Basement fragments.

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 06 May 2004 19:33:50

In the basement of the department I'm based in at Glasgow Uni there's a small library, the Robert Carroll library. Robert Carroll was a theologian who worked in the department until his sudden death in Spring 2000, the contents of the library being the books from Robert's own personal library which were left to the department. While browsing through some books a receipt for a meal fell onto the table in front of me, signed by Robert. I never had the opportunity to meet him, but I wonder what he shared with the two (at a guess) people he ate with that mid-July afternoon, the last summer of his life. I suspect not just food and words for sure. But to what extent (if any) can we truly share with another? Sure we can give infinitely of our time, energy, money, thoughts, words, possessions, advice, etc, etc. But to know another person implies possessing that which simply cannot be possessed without diminishing the other person. Hence my total bewilderment when people say things such as 'it's really important that you get to know such and such a person.' Why the need for this knowledge unless to control? It makes more sense to me to accept that we don't and can never know the other person, and once we accept this we are free to let the other think of themselves, and thus be, in their own terms (to use John Cage's terminology).
The receipt is now acting as a book mark in 'A Dry White Season' by Andre Brink. The page it marks at the moment has the heavily penciled paragraph:

"How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more casually,
I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting
in the white wintry veld and sitting down for a while to smoke a pipe
before proceeding on their seperate ways. No more.
Alone. Alone to the very end. I. Stanley. Melanie. Every one of us.
But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly:
is that the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this
world?"

Smoke, meet, eat, touch, move on, pass on. That's life.