Beautiful World, Where Are You(49)

being really, but as a beam of pure intellect. And how I wish I had a little more of your radiance illuminating my life at the moment.

Yesterday afternoon I gave three interviews and did an hour-long photoshoot, and between two of the interviews, my father called me to tell me that he had a fall and he’s back in hospital getting an x-ray. His voice sounded thin and his speech was quite garbled. I received the call while standing in the corridor of my publisher’s office building in Montparnasse. In front of me was an entrance to the ladies’ toilets, and beside that a large poster for a bestselling paperback by a French writer. I asked him what time the x-ray was scheduled but he had no idea – I’m not even sure how he managed to place the call. When we hung up, I went straight back down the corridor and into an office room, where a nice female journalist in her forties proceeded to conduct an hour-long interview with me about my influences and literary style. The photoshoot afterwards took place on the street. Several passers-by stopped to watch, perhaps curious as to who I was and why my photograph was being taken, while the photographer gave instructions such as: ‘Relax your face’, and ‘Try to look more your normal self.’ At eight p.m., a car took me to an event space in Montmartre, where I gave a public reading and answered audience questions, sipping intermittently from a tiny plastic bottle of lukewarm water.

This morning, tired and disorientated, I wandered down the street near my hotel and eventually found and entered an empty church. There I sat for about twenty minutes bathed in the slow serious air of sanctity and cried a few picturesque tears about the nobility of Jesus. This is all by way of explaining to you my interest in Christianity –

put simply, I am fascinated and touched by the ‘personality’ of Jesus, in rather a

sentimental, arguably even maudlin way. Everything about the way he lived moves me.

On the one hand, I feel toward him a kind of personal attraction and closeness that is most reminiscent of my feeling for certain beloved fictional characters – which makes sense, considering that I’ve encountered him through exactly the same means, i.e. by reading about him in books. On the other hand, I feel humbled and impressed by him in a different way. He seems to me to embody a kind of moral beauty, and my admiration for that beauty even makes me want to say that I ‘love’ him, though I’m well aware how ridiculous that sounds. But, Eileen, I do love him, and I can’t even pretend that it’s only the same love I feel for Prince Myshkin, or for Charles Swann, or for Isabel Archer. It is actually something different, a different feeling. And while I don’t, as such, really

‘believe’ that Jesus was resurrected after his death, it’s also true to say that some of the most moving scenes in the Gospels, and some of those to which I return most frequently, take place after the resurrection. I find it hard to separate the Jesus who appears after the resurrection from the man who appears before; they seem to me to be all of one being. I suppose what I mean is that in his resurrected form, he goes on saying the kind of things that ‘only he’ could say, that I can’t imagine emanating from any other consciousness. But that’s as close as I get to thinking about his divinity. I have a strong liking and affection for him and I feel moved when I contemplate his life and death. That’s all.

Rather than filling me with spiritual peace, however, the example set by Jesus only makes my existence seem trivial and shallow in comparison. In public I’m always talking about care ethics and the value of human community, but in my real life I don’t take on the work of caring for anyone except myself. Who in the world relies on me for anything? No one. I can blame myself, and I do, but I also think the failure is general.

People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs, and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see. Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another, but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life. Of course if we all stay alone and practise celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems will be avoided, but it seems we will also have almost nothing left that makes life worthwhile. I guess you could say the old ways of being together were wrong – they were! – and that we didn’t want to repeat old mistakes – we didn’t. But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing. And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.

However: Jesus teaches us not to judge. I can’t approve of unforgiving puritanism or of moral vanity, but I am hardly perfect in either regard. All my mania for culture, for

‘really good’ things, for knowing about jazz recordings and red wine and Danish furniture, even about Keats and Shakespeare and James Baldwin, what if it’s all a form of vanity, or even worse, a little bandage over the initial wound of my origins? I have put between myself and my parents such a gulf of sophistication that it’s impossible for them to touch me now or to reach me at all. And I look back across that gulf, not with a sense of guilt or loss, but with relief and satisfaction. Am I better than they are?

Certainly not, although maybe luckier. But I am different, and I don’t understand them very well, and I can’t live with them or draw them into my inner world – or for that