to make the world a better place, then I rather suspect the best thing you could do is stay in finance, make even more money, and give it to good causes. Given the choice between becoming an aid worker or funding a hundred of them—it’s a no-brainer. But I’m approaching the question rather less altruistically. I think the best way you can get through this is to redefine what you think your situation is. I don’t think finance will give you the chance to take a risk, the chance for
you
to take a risk and
learn
to face uncertainty. Gambling with chits is fine—is it chits or chips?

Chips.

Gambling with chips is fine, said my father, but maybe you could try putting yourself on the table. If I were you, I’d talk to Meena and let it take you where it takes you. And when you don’t know what to say, say you don’t know what to say. But of course, I’m not you.

I’ve never known you to be prescriptive, but what I’m hearing is that I should change my life completely.

I hope I’m not being prescriptive. Change your life by all means, but only if that’s what you want to do. Half the gain is in just wanting change. You know what the problem with politicians is?

What?

They’re the kind of people who want to be politicians.

It’s easier said than done, I said.

Of course it is. Everything is easier said than done.

Quite.

Except talking, he added.

Sorry?

Talking isn’t easier said than done, he said, smiling at me.

But don’t they say talk is cheap? I replied.

And worth every penny. Talk to Meena, he said.

Speaking of talking, I said, acknowledging that he’d deftly brought it back to Meena.

The thing about talking, he said, is it makes you thirsty.

Now you’re talking.

*   *   *

This conversation took place last year. If I were to put my finger on what it is about it that makes it significant in my mind, I would have to declare that I don’t readily know. At the time, my experience of it was lined with a sense of frustration, which gave way to a feeling of disappointment. Yet it is a conversation that I continue to circle back to, so that I am left to suspect that the significance of a conversation is contained in how it is remembered and that only time can disclose the measure of its effect.

12

Henna Tattoo or Redundant and/or Superfluous

A novel was something made up; that was almost its definition. At the same time it was expected to be true, to be drawn from life; so that part of the point of a novel came from half rejecting the fiction, or looking through it to a reality.

Later, when I had begun to identify my material and had begun to be a writer, working more or less intuitively, this ambiguity ceased to worry me. In 1955, the year of this breakthrough, I was able to understand Evelyn Waugh’s definition of fiction (in the dedication to
Officers and Gentlemen
, published that year) as “experience totally transformed”; I wouldn’t have understood or believed the words the year before.

—V. S. Naipaul,
Reading & Writing: A Personal Account

But isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.

—Philip Roth,
Exit Ghost

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

—Umberto Eco,
The Name of the Rose
, postscript, translated by William Weaver

You should write a book.

About what? replied Zafar.

A memoir. An autobiography.

Why?

Put your story down on paper.

Books tend to involve paper. Still.

People read memoirs, I said.

So everyone should write memoirs?

Not everyone can write. You
can.
You can stay here and write.

How do you know I can write? he asked.

How do you know you can’t? You don’t know until you’ve tried, I said.

I can pick my nose in front of the pope. Doesn’t mean I
should.

You don’t like memoirs?

If I like reading them, then I should want to write one, too. Right?

No, I said, exasperated. If you
don’t
like reading them, I continued, that’s an argument for not writing one.

One should never do anything one doesn’t like.

No. One should probably not write a memoir if one doesn’t like memoirs. Why not write a novel? I asked, opting for another tack.

All novels are autobiographical.

That’s not true. All novels are fictional.

Philip Roth didn’t write about colonial Europeans traveling up the Congo river into the heart of Africa, Conrad didn’t write about an Indo-Trinidadian settling postcolonial England and Naipaul certainly didn’t write about immigrant Jews in the northeast of America.

What do you have against memoirs?

Memoirs are stories of redemption, said Zafar, half of them about a tragic childhood finally overcome, the rest about fleeing the working treadmill for the romantic Tuscan hills or the countryside of Provence and finally discovering what life is actually all about. Look at what I’ve survived, or see how I’ve changed: I’ve taken risks and now I know what’s really important. I have nothing against memoirs, but what if there’s no redemption to speak of? A manual on failure and dissatisfaction, how to be unhappy, the secret to unhappiness—now that I could write.