Nikos Kazantzakis – The Last Temptation

Why rewrite the Gospels? Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation is the second attempt at it that I’ve met this year, after Tolstoy’s The Life of Jesus: The Gospel in Brief. Christians have four official versions of Jesus, and as many apocryphal ones as they like – why ask for more!? As Dustin Condren notes in the introduction to his translation of the Tolstoy, in Tolstoy’s case he wanted “to find the practical, pure teaching of Jesus Christ, to free it from the linguistic patina of ritual and scripture, removing both the dogmatic and the supernatural”. Tolstoy sought to reshape Christianity into a practical guide, removing it from the clutches of the orthodox (he uses the same exact term for the Bible’s pharisees, just to make it clear to his readers who the enemy is and always has been).

Tolstoy’s goal was noble enough – a better Christianity to make a better people. His tortuous life indicates how serious he was about finding this truth. The problem was that he went so far from the original text in places that even allies of the aging sage thought he had gone overboard. But taken as a whole, his project is interesting. In creating a synthesis of the four gospels into one narrative written in a more earthy idiom, Tolstoy makes us reflect on what the gospels and Jesus actually say. In reflection, we might turn back to the originals, or we might stick with Tolstoy. But either way, he makes us think. Another miserable soul with a deep distrust of organised Christianity was Soren Kierkegaard, and he too tried to make readers and listeners go back to the texts themselves by pressure washing them of the encrusted dogmatism, as he did in The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air.

I got the impression that Nikos Kazantzakis was less interested in all that. As P.A. Bien notes in his translator’s note, Kazantzakis spent his whole life shifting from idol to idol, experimenting with heroes ranging from Christ to Nietzsche, to Buddha and then Lenin, before finally reaching Odysseus and then going back to where he started. His Christianity was not like either Kierkegaard or Tolstoy’s in that it does not seek to proselytise. Instead, in recounting a new version of Christ’s life what he really does is try to combine elements from many of his intellectual experiences into a new synthesis, one very much influenced by Nietzsche in particular. Here were have, to go by Kazantzakis’s own prologue, a model, “a supreme model to the man who struggles”, because “every moment of Christ’s life is a conflict and a victory”.

This, then, is the Christ we meet in The Last Temptation: a man in conflict with himself. The Last Temptation contains an awful lot of temptations. When we first meet Jesus he is the carpenter who makes crosses for others’ crucifixions, and he is engaged in a battle with God to avoid answering His call. “Till I die!” he shouts, in answer to the question of how long he will continue resisting God. Jesus here goes in attitude from a stroppy teenager, to a love-preaching ingenue, to a fire-breathing prophet, over the course of the book, as key moments from his life – his stay in the wilderness and John the Baptist’s death, a visit to a desert monastery – come to affect him. We meet Mary Magdalene, Mary his mother, and many other characters from the Bible.

But Jesus and Judas are the most interesting. They always are. Even to a non-Christian, Jesus has to be a most curious god, because he is at least part-human. In his struggles and confusions and his like-us-ness he serves as an entry point into the world of Christianity. To those who are Christians, he becomes a human companion within one’s soul, who is more understanding of our pains and sufferings than the immaterial being he also is, might be. Judas, meanwhile, is fascinating as a betrayer. He and his fate are the yardstick for measuring God’s kindness and forgiveness – does He allow Judas to go to Hell, given Judas was predetermined to betray his master? Kazantzakis avoids all this by having Judas betray Jesus at Jesus’s own instigation. There is no other way, Jesus says, for the Kingdom of Heaven to come.

Familiar stories and parables are also played out in The Last Temptation. Like Tolstoy, Kazantzakis takes a slightly sceptical stance towards miracles, relegating many of them to dreams (such as the walking on water). Nevertheless, perhaps the most egregious (to traditionalists) thing he does is “fix” certain parables. We may remember the Parable of the Ten Virgins, in which the virgins are asked to remain awake for the coming bridegroom. Some have brought enough oil, while others have not. Those who have are present when the bridegroom comes, while the others have had to run off to get more. Upon their return, they find the doorway locked and are refused entry. Here’s Matthew’s version of the ending: “Lord, Lord, open to us.” But he answered, “Most certainly I tell you, I don’t know you.”

Here is Kazantzakis’s addition to the ending: ““This is a wedding,” [the bridegroom] cried. “Let everyone eat, drink and be merry. Open the door for the foolish virgins and wash and refresh their feet, for they have run much.””

Where the Bible is at times exclusionary and absolutist in its demands, Kazantzakis’s Jesus is a big fan of forgiveness. His alterations to what we know not only make Jesus more human, but also make his teaching more humanly possible as well. Nobody ends up in hell, nobody goes without forgiveness who truly desires it. It is even more a religion for the small and lowly than Christianity already is.

The problem with writing about Jesus is we all know what happens to him at the end of his time on earth. Many of us also know a good deal about what he gets up to, while on earth. The Last Temptation, therefore, needs to engage us emotionally, rather than grip us through its plot. This it generally achieves on the back of Kazantzakis’s language, which is earthy and often beautiful. We learn that Andrew “made friends with laughter and food”. Jesus’s early blessing by God is described thus: “he had felt a light, prolonged tingling on the top of his head, very tender, like a caress”. We find a lovely comment on the relationship between body and soul: “the body is the camel on which the soul mounts in order to traverse the desert”. Finally, souls are described as “sparks of God.” Nice stuff.

Yet there is a certain tension in this novel as well. The more serious Jesus and his message is within its pages, the more tragically ridiculous he becomes to us. All the talk of a new temple and a new world lose their power when we look around ourselves and see only signs of Jesus’s failure to achieve his stated goals. Alas, it’s hard for us to remove the ironic glasses we all wear, but we must do so to enjoy The Last Temptation to its fullest. Although, this is a charge we could level at any religious work these days…

The temptations that Jesus encounters sometimes work, and sometimes don’t. Jesus is a cowardly, fearful man who is uncertain of his destiny, at least in Kazantzakis’s rendering of him. But when, for example, he tries to convince us that this Jesus might be tempted by worldly power, it simply does not chime with the Jesus we have accompanied thus far. At least in the Bible there is sufficient economy of expression that we might, with extreme imaginative effort, allow ourselves the thought that Jesus might be tempted by such things – here, at six hundred pages of him, we cannot see it.

Still, the clue is in the title. We are here for the last temptation, the big one. For Kazantzakis, this is when Jesus has successfully made his way to the cross and been crucified. At this point he falls into a dream state, and in this state he dreams an alternate life. This life has two components. First, it has erotic fulfilment, as Jesus and Mary Magdalene finally consummate their affection for one another; then, it has domestic happiness, as Jesus lives and has a lot of children with the sisters Mary and Martha, while Magdalene disappears from view. In all this, Jesus is accompanied by a green-winged angel, who we can tell quite quickly is not all he seems.

After all of his struggles, now Jesus finds a kind of peace. “Harmony between the earth and the heart, Jesus of Nazareth: that is the kingdom of heaven,” says his new friend. Rather than his duty as Messiah, Jesus finds his paradise in the accumulation of small, day-to-day joys: food, wine, labour, sex. And through his many offspring he finds he has conquered death.

Readers at this point may be somewhat confused. Presuming none of us is a Messiah ourselves, isn’t all this not happiness? Little joys and gratitudes, a dampening of one’s anxieties about death? Yes, it is. But we also have to answer the question of whether this is enough, because if this isn’t enough, then we need something else, and that something else inevitably ends up being God or some other higher purpose. When Jesus realises that this is all he’ll get, he doesn’t renounce his new domestic life, but he does begin to doubt it.

Things fall apart when he meets his disciples and Paul. Paul, we remember, was once Saul, but a conversion on the road to Damascus led him to a new life and a new name in fulfilling God’s wishes. He arrives at Jesus’s home only to find the Messiah is not the one he had gone about praising to others. But Paul is mighty, and not to be dissuaded by Jesus’s failure to correspond to his own youthful teachings: “Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts us a man’s height above the earth – that is true. Whatever clips off man’s wings – that is false.” Paul creates a new Jesus, ignoring the one before him, because he acknowledges that people need Jesus. Not domestic dandy Jesus, but a comforter and hopebringer. The reality, ultimately, is not altogether important.

Then the disciples arrive, old and broken. They find Jesus after their own efforts in life have failed, and he tries to justify himself to them: “In my youth I set out, like a youth, to save the world. Afterward, when my mind had matured, I stepped into line—the line of men. I went to work: ploughed the land, dug wells, planted vines and olives. I took the body of woman into my arms and created men—I conquered death. Isn’t that what I always said I would do? Well, I kept my word: I conquered death!” Jesus’s family happiness in the dream does not come from nowhere. Characters from his own mother all the way to the earthy, rich, Zebedee, say repeatedly that happiness comes from losing one’s illusions and settling down with a wife. This is exactly what dream-Jesus has done.

But the disciples do not accept his betrayal. In fact, the book reaches the peak of its emotional power as they reject him, crying “Coward! Deserter! Traitor!” again and again. He has not conquered death, only hidden it from himself. He has certainly not honoured God either.

The Last Temptation ends as Jesus awakes, still on the cross. Seeing this, he realises that he made the right choice after all, and has nothing to regret. In discovering the alternative path through the dream, we and he see what the good path means by comparison. Like Jesus, we can feel relieved in the knowledge that “everything has begun.”

But what on earth are we to do with a novel like this? It takes our understanding of what a good life is and tramples it into the ground, instead favouring a life of constant struggle with temptation and doubt. What a pain, to find the world more complicated than we might wish… Here, in this love of struggle, is Nietzsche’s influence most clearly felt. Here too is Kazantzakis’s own life. His father helped the Cretan people revolt against their Ottoman rulers, providing one example of heroism; later the boy was sent to be taught by monks, providing a much more spiritual set of heroic ideals. The Last Temptation is in some way a dramatization of these conflicting images of goodness. One that sees harmonising the spirit with God as the greatest good, and the other that sees harmonising the body with earth as it.

The problem is that struggling is not the key to happiness; it is the key to growth. And providing we can keep ourselves from struggling too much, or in the pursuit of unattainable goals, we can find in a bit of struggle a source of joy. Jesus’s struggle is not “a bit of a struggle”. It is a merciless, exhausting, brutal conflict, a war against his own body and his own soul. But Jesus was the Son of God, so he was supposed to struggle like this. When we choose to live our lives in small joys and kindnesses, it’s much less clear what greater journey and duty we are missing out on. But if we look inside ourselves, perhaps we can find it. And then, and only then, Kazantzakis’s Jesus might be closer to a model worthy of emulation.

It is always a bit funny to take Jesus and rework him. But unlike the Koran, we can say that the Bible was written by people who may have been fallible. Given this interpretative layer, which The Last Temptation acknowledges by having Jesus get angry at Matthew (“I say one thing, you write another, and those who read you understand still something else!”), there is more leeway to reinvent Christ. Tolstoy wanted a Christ who would be happy toiling on the fields alongside him, while Kazantzakis wanted a Christ who could be a paradigm for spiritual growth for us in the modern age, no matter how much we may find the directions of his growth somewhat strange or irrelevant to our own lives.

Ultimately, what seems certain is that Jesus will continue to provide fascination for people in the years to come, even as Christianity falls further and further out of view. This man who combines God and human, when we add his doubts and anxieties (and even the Bible dramatizes these), comes to be remarkably close to us humans now, living in a world where people throw around words like “transhumanism” and “posthuman”, “cyborg” and all the rest with reckless abandon. As our command of the world becomes more godlike, our command over ourselves and our destinies remains riven with the old uncertainties. It makes sense to see Jesus as someone who might have some kind of answers. This Jesus, Kazantzakis’s Jesus, may do.

For more Kazantzakis, I’ve read and reviewed Zorba the Greek and his biography, Report to Greco. For more Last Temptation, I’ve heard Scorsese made a film.

Malina – Ingeborg Bachmann

It’s always hard to write about a book which you finish with a feeling that you have not understood anything. The Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s one and only novel Malina is not only awesome and exhilarating, but also pretty hard to make sense of. Taking as its subject the disintegration of a certain female artist’s mind, I spent most of the novel trying to determine what was real and what was not. I have now finished the novel and I am none the wiser. I have tried looking at the secondary criticism and am even less wise than before. It appears the main topic for the critics to discuss is whether half the characters even exist outside of the heroine’s head. You see what kind of fish we are dealing with here.

Malina is a weird book. It is probably the story of a woman whose attention is divided between two men, a Hungarian named Ivan and the eponymous Malina. My edition’s back cover calls it “part detective novel, part love story, part psychoanalytic case study”. Just that alone ought to grab our attention – we are not dealing with a novel that fits into the standard genres we might be used to. The narrator spends the first half of the book mostly with Ivan, then she has a breakdown and spends most of the second half of the book with Malina. Or we might say, in his power. One of Bachmann’s most famous utterances is that “fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman”.

Fascism, fascism, fascism. Can we ever escape it, except by retreating cowardly into a past where it hasn’t been born yet? In Malina it lurks throughout the first act, only coming out into the open in the second. Malina is post-war German literature, but relatively subtle in its treatments of the past when compared to authors like Günter Grass. In fact, it reminded me a little bit of Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters. I later discovered that Bachmann had been a kind of mentor to Bernhard. He, in turn, had given her some of his distinctly offensive praise: “I loved Bachmann a great deal. She was a very intelligent woman. A strange combination, no? Most women are stupid but bearable, possibly even agreeable; intelligent too, but rarely.”

But we must get to the novel, there’s no hiding from it. What there is, is hiding from is our narrator’s past. “I don’t want to talk, it all upsets me, in my remembering.” From the moment Malina begins our narrator is three things – creative, intelligent, and mentally unwell. Unlike with Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, which Malina has plenty in common with, here we don’t even start with a narrator we can trust. The opening section gives us “the cast” and descriptions of the narrator, Malina, and Ivan. But already we get a nudge that identity is a bit more complicated (a mess) than what we can easily write down. In the case of our narrator, “Official Austrian I.D. Eyes—br., Hair—blond; born in Klagenfurt”, is really not enough for us to go on.  We then hear that “the experts” have deemed her “still functional”, which the rest of our novel will test our credulity of.

And so, and so. The first section of the novel is entitled “Happy with Ivan”, which I believe to be a joke. For our narrator, Ivan appears a kind of saviour: “Against the decay and order, against life and against death, against accident, constant threats from the radio, the newspaper headlines all spreading the plague, against perfidy seeping down from upstairs or up from downstairs,”, she has Ivan. Ivan “is beginning to cure me”. But does Ivan care about our narrator? “How sad I am, and why doesn’t Ivan do anything about it?” Probably not. We are treated over the course of the novel to examples of “sentences”, shared between the two characters, as if they are reading off limited scripts. But our narrator notes that “we don’t have a single sentence about feelings.”

I live in Ivan.

I will not outlive Ivan.

The narrator’s mood swings between joy and terrible sadness, from paragraphed section to paragraphed section. At one point she gets excited about “infecting” the world with positive feelings – it always comes back to disease – but soon she is depressed again. Such mood swings do not make for fun reading. Nor does the disorientation that comes from these and other abrupt changes. The first time the narrator meets Ivan’s two young children, she is cold to them and they to her. The second time we hear that they meet, the situation is much changed, and they are more talkative. What are we missing? We ask in vain for some signposting, some sense even of time. It is not forthcoming.   

Malina is made up of short sections, often only a page or two long. Dialogue is hard to differentiate. Sometimes we get phone calls, which are jumbled up and with the ends of sentences missing. Our narrator spends a lot of time waiting for Ivan, and less time with him. In the first section, we have a fairy tale, we have snippets of stories or else reworkings of them, we have letters written and unwritten, we have an interview. All of this is inventive, and every new approach throws new light on the problem we are facing in Malina, of making sense of things and working out what’s what.

After a trip out of Vienna to see friends the narrator collapses, and the first section ends. Malina’s second part is one of the most horrific sequences I have ever read. In it, our narrator falls into her own mind, and we with her. Where the first part of the book kept her past hidden, with only the odd veiled references (she was put up against a wall and almost shot as a child), the second part introduces “my father”. A family, the thing we had missed before. But this is not her real family, or at least not necessarily so. The second part is a nightmarish hellscape of torture scenes and mental anguish, interspersed with dialogue (now clearly signposted, as in a play), between the narrator and Malina. The closest thing I imagine it compares to is being waterboarded. We go under the water and feel like we are drowning, and then our head is dragged out again for a brief gasp of air, only for the cycle to repeat.

Gas chambers, barbed wire, Siberian prison camps, incest, murder, child rape. I, not one for squeamishness, thought that this is one of the few books that could have done with a content warning. The narrator possibly has a real sister, Eleonore. She has possibly betrayed her father. She has possibly been raped by her father. She dies repeatedly, horribly. In the nightmares a constant feeling is one of exposure – she is filmed without her consent, or forced to stand on stage, or forced to strip naked. Her powerlessness is the overwhelming impression. At the same time, her powerlessness is also reflected in Malina’s growing influence over her “waking” life. These dialogue sections, which feel just as unhelpful as the dream sequences (Malina: What happened to her? Me: She died in a foreign land”), convey a transferring of agency. “Leave it to me”, Malina says. And what he means is – control over her whole life.

In the third section, we might think that things are back to normal. At least the dream sequences have ended. But my initial impression of the narrator, who says of herself that she’s always in a “state of disintegration or recomposition”, is that she has been lobotomised. Something is missing. Even less than before do we have a grasp on what time it is. She is interested in mailmen (as a concept). Her relationship with Ivan begins to crumble, and the snatches of phone conversations become still less informative. The narrator notices that signs of Ivan’s presence in her life are also disappearing, such as the pack of cigarettes he would leave on the table. Everything is falling apart; only Malina remains.

In “the theatre of my thoughts”, which may or may not be the outside world, the narrator tries to live. At a restaurant with Malina, she is decapitated. Malina goes from a slightly concerning controlling presence to an outright evil one when he begins urging the narrator to murder Ivan. “Kill him! Kill him!” But is this real? (“But am I really saying something?”). It is impossible to say. As the narrator’s mind continues its final losses of everything that allowed it to make sense of things, we are treated to no additional clarity.

And yet, the lack of clarity is itself a reality. If we say that the narrator simply went mad, then where does that leave Malina, who early on we learn “was destined to be my doom?” Madness can be aided and abetted by dark agents, and perhaps Malina’s suggestion that our narrator murders Ivan is not a figment of her imagination, but in fact him pushing her further and further into passivity and his control. All through the novel, our narrator is a passive being. She is desperate to control Ivan, but she has no power over him. Her dream sequences, like Kafka’s, show her being submissive to an entirely dominant father. The final sections have Malina be ascendent. Violence is a thread running through the novel. Whether it is the slap given to her as a schoolgirl by a boy as a prank, her father’s dream violence, to Malina’s real violence, our narrator is the victim of physical force.

Malina might be read as an attempt, a doomed one, to break out of this domination by others. And it is an attempt made using language. The fairy tale we are treated to early on in Malina is one of woman’s emancipation. Our narrator, who is an author like Bachmann, also reads in a way that leads her to a kind of freedom, or hope of it. She twice quotes Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, “He who has a Why to live for will bear almost any How”. The constructed-ness of Malina itself is a kind of scattergun attempt at finding a way of self-expression that works. We have letters, we have telephone calls, we have dialogues.

But with each of these, we have difficulties. The phone calls don’t go anywhere. The letters, whose recipients (yet again) may not actually exist, are not posted. Perhaps most intriguing is an interview with a journalist, where the narrator begins to express her thoughts on language.

“I will tell you a terrible secret: language is punishment. Language must encompass all things and in it, all things must again transpire according to guilt and the degree of guilt”.

This is an important statement. Germanists will be thinking about Arendt and Adorno and Celan and all the other thinkers and artists who struggled with what to do with German after the Second World War and who made similar pronouncements. And yet, “(signs of exhaustion in Herr Mühlbauer. Signs of my own exhaustion.)”. There is no engagement, the man shuts her down. The truth, which is a victim’s and a woman’s truth, has no place here. As is the case elsewhere in the novel, our narrator (ironically, good at writing), cannot express herself externally because the men do not allow her to.

Austria during the sixties was a bit of a mess with regards to its Nazi past. Bernhard’s Woodcutters deals with it obliquely, and Elfriede Jelinek’s horrid (but also impressive) Wonderful, Wonderful Times does so a little more directly. The interview is one example of an unwillingness to think about the past among certain members of the Viennese bourgeoisie. Another example comes at the end of the first part where the narrator goes on holiday to the Tyrol with some friends, where we have some Bernhard-esque social satire (albeit less funny). Here we have no “discussions,” “talking,” or “get-togethers,” but conversation, a dying species of weightless speaking at cross purposes, which permits proper digestion and maintains the good spirits of all.” Language itself, as in a Chekhov story, is manipulated by the controllers of discourse into being a tool for preventing discourse, leaving our narrator poised for her breakdown.

Malina is one of those novels that rewards reading carefully. It also frustrates, with its lack of clarity. Does Ivan exist, does Malina exist, or are they merely alter egos, facets of the narrator’s imagination let loose upon the world? We have to wean ourselves off the plot to enjoy the book. Instead, carried by Bachmann’s command of language, we need to focus on the ideas here instead. Why is it that our narrator cannot speak? Why are her relationships with the outside world always characterised by domination and submission?

Once we start asking these questions, the novel provides plenty of answers. It is the tortured and at times torturous account of the breakdown of a psyche, but that breakdown is not without its external factors. To go away thinking that this is just another novel about a psychotic woman is offensive and misses the point. This woman is trapped within a world that destroys her ability to speak and define herself and deprives her of any kind of authentic expression except her writing. Given all of that, how could she do anything other than go insane?

I really enjoyed Malina’s intelligence and inventiveness. It is not an easy book to read, and I can’t pretend I liked getting to the end not knowing what I had just read. But at the same time, here is a book that still has mysteries to unravel, and that demands I one day return to it. That can only be a good thing.

On Reflection

Here’s a question for you. When you reflect, where do you put the mirror?

This seems a silly question, and that’s because it is. But there’s also something here too, because having thought about reflection recently it occurred to me that reflecting on reflection itself isn’t without its value. And luckily, unlike when we put mirrors against mirrors in real life, creating a headache-inducing cascade of images (which I recently experienced at the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Tate Modern), we can stop our reflecting on reflection after only one reflective layer. But still, with its own repetitions, this paragraph shows how dangerous and disorientating such mirroring can be if we are not careful about it.

So. When we see our reflections in real life, we stand in front of a mirror. Alternatively, we turn on the camera on our phones, but I am too old for that already. Facing the mirror, our goal is to examine our physical appearance. Up close, in the mirror of a washroom or via our phone’s selfie camera, we get to investigate the blemishes, the little blotches and patches of colour, the wrinkles and the hairs. From further away, we check out our figure, or how the clothes sit on us. We might be taking advantage of a mirror on the inside of a cupboard to help us select an outfit.

In both cases, from close up or far away, we are seeing ourselves as an object in others’ eyes. We want to look good because when we look good we feel confident and happier. Even if we turn our backs on beauty products and fancy clothes, we certainly don’t want to look bad. This isn’t complicated. We use mirrors and physical reflection – the fake image of ourselves – to improve the real image of ourselves. Mirrors make the world more beautiful, if a little more narcissistic too.

This isn’t too interesting. What is, is when we reflect in a different way. Now, when you try and answer the ridiculous question I set at the beginning of the post, what did you come up with? I’ll tell you what I got. You place the mirrors right in front of your eyes. You look immediately back into yourself, without worrying about such silliness as what you are wearing. Here you are trying to descry the state of your soul.

Reflection in this sense is a matter of personal diagnostics. We are trying to work out our own selves. It’s connected to things like mindfulness. When we reflect, we try to understand our feelings and why we feel that way. We are trying to follow the wires and circuitry of our inner being, such that we might, with any luck, prevent ourselves from falling into bad moral and spiritual habits.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” Father Zosima, in the Brothers Karamazov.

Reflection is designed to stop just this. By understanding ourselves, we can uproot the lies that have gained purchase within us and prevent hypocrisy, that most fatal and inevitable of human weaknesses. The more we understand ourselves, the less likely it is that we will be able to deceive ourselves. If we spend enough time immersed in our hearts, we deprive the devils that live the chance of twisting them in unhealthy directions.

Yet is that all actually right? The first thing that you will have noticed when I suggested putting the mirrors right in front of one’s eyes is that this position completely obscures the light. Now, the soul is a murky place, but even so, doesn’t it need some light for us to actually see? What a hindrance the darkness is. Though we might be attempting to remove the rot from the floorboards, it is precisely the dark and the wet that the dark contains, which makes the rot exist, to begin with. We go into ourselves, find nothing, come out again and pat ourselves on the back, missing the obvious.

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending deals with reflection as one of its central concerns. First, the narrator takes us on an introspective tour of his life, reaching one conclusion. Then, new information comes to light, and he does the same tour all over again, reaching a completely different conclusion. The process of reflection is the same both times. But what we see is that reflection of a certain sort can be an act of self-deceit. To continue the silly metaphor, how are things supposed to enter us if we have mirrors covering our eyes? Don’t we all cry out with despair every time Stevens fails to notice his life and his opportunities are slipping away in The Remains of the Day?

Introspection is a fairly useless thing when you put the mirrors in front of your eyes. Useless at its best, but often downright hostile. Turning our gaze inwards prevents us from noticing others or the world outside. These modern novels that are so deep within someone else’s head always bother me because they portray quite an unhealthy way of going through life. I confess I am probably more self-centred than most, but even I am more aware of the world and its inhabitants than the likes of Else in Schindler’s Fraulein Else. Of course, Else is not what we would call mentally O.K. But even the narrator in The Sense of an Ending is pretty bad at this. The deeper we go into ourselves, the less we seem to get out, and the less we act as members of the external community as well.

Who has not, on this score, found how utterly useless reflection is when dealing with depression? Thinking, reflecting, and ruminating, rather than actually using those CBT techniques to dismember one’s bad feelings, that is. When we reflect while depressed then it really is like we are in a hall of mirrors, because we only get dizzier and dizzier, and further and further away from what is real and meaningful.

One solution to ruminating depression that often works wonders is talking to others. Unburdening one’s soul is removing the feelings from the damp cellar I described earlier and shoving them into the light, where they are often quickly disinfected. Is there not a way of placing the mirrors that also does this?

Indeed, readers, I have determined that there is.

The optimal location for the mirrors when we are reflecting is right in front of us, just like when we are getting changed, but the mirrors in this case are also rather wide, so that we can see the world behind us instead of just ourselves and what we are wearing. When we reflect, we need to be able to place ourselves as a unit within a community. Reflecting when we only get deeper and deeper into ourselves fails to let us see how we fit into the narratives of others’ lives. Rather than binding us to others, reflecting in that sense divides us. Not so here, where we are obliged to see the connections between us all because we have to see others wandering about in the background, even as we focus on ourselves.

Does this mirror placement prevent hypocrisy or lies? Certainly not, but it also lets us see our actions as they are played out in the world, rather than only in our distorted memories. It becomes harder to hide from ourselves. Coupled with seeing ourselves as part of a network of human beings this mirror placement might make us a more responsible being too.

I was reflecting on reflection because I have been thinking about some of Adorno’s comments on fascism, namely how among those who fall victim to it their common characteristic is their inability to reflect. Reflection is obviously hugely important, but so is reflecting the right way, not just going into yourself and expecting that in itself to be enough to sort things out. Adorno, of course, understood that fact when he noted that working through the past is a process we must do every day, rather than simply do in one go and then move on. Here, however, I just wanted to have some fun thinking about what reflection might look like, and how we might want to visualise it.

We might go further and think about a form of reflection in which we ourselves are invisible (the mirror is placed alongside our eyes and takes in images from without). This we could equate to certain Buddhist teachings or else Schopenhauer’s own renunciation-orientated ideals of life. And there are things like music and literature and great art in general, all of which can also lead us to reflect in a way that removes our own egos from the equation.

But those are topics for another day.