Jackson's Dilemma Read Free Page A

childhood; but as he grew up he saw more in his uncle and his tales, a sort of warm ringing undertone, a gentle compassionate light or sound, an awareness of the tragedy of human life, good and evil, crime and punishment, remorse. Tim must have seen terrible things in India; perhaps done terrible things, which he might or might not have regretted, but which, in the sunny peace of Penndean, were never spoken of. The strange sound was then a sort of silent pain, which he rehearsed again and again among his broken heroes - Macbeth with bloody hands, Othello having killed his wife, the bizarre devastation of Kafka’s people, T.E. Lawrence, Jim jumping from the ship. For consolation, Kim and the Lama. Another thing which Pat said of Tim was that he was covered all over in sugar. Benet (then adult) objected. It was not sugar. It was a sort of faintly beautiful profound grief. Alice listening to the Mock Turtle weeping. When Tim was dying he was reading Through the Looking Glass. This was a strange point at which Benet often paused. Well, why not? Was not Lewis Carroll a mathematician? Tim did not display his mathematical mind to his family, though he did once try to explain Gödel’s theorem to Benet. Building bridges? Pat, and Benet when young, thought of Tim’s Indian activities as those of some simple labourer; then, after he had (as Pat said) ‘gone native’, as a descent into some sort of occult necromancy. A regular joke was to ask Tim if he could perform the Indian Rope Trick, then laugh when Tim took this seriously and started to explain. To Benet alone, in later years, Tim, now old (confused some said, but Benet never accepted that) spoke of the magic of mathematics, of calculating prodigies, of the deep reality of human intelligence, beyond words and outside logic. Many people in India, he said, could easily master contrivances beyond the comprehension of the brightest Cambridge scholars. It only dawned later on Benet why Tim tenderly avoided playing chess.
     
    Leaving at last the silence of the library, Benet moved towards the drawing room, pausing in the hall to survey himself in the long mirror. The hall was large and rather dim, deprived of the sunlight of the summer afternoon; it contained an old Sheraton writing desk, never opened, and was the only part of the house to have parquet flooring. The mirror was also dim, a little smudged at the sides. Ever since childhood Benet had wondered what he looked like. This wonder was connected with ‘Who am I?’ or ‘What am I?’ Benet had discovered quite early in life that Uncle Tim shared this lack of identity. They sometimes discussed it. Does everyone feel like this, Benet had wondered. Tim had said that no, not everyone did, adding that it was a gift, an intimation of a deep truth: ‘I am nothing.’ This was, it seemed, one of those states, achieved usually by many years of intense meditation, which may be offered by the gods ‘free of charge’ to certain individuals. Benet laughed at this joke. Later he took the matter more seriously, wondering whether this ‘gift’ were not more likely to precede a quiet descent into insanity. Later still he decided that, after all, ‘I am nothing’, far from indicating a selfless mystical condition, was a vague state of self-satisfaction experienced at some time by almost anyone. Yet more profoundly he wondered whether Tim, thought by so many of his friends and acquaintances to be ‘rather dotty’, were not really a receiver of presents from the gods.
    Benet now, looking at himself in the mirror, experienced a usual surprise. He still looked so remarkably young. He also, when thus caught, always seemed to have his mouth open. (Did he always go about with his mouth open?) He was of medium height, about the height of Uncle Tim, though shorter than Pat. He was lean and slender, always neatly dressed even when gardening. He had thick ruffled hair, copious red and brown, flowing down over his ears, without any streaks of