Therefore Choose
Authors: Keith Oatley
Therefore Choose
Also by Keith Oatley
Fiction
The Case of Emily V.
A Natural History
Non-Fiction
Emotions: A Brief History
Understanding Emotions
Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions
Selves in Relation: An Introduction to Psychotherapy and Groups
Perceptions and Representations: The Theoretical Bases of Brain Research
Brain Mechanisms and Mind
Copyright © 2010 by Keith Oatley.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call 1-800-893-5777.
Characters in this book are imaginary and, except for Harold, who appears towards the end of Part 1, no resemblance to actual persons is intended or implied.
Edited by John Sweet.
Cover adapted from
Self Portrait
, 1910 (pastel and distemper on paper) by Feliks Michal Wygrywalski (1875-1944) © Mazovian Museum, Plock, Poland/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Cover design by Jaye Haworth and Julie Scriver.
Interior page design by Julie Scriver.
Printed in Canada on 100% PCW paper.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Oatley, Keith
Therefore choose / Keith Oatley.
Â
ISBN 978-0-86492-616-6
I. Title.
PS8579.A75T54 2010Â Â Â Â Â C813'.54Â Â Â Â Â C2009-907521-0
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Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the New Brunswick Department of Wellness, Culture, and Sport for its publishing activities.
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Goose Lane Editions
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For Kathleen, Jennifer, and Hannah
CONTENTS
1
Anyone in Cambridge
will tell you where Trinity College is. Then, through the Gatehouse, and past the Fountain in the middle of Great Court, is the Dining Hall. In it, George stood in a line of undergraduates, facing another line across a long oak table, waiting for grace to be said. He was a little taller than those who stood next to him, and his brown hair was slightly too long, but otherwise he looked much like his companions.
“Benedic, Domine, nos et dona tua ⦔ The words were intoned by a scholar who stood near High Table.
Grace, thought George â gift â a lovely idea, now the signal to start eating.
Grace finished with a sudden hubbub of voices and a scraping of benches on the flagstone floor as everyone sat down. It was the start of Michaelmas term, the year was 1935, and George was beginning his third year as an undergraduate. If one were to go back a hundred years, the clothing would no doubt be different but the young men would be much the same, the ritual much the same, as if this were a certain thing that people do in a certain society, as if this were the way it should be.
As George sat down, he noticed, next to him, a man wearing a tweed jacket under a new gown.
“I don't think we've met,” said George.
“Werner Vodn,” the man said. “From the University of Munich.”
He had light brown hair, and an open face that reminded George of a Holbein portrait. He turned towards George and shook his hand.
“George Smith. I'm pleased to meet you,” said George.
“This is good. Not all are pleased to meet people from Germany at this time.”
“Hitler, meinen Sie, und die Nazis?”
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
“I speak German a bit,” said George. “But I hope Hitler isn't the whole of Germany.”
George learned German and French at school because he liked the teacher. For two summers he spent time in Germany on exchanges. He also spent a summer in Paris. Languages occupied him, and he was good at them. They were bridges to other worlds, which drew him towards them. They were escapes from an enclosed upbringing. The mental bridge he built to Germany was to a world of deep scholarship, beloved of his teacher, absent from his family, present in Cambridge.
“I am from the southwestern part, from Konstanz,” said Werner.
“You can take time off from your own university?”
“I came to attend Wittgenstein,” he said.
“Philosophy!” said George. “I'm just a medic, I'm afraid. Anatomy, physiology ⦠largely without intellectual content.”
“He is a great man. âThe proposition is a picture of reality.'”
“How do you mean?”
“It's a quotation from his book, the
Tractatus
. He has numbered all the propositions. This is number 4.01.”
“I see.”
“I hoped for a room in Whewell's Court, near him,” said Werner. “But this is not possible. I am in Great Court.”
“Your English is very good, without an accent.”
“My grandmother is English, my mother's mother. She came from Godalming, and when my grandfather died, she lived with us, from when I was young. I was her favourite. I think she was lonely. We spoke together in English, and she read to me.”
“And you took it on, and started to read in English yourself?”
“My grandmother bought me this jacket. Harris Tweed. She thought it would help me fit in.”
“How is that working?”
They both laughed.
“It's your strongest point, literature,” he said. “Your music is not so good. There is Handel, of course, but when you look into him, you find he was German.”
He smiled, trying to see if he could provoke George a little.
To be at Cambridge. This was a thought to which George would return as he regarded the courtyard through the window of his room or as he walked from the college to a morning lecture in the Downing Site. He was a medical student, and on his first day as an undergraduate, his supervisor in Anatomy had taken a piece of paper and had drawn for him in pencil a little map of the route from the college to the Downing Site. He did this for everyone he supervised.
George attended lectures assiduously. He had bought himself a set of notebooks with stiff board covers, one for each subject. He was good at taking notes, although he never read them again. He put what was said into his own words, and this seemed to enable him to remember everything necessary without having to read those stultifying textbooks that medical people produced. On the days when there were lectures, with two of his notebooks under his arm, he would walk along the narrow pavement of Trinity Street, past the solid walls of Gonville and Caius that looked as if they had been there forever. Each year a new set of students would walk these pavements.
He'd walk past the front of Great St. Mary's, then glance across the road to King's College Chapel. How to describe it? Thousands of people must have tried. But describe the chapel in a way that's fresh. Someone called it a giant sow on her back with her feet in the air. What did Flaubert say? “If you don't have any originality, you must find some.” All right, don't say anything about beautiful perpendicular stonework, or tracery in the windows, or pinnacles soaring towards the sky.
“Originality,” said George. How can one know? What about this chapel? Rather than straining for the heavens, what would the building be like if it were something for people who live here on earth, whose idea wasn't the unattainable but the finite? George thought he'd write that down when he got to the lecture theatre, in one of his notebooks in the place where he jotted down turns of conversation, fragments of description. These notes were at the back of his notebook, but not at the very back, which was left blank in case anyone opened it accidentally.
George walked on, along King's Parade, past the window of the gentlemen's outfitter. In the window were gowns and other university-looking garments â attire, that's what they'd be called. An outfitter's shop, like his father's. Now he was outside looking in rather than inside looking out. What would his father have thought?
“Your father would have been proud,” his mother said when he got a scholarship. She meant she was proud. She didn't know much more about Cambridge than the boat race of which one read each year in the newspaper, and for which everyone, of course, had a preference, dark blue or light blue, Oxford or Cambridge. But she knew, too, that Cambridge was the route to success in life. It was an idea she cherished. It let her know she'd done well as a mother: her son was hoisted up the social scale.