Vertigo

I had dreams of becoming a monk when I was younger. I fancied myself equal to the task, too, even if I barely understood what monastery life really is about beyond the idealized vignettes I came across from my reading here and there, or knew if there even remained any monasteries anymore other than the ones on the rocky hills of Athos or the rockier deserts of Tibet which I know I will never see in my lifetime. I remember reading St Benedict’s Rule in one feverish sitting, and attempting, in vain, to read the original in Latin: every page, every rule (sterner than the next) holding me in trance despite the book being contrary to the value of personal liberties I based my whole Weltansicht on.

At first I thought, rather naïvely, that it was a longing for order in a chaotic world I was only beginning to discover that drew me to monasticism (or fantasies of it, at least). Yet I was as attracted to the tranquility that permeated from each page of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game as I was to the intrigues that defined Eco’s Name of the Rose. The idea of achieving order through blind obedience, in addition, is something I find not only irrational but also deeply repulsive. Still the mechanical rhythm of monastic life — waking up each day at four,A bit from Mrs Maisel that’s too funny to pass up: Susie shouting, ‘I got up at 9:30. In the morning. You know the last time I was up at 9:30 in the morning? It was the last time I stayed out all night and got home at 9:30 in the morning.’ staying in bed in perfect silence until five or six, or ‘if anyone may perhaps want to read, let him read to himself in such a way as not to disturb anyone else;’ saying the nones, a few minutes for a bowl of porridge (I imagine there would be porridge from too much Dickens) and maybe some milk, then off to work tending the gardens — is oddly comforting; and a perhaps a few more years of disillusion with the ‘outside’ world would be enough to convince me there is no other way to live.

No, it was not order per se that I liked but the notion that one could live one’s life entirely divorced from the world in pursuit of something — be it God or wisdom or anything else entirely. Maybe it is not monasticism as much as hermeticism, or a hermeticism disguised in the trappings of monastic life that I liked: to read for example Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and trace each footnote, each reference to the beginning of time, with no care for the world; to learn Elvish or Latin or Old English, knowing full well one would never be able to speak a word of it; to devote oneself to tasks as arcane as the next, without having to justify to anyone the point of it all; to spend one’s day in all of this, with the hours punctuated by Gregorian chants and paternosters until finally it is time for bed.

I am reminded of a poem by Borges, from notes he wrote (he would have us believe) on the dust jacket of his copy of Beowulf:

A veces me pregunto qué razones
me mueven a estudiar sin esperanza
de precisión, mientras mi noche avanza
la lengua de los ásperos sajones.

[At times I ask myself what reasons
moved me to study without any hope
of satisfaction, while my night came down,
the tongue of these rugged Anglo-saxons.]

Of course Borges had the luxury of old age. Yet the poem’s last lines possessed a pure, almost foolish, optimism it could only have been written by someone young.

Más allá de este afán y de este verso
me aguarda inagotable el universo.

[Beyond this zeal and beyond these verses,
the inexhaustible universe lies for me waiting.]

Maybe it was a longing for God, too: although of course a longing for God is far too often just an ill-disguised longing for order amidst the chaos — and it has been quite some time since I’ve stopped looking, too, comforting myself with a platitude I have fashioned from reading Camus: that life is meaningless, and where philosophy is an acceptance of this very fact, religion is a vain struggle to prove that it could be otherwise.

I grew up where it is still anathema to voice any doubts about the existence of an Almighty. But since it is the 21st century, one is reprimanded not by death or getting one’s tongue cut off but by being labelled simply as an eccentric, a weirdo. This feels worse: this is Leo X shrugging off Luther’s Theses, laughing in mild amusement at the quirky Bavarian, telling his cardinals, ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, let the guy protest all he wants; it’s just a phase, he’ll get over it soon.’ Sometimes though the ‘punishment’ surfaces as efforts at conversion—proof, they will tell you, of God’s (and thus by extension, their own) benevolence even to the most wretched. A particular line stood out for me after hearing it again and again not just from the vicar of our parish the few times I remember going to church but more tellingly from the myriad Hillsong-type amateur evangelists I went to school with: ‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God,”’ each word proudly chanted as if it were the ultimate condemnation. I came to loathe those words and the people who uttered them; and yet many years later (seven years since I last entered a church unironically) I could still not shake them off my thoughts or convince myself how they are by design poisonous to any honest inquiry into the question of God. To this day I still consider myself Christian — or at the very least a Christian atheist in the mould of Stephen Fry—not a ‘fool,’ in the language of these people.

I do not think it is simply cowardice, this inability to form an opinion and stand fast in it, as much as an admission that it is categorically impossible to know whether God exists or not. Most people I knew growing up, when confronted by this question, almost always comes up with their own version of the apologist’s answer to Pascal’s wager: that if one lives believing there is a God and dies to find out there is none, one loses nothing; but if one lives, on the contrary, denying God’s existence, to discover on one’s death that He does in fact exist, one loses everything.Pesons le gain et la perte en prenant croix que Dieu est. Estimons ces deux cas : si vous gagnez vous gagnez tout, et si vous perdez vous ne perdez rien : gagez donc qu’il est sans hésiter. (Pascal, Pensées) From a utilitarian (nay, rational) viewpoint this argument makes sense: but it is not as much a proof of God’s existence as it is a justification of one’s belief in it. But I cannot accept this argument: I refuse to predicate my belief in God or in God’s existence in a fear of eternal damnation — or even in a fear of the unknown: I refuse to anchor my belief in God in fear, in my desire for self-preservation, in my own selfishness.

Yet at the same time I believe it would be as easy to dismiss the possibility that God exists as it is to blindly believe in God’s existence as an uncontrovertible and self-evident fact. I envy those who, when asked whether God exists, could answer with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ without a moment’s hesitation. HilbertWir dürfen nicht denen glauben, die heute mit philosophischer Miene undüberlegenem Tone den Kulturuntergang prophezeien und sich in dem Ignorabimus gefallen. Für uns gibt es kein Ignorabimus, und meiner Meinung nach auch für die Naturwissenschaft überhaupt nicht. Statt des törichten Ignorabimus heisse im Gegenteilunsere Losung: Wir müssen wissen, [w]ir werden wissen. (Hilbert, 1930 Radio Address) warns against those who set out their inquiry with a belief that there is only so much that we can know, even suggesting, not without arrogance, how science’s motto should thenceforth be ‘We must know: we will know.’ (Granted, he was speaking of science in general and of mathematics in particular but his exhortation is more properly understood as dealing with human knowledge itself and how we set forth to expand it.) I agree that the pessimism inherent in professing ‘I don’t know’ or ‘we will never know’ can only be detrimental to one’s search for the truth, but perhaps this pessimism is merited: to know (or to believe) that the universe is infinite and to know (or to believe) that human knowledge isn’t, is after all to know (or to believe) that mankind’s quest to understand the universe is doomed from the very beginning.

But I digress. When I started writing these notes, I was perhaps simply interested in the superficial similarities between monastic life and the self-isolation most everyone has been forced to recently. It was the middle of April, a month into my quarantine. I just finished reading St Augustine’s Confessions — only the third book I was able to complete in the three years since I left university (after Nabokov’s Lolita from a year ago which I have completely forgotten now and Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror from just the week before) — and wanted to write a few lines, a status rerum report of this lockdown, as a check to my anxiety (read: sanity). I was too lazy to even think of keeping a diary.

But that was two months ago. April is as foreign, as unrecognizable, to June/July 2020 as the 1960s. I had but lost all sense of time, and would never again understand why we ever put so much importance to it before. I began writing to convince myself that I was not as lost as I felt, that there was a method behind all this madness. But I have failed, and miserably. All I have left are these fragments. Ignari hominumque locorumque erramus vento huc vastis et fluctibus acti.