The Course of Love

Maturity

Throughout the winter Rabih works on designs for a gymnasium. He meets a dozen times with the members of the local education authority who are commissioning it. It promises to be an exceptional building, with a system of skylights which will make it bright inside even on the dullest days. Professionally speaking, it may be the beginning of something very substantial for him. And then, in the spring, they call him back in and, in that aggressive manner sometimes adopted by people who feel so guilty about letting someone down that they become offensive, bluntly tell him it’s off—and that they’ve decided to go with another practice with more experience. That’s when the not-sleeping begins.

Insomnia can, when it goes on for weeks, be hell. But in smaller doses—a night here and there—it doesn’t always need a cure. It may even be an asset, a help with some key troubles of the soul. Crucial insights that we need to convey to ourselves can often be received only at night, like city church bells that have to wait until dark to be heard.

During the day he has to be dutiful towards others. Alone in the den, past midnight, he can return to a bigger, more private duty. His thought processes would no doubt sound weird to Kirsten, Esther, and William. They need him to be a certain way, and he doesn’t want to let them down or scare them with the strangeness of his perceptions; they have a right to benefit from his predictability. But there are now other, inner demands on his attention. Insomnia is his mind’s revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.

Ordinary life rewards a practical, unintrospective outlook. There’s too little time and too much fear for anything else. We let ourselves be guided by an instinct for self-preservation: we push ourselves forwards, strike back when we’re hit, turn the blame onto others, quell stray questions, and cleave closely to a flattering image of where we’re headed. We have little option but to be relentlessly on our own side.

Only at those rare moments when the stars are out and nothing further will be needed from us until dawn can we loosen our hold on our ego for the sake of a more honest and less parochial perspective.

He looks at the familiar facts in a new way: he is a coward, a dreamer, an unfaithful husband, and an overly possessive, clingy father. His life is held together by string. He is over halfway through his career, and he has achieved next to nothing in comparison with the hopes that were once placed on him.

He can, at three a.m., be oddly unsentimental in listing his faults: a willful streak that provokes distrust in his superiors, a tendency to get offended too easily, a preference for caution based on a terror of rejection. He has not had the self-confidence to stick with things. By his age, others have gone ahead and set up their own architectural practices instead of waiting to be asked and then blaming the world for not begging hard enough. There is precisely one building—a data-storage facility in Hertfordshire—with his name on it. He is on track to die with the largest parts of his talent still unexploited, registering as mere flashes of inspiration that he occasionally perceives out of the corner of his mind’s eye while he’s in the shower or driving alone down the motorway.

At this point he is beyond self-pity, the shallow belief that what has happened to him is rare or undeserved. He has lost faith in his own innocence and uniqueness. This isn’t a midlife crisis; it’s more that he is finally, some thirty years too late, leaving adolescence behind.

He sees he is a man with an exaggerated longing for Romantic love who nevertheless understands little about kindness and even less about communication. He is someone afraid of openly striving for happiness who takes shelter in a stance of preemptive disappointment and cynicism.

So this is what it is to be a failure. The chief characteristic may be silence: the phone doesn’t ring, he isn’t asked out, nothing new happens. For most of his adult life he has conceived of failure in the form of a spectacular catastrophe, only to recognize at last that it has in fact crept up on him imperceptibly through cowardly inaction.

Yet, surprisingly, it’s okay. One gets used to everything, even humiliation. The apparently unendurable has a habit of coming to seem, eventually, not so bad.

He has already sucked too much of life’s bounty, without particular profit and to no good effect. He has been on the earth for too many decades; he has never had to till the soil or go to bed hungry, yet he has left his privileges largely untouched, like a spoilt child.

His dreams were once very grand indeed: he would be another Louis Kahn or Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe or Geoffrey Bawa. He was going to bring a new kind of architecture into being: locally specific, elegant, harmonious, technologically cutting-edge, progressive.

Instead he is the almost-broke deputy director of a second-rate urban-design firm, with a single building—more of a shed, really—to his name.

Nature embeds in us insistent dreams of success. For the species, there must be an evolutionary advantage in being hardwired for such striving; restlessness has given us cities, libraries, spaceships.

But this impulse doesn’t leave much opportunity for individual equilibrium. The price of a few works of genius throughout history is a substantial portion of the human race being daily sickened by anxiety and disappointment.

Rabih used to assume that only the flawless version of anything was worth having. He was a perfectionist. If the car was scratched, he couldn’t enjoy driving it; if the room was untidy, he couldn’t rest; if his lover didn’t understand parts of him, the entire relationship was a charade. Now “good enough” is becoming good enough.

He notes a developing interest in certain sorts of news stories about middle-aged men. There was a guy from Glasgow who threw himself under a train, having amassed large debts and been caught out in an affair by his wife. Another drove his car into the sea near Aberdeen following some online scandal. It doesn’t, in the end, take very much, Rabih can see: just a few mistakes, and suddenly one is in the realm of catastrophe. With a few twists of the dial, with enough outside pressure, he, too, would be capable of anything. What enables him to think of himself as sane is only a certain fragile chemical good fortune, but he knows he would be very much in the market for a tragedy if ever life chose to test him properly.

At those times when he is neither fully awake nor quite asleep but traveling through the interstitial zones of consciousness, at two or three a.m., he feels how many images and stray memories his mind holds, all waiting to come to his attention when the rest of the static has receded: glimpses of a trip to Bangkok eight years before, the surreal view of villages in India after a night squashed against an airplane window; the cold tiled bathroom floor in the house his family lived in in Athens; the first snowfall he ever experienced, on a holiday in eastern Switzerland; the low grey sky observed on a walk across fields in Norfolk; a corridor leading towards a swimming pool at university; the night spent with Esther in hospital when they operated on her finger. . . . The logic of some things may fade, but none of the images ever really go away.

During his sleepless nights, he occasionally thinks about and misses his mother. He wishes with embarrassing intensity that he might be eight again and curled up under a blanket with a slight fever and that she could bring him food and read to him. He longs for her to reassure him about the future, absolve him of his sins, and comb his hair neatly into a left-sided parting. He is at least mature enough to know there is something important which ought to resist immediate censorship in these regressive states. He can see that he hasn’t, despite the outward signs, come very far.

He realizes that anxiety will always dog him. It may appear that each new wave of it is about this or that particular thing—the party where he won’t know many people, the complicated journey he has to make to an unfamiliar country, a dilemma at work—but, considered from a broader perspective, the problem is always larger, more damning, and more fundamental.

He once fantasized that his worries would be stilled if he lived elsewhere, if he attained a few professional goals, if he had a family. But nothing has ever made a difference: he is, he can see, anxious to the core, in his most basic makeup—a frightened, ill-adjusted creature.

There is a photograph he loves in the kitchen, of Kirsten, William, Esther, and himself in a park on an autumn day, throwing leaves at one another from a pile blown together by the wind. Joy and abandon are evident in all their faces, a delight in being able to make a mess without consequence. But he recalls, also, how inwardly troubled he was on that day; there was something at work with an engineering company, he was keen to get home and make some calls to an English client, his credit card was far above its limit. Only when events are over is there really any chance for Rabih to enjoy them.

He is aware that his strong, capable wife is not the best person around whom to have a nervous breakdown. There was a time when he would have felt bitter about this. “Insomnia isn’t glamorous; now just come to bed”—is all Kirsten would say if she woke up now and saw the light on in the den. He’s learnt, over many painful episodes, that his beautiful, intelligent wife doesn’t do reassurance.

But, better than that, he’s started to understand why. She isn’t mean; it’s her experience of men and her defenses against being let down kicking in. It’s just how she processes challenges. It helps to see these things; he is accruing alternatives to vengeance and anger.

Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.

Kirsten’s mother is in hospital. She has been there for two weeks. It started off as something innocuous having to do with her kidneys; now the prognosis is suddenly far graver. Normally so strong, Kirsten is ashen and lost.

They went up to see her on Sunday. She was extremely frail and spoke softly and only to make simple requests: a glass of water, the lamp tilted so there would be a little less light in her eyes. At one point she took Rabih’s hand in hers and gave him a smile: “Look after her, will you,” she said, and then, with the old sharpness, “If she lets you.” A forgiveness, of sorts.

He knows that he never found favor in Mrs. McLelland’s eyes. At first he resented it; now, as a parent himself, he can sympathize. He isn’t looking forward to Esther’s husband, either. How could a parent ever truly approve? How could they possibly be expected, after eighteen or so years of answering to a child’s every need, to react enthusiastically to a new and competing source of love? How could anyone sincerely perform the requisite emotional somersault and not suspect in their heart—and let on as much, through a succession of more or less sour remarks—that their child had mistakenly fallen into the clutches of someone fundamentally unsuited to the complex and unique task of administering to them?

Kirsten cries uncontrollably after their visit in Raigmore Hospital. She sends the children to play with their friends; right now she can’t be a parent—the one who tries never to frighten others by revealing their pain; she needs to be a child again for a while. She can’t overcome the horror of her mother looking sallow and emaciated against the institutional blue sheets. How could this be happening? She is at some level still deeply attached to her impressions, formed in her fifth or sixth year, of her mother as someone strong, capable, and in charge. Kirsten was the little one who could be scooped up into the air and told what needed to happen next. She craved this authority in the years after her father left. The two McLelland women knew how to stick together; they were a team, involved in the best kind of sedition. Now Kirsten is in the corridor quizzing an alarmingly young doctor about how many months there will be left. The world has been upended.

We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind of knowledge and experience. They look, for a while, astonishingly competent. Our exaggerated esteem is touching but also intensely problematic, for it sets them up as the ultimate objects of blame when we gradually discover that they are flawed, sometimes unkind, in areas ignorant and utterly unable to save us from certain troubles. It can take a while, until the fourth decade or the final hospital scenes, for a more forgiving stance to emerge. Their new condition, frail and frightened, reveals in a compellingly physical way something which has always been true psychologically: that they are uncertain vulnerable creatures motivated more by anxiety, fear, a clumsy love, and unconscious compulsions than by godlike wisdom and moral clarity—and cannot, therefore, forever be held responsible for either their own shortcomings or our many disappointments.

In those moods when Rabih can at long last break free of his ego, it isn’t just one or two people he feels he can forgive more easily. It may even be, at an extreme, that no human being any longer lies outside the circle of his sympathy.

He sees goodness in unexpected places. He is moved by the benevolence of the office administrator, a widow in her mid-fifties whose son has just gone off to university in Leeds. She is cheerful and strong, an extraordinary accomplishment which she extends over every hour of every working day. She takes care to ask all the staff how they are. She remembers birthdays and fills in idle minutes with reflections that are always encouraging and tender. As a younger man he wouldn’t have taken any notice of such a minor demonstration of grace, but by now he has been humbled enough by life to know to stoop down and pick up the smaller blessings wherever they come. He has without trying, and without pride, become a little nicer.

He is readier to be generous, too, from a sense of how much he needs the charity of others. When others are vindictive, he is more interested in mitigating circumstances, and in any bits of the truth that cast a less moralistic light on viciousness and bad behavior. Cynicism is too easy, and it gets you nowhere.

He becomes aware, for the first time in his life, of the beauty of flowers. He remembers harboring a near hatred of them as an adolescent. It seemed absurd that anyone should take joy in something so small and so temporary when there were surely greater, more permanent things on which to pin ambitions. He himself wanted glory and intensity. To be detained by a flower was a symbol of a dangerous resignation. Now he is beginning to get the point. The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment. Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a bluebell. But once we realize that the larger dreams are always compromised in some way, with what gratitude we may turn to these minuscule islands of serene perfection and delight.

Held up against certain ideals of success, his life has been a deep disappointment. But he can also see that it is, in the end, no great achievement simply to fixate on failure. There is valor in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one’s life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure.

Sometimes he has a hot bath in the middle of the night and takes stock of his body under the bright light. Aging is a bit like looking tired, but in a way that no amount of sleep will repair. Every year it will get a little worse. Today’s so-called bad photograph will be next year’s good one. Nature’s kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don’t get as scared as we should. One day his hands will be liver spotted, like those of the elderly uncles he knew in his childhood. Everything that has happened to others will happen to him, too. No one gets away.

He is a collection of tissues and cells delicately and intricately conjoined and brought to life for only an instant. It will take just one sharp collision or a fall to render them inanimate again. All the seriousness of his plans depends on a steady flow of blood to his brain through a vulnerable network of capillaries. Should any of these suffer even the tiniest of failures, the tenuous sense he has begun to make of life will at once be erased. He is just a fortuitous constellation of atoms which have chosen to resist entropy for a few moments within cosmic eternity. He wonders which of his organs will fail first.

He is only a visitor who has managed to confuse his self with the world. He had assumed he was yet another stable object, like the city of Edinburgh or a tree or a book, whereas he is more like a shadow or a sound.

Death will be nothing too bad, he supposes: the constituent parts of him will be redistributed and returned. Life has been long already, and it will, at a point whose outlines he now intuits, be time to release and give others a go.

One evening, returning home through the dark streets, he spots a florist’s shop. He must have passed it many, many times, and yet he’s never taken any notice of it before. The front window is brightly illuminated and filled with a variety of blooms. He steps in, and an elderly woman smiles warmly at him. His eye is drawn to the first native flowers of a tentative spring: snowdrops. He watches the woman’s hands wrap the little bunch in fine white tissue.

“For someone nice, I think?” She smiles at him.

“My wife,” he replies.

“Lucky woman,” she says as she hands him the bundle and his change. He hopes to get home and, on this occasion, prove the florist right.