Читать книгу What it Means to be Human - Robert Rowland Smith - Страница 13

Colin’s story shows just how singular was his fate. In its details it belongs to nobody else. That is what makes him different – different even from me, his son. The truth is that, having witnessed the onset of his MS, which terrifies me, I’m glad of it. For all the compassion I feel towards him, that his fate differs from mine is something for which I can only be thankful.

Maybe it would be nobler if I felt the urge to take on his disease in order to spare him. That would be a grand filial sacrifice. It is what sacrifice is, at heart – the loving instinct to take over somebody else’s fate, to bear their cross. But that is a fantasy, and in any case doing so is impossible. We can never really stand in for anybody else. Even in the extreme case of offering up our own life to save another’s, it is still our own death that we will die, not theirs. We can’t actually spare them, we can merely buy them some time. What’s more, sacrifice seems to flow more appropriately in the other direction. If anything, parents sacrifice themselves for their children, not the other way round, at least in the West. They cede to the flow of time, giving priority to newer life over older. Incurable is incurable, as the Victorians said.

Wrapped up inside fate is another element that makes family members other to us. It was identified by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. In a precious fragment of text from the ancient world, Heraclitus is quoted as saying that ‘man’s character is his fate’. Who we are, as much as the action of any external influence, determines what will happen to us. To change our fate, therefore, requires changing who we are. But changing who we are is never easy. The drive to carry on being ourselves counts among the most powerful forces in the universe, rivalling gravity. After all, our character is what stops us from becoming other people. As if it were a repelling magnet, our character keeps others at arm’s length, insisting on its own space.

I saw first hand just how much my father’s character shaped his fate. Despite his education, his money, his family, and his luck in being given both a job and a house, he experienced life as a series of calamities. The slightest thing would vex him. If the traffic was bad, if he couldn’t open a jar, if a utility bill arrived in the post, if the sink got blocked, if the lawnmower ran out of petrol, if the television picture went fuzzy – in all cases, an almost existential despair would wash over him. It was as if every red light on the road was a monstrous unfairness trained deliberately on him. In little things he saw large tragedies. Fate had seen that Colin’s character was tragic, and decided to follow suit.

What overwhelmed him, I believe, was the sense of confronting his own resourcelessness. It wasn’t just that he had been given a lot, but that both boarding school and the family business were institutions that ran life for him. True, he had shown initiative in bringing Patricia to Canada. But she was expected to be a stereotypical 1950s wife, managing his domestic infrastructure. In other words, he’d had precious few opportunities to develop agency of his own. So whenever something less than advantageous occurred, he looked into his cupboard of personal supplies for dealing with it, and saw that it was empty.

In such tiny moments, Colin exhibited a brief but bottomless despair. He would let out what the English Gothic writer Thomas de Quincey called a ‘suspiria de profundis’, a sigh from the depths. I remember this sigh filling the house like the exhalation of a wounded animal. So when something truly terrible finally did happen – his own father ousting him from what was purportedly a family business – one can only imagine the hollowness into which he stared. If it was hard enough for Colin to roll with the mishaps of everyday existence, how frightening it would have been to behold this once-in-a-lifetime tsunami.

In the jargon, Colin lacked the necessary ‘coping mechanisms’. The want of resilience that he had shown in allowing minor inconveniences to flummox him became, when he was fired, his condition of being. Cruelly, it also provided the ideal environment for the MS to thrust upwards from beneath the ground, where it was only half buried, into the light. For whatever else multiple sclerosis might be, it is a disease that deprives its victims of the ability to cope. To someone whose coping mechanisms are already feeble, an incurable disease such as MS, mixed with unemployment, produces a fatal concoction. Paralysis was the result.

Other people might have responded differently. Stories abound of those who conquer or at least subdue their MS through a combination of attitude, diet and exercise. But my father responded in the way that only he could. He met the emptiness that faced him with an emptiness of his own. That was his character, and it became his fate.