Art & Lies Read Online Free Page B

the glorious lights of the Renaissance bewilder me a little. Perhaps because, in the mediaevals, with their love of systems and hierarchies, I find the fullest and most human outworking of the old theory of ‘Kyndly Enclyning’. A theory that starts with Plato and runs in a many-coloured current through Boethius, Chaucer, all the thinking of the Middle Ages, and is still lively in both Shakespeare and Bacon. A truth, still apparent, though disregarded, that things move violently to their place, but calmly in their place. To put it another way, everything has its right home, the region that suits it, and, unless forcibly restrained, will move thither by a kind of homing instinct. But how will I find my ‘right home’, that house not built with hands, unless I am in my right mind? Every day, in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question ‘How shall I live?’ is not one I can answer on prescription.
    Most common are the retired or fired businessmen who develop cancer. They come to me in broken health, in fear for their lives, and the phrase I hear first is ‘I’m not the man I was.’ As we talk it becomes clear that he is the man he has been always, yes, well-off, yes, respectable, but immature, without self-knowledge, a man without breadth or depth, but shielded from this lack by his work, by his social standing, by his loving wife, by his young mistress, by his slap-on-the-back pals. Often, as we talk, he tells me that he has never liked his work, hates his family, or that he has lived for his work and that without it he is a child again and what should he do in the mornings?
    Saddest of all are the women who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue. They made the sacrifice, often willingly, and they are still waiting for the blessing. While they wait their cancer does not.
    It’s awkward, in a society where the cult of the individual has never been preached with greater force, and where many of our collective ills are a result of that force, to say that it is to the Self to which one must attend. But the Self is not a random collection of stray desires striving to be satisfied, nor is it only by suppressing such desires, as women are encouraged to do, that any social cohesion is possible. Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child. ‘What do you do?’ is the party line, where doing is a substitute for being, and where the shame of not doing wipes away the thin chalk outline that sketches Husband Wife Banker Actor even Thief. It’s comforting, my busy life, left alone with my own thoughts I might find I have none. And left to my own emotions? Is there much beyond a childish rage and the sentimentality that passes for love?
    A friend of mine whom I treat informally, he is not my patient, came to me after his second heart attack and said ‘Handel, I want to think about my life.’ I gave him Pascal’s Pensées , he was delighted and stuffed the book into his bulging briefcase. ‘Just what I need,’ he said. As he was hurrying off to pick up a cab, he turned back to me and said ‘Handel, I’ve been so much better for our chats, and I have realised that you are right about the importance of the contemplative life. I’ll try and fit it in.’
    From my window I watched him disappear into the busy street that used to be flanked on either side with self-distinguishing little shops, each with its own identity and purpose. Each with customers it knew and a responsibility towards them. Now, the unflanked street has been widened, for a road too dangerous to cross, that roars between plate glass multi-national stores, that each sell the same goods, from the same markets, but in different packages and according to