A Conspiracy of Friends Read Online Free Page A

matter—the attraction of one to another, the search for completeness, the sad, insistent human longing—was the same wherever and however it occurred, had the same dignity, the same magnificence. The moping, lovesick teenager, blissfully unaware that his or her feelings were precisely those that his parents—and everybody else—had felt, might slip into solipsism, but surely must be forgiven because his teenage love affair, short-lived though it might be, was every bit as important, as magnificent, as that conducted by Romeo and Juliet or by Pyramus and Thisbe.
    William glimpsed this insight. Doing what all of us should do from time to time, but which the demands of quotidian existence prevent us from doing—sitting down and taking stock of what his life was about and what it meant—he suddenly realised that if he felt that he had achieved nothing it was because he had failed to cherish what he had in fact done. He had filled his days doing ordinary, unexceptional things and thought nothing of them. But they were far from nothing: even the act of making his morning cup of tea as he looked, bleary-eyed, over the rooftops of Pimlico amounted to a small miracle: that there should, in this cold void of space, be a small blue planet on which he, a rather complex collection of cells, should be delighting in the dried black leaves of a plant that grew half a world away; that surely was astonishing and worthy of celebration and awe. And that was even before one started to address the mystery of consciousness—that this collection of cells, engaged in the making of tea, should trigger enough electrical activity toproduce consciousness, of all things, even while being unable to explain exactly what consciousness was.
    Yet what was the point of it? Unless one could subscribe to an explanation of the sort religion might offer, there appeared to be no point at all. We were born, we did what we found ourselves doing and then we died; a grim prospect, or certainly a dull one. And what was the point of having no point? So we should create a point, he thought; we should
impose
a sense of purpose. We could pick our cosmology and then put doubt aside. People had been doing so for a very long time, and half the world—at the least—wanted to carry on with this great act of self-administered and entirely understandable anaesthesia. They realised that belief of whatever sort—whether it was the faith in History and the State, as in the shattered halls of communism, or faith in a particular theology—at least made it possible to get through the day. And if one felt better in the belief that one’s life made sense in these terms, then what was wrong with that? Was it weakness to allow oneself the pleasure of thinking that one
counted
in some way? And did this engagement not result, on balance, in greater human happiness? No, said the atheists, it did not. And yet where, William wondered, were the great works of those who believed in nothing at all? We
had
to believe, he thought, whether it was in some power beyond us, or in love, or art, or beauty. The need to believe was always there, and it would find expression, even if it attached itself to something paltry and shallow such as celebrity culture. And for many millions that was where their spiritual energy went—into a fascination with fashion and the lives of narcissistic entertainers. Viewed in this light, he considered,
Hello!
magazine was a religious tract, a work of theology.
    William raised these questions with Marcia, who had called at his shop to place an order for a small reception she was in charge of that evening.
    “Point?” she said. “Why think about it? Haven’t we got enough on our minds as it is?”
    “But …”
    “And anyway, we know what we want in this life.”
    “Do you, Marcia? Do you know what you want?”
    She looked at him. She could not tell him what she wanted in this life because try as she might to give him up—and she did give him up from time