Dots on a line

“Each moment was a separate little island, isolated from time, and blank, unconditioned by time.” (290) This short but dense sentence from D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow got me thinking about how the human machine is wired. At that moment in the book the character in question, Tom Brangwen, is described through the eyes of his niece, Ursula, who sees him as a cold, inhuman creature because of his characteristic yet uncanny detachment. The girl portrays her relative as a barely living thing, as he “did not care any more, neither about his body nor about his soul.” (290) This is where I connected the two sentences. It seems fair to me that an inanimate entity has its history – or, not to use such a big word, the moments that composed its life – represented as individual links of a nonexistent chain. As a shell deprived of an inner self, I can picture why its existence seems to be made of unrelated facts. But when we look at human beings – those whose body actually contains a soul, I cannot regard their lives as composed of isolated actions, without antecedents, triggers, and which result in nothing. I know John Locke developed the idea of the blank page, and that he saw each human baby as pure clay ready to be modelled by its own future behaviour – that will later be redefined by Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism. What this seventeenth-century philosopher is putting forward is our ability to stand for ourselves, and to become who we want to be despite any familial background. I admire that theory although I think I don’t agree with it, or not completely at least.

I can see where Locke is going when he says that it is not because your father was a king that you will be a good one, or because you were born a peasant that you can’t do anything but work the land. I believe so too, but a king’s or peasant’s son nevertheless has genes – Locke couldn’t have known that though. And this is where I don’t agree with Sartre when he says that we are not defined by those who came before us, but by our actions; not by our past, but by our present. Again, this can only be partially true. We are a mix of both – and to me, it’s not a fair mix since I think our DNA must rule maybe two thirds up to three quarters of our selves; we are entitled to less freedom than we think we are., but that’s only my personal view of the matter. Why are we all so different? Why is every human being unique? It is because each of us is the result of a one-of-a-kind blend. Because if we were all genes, we would be the same as our ancestors; and if we were 100% spontaneous behaviour, we would all look alike – let’s face it, we can all accomplish the same deeds (kill someone, save lives, believe in what we can’t see). On the one hand, we would just be predetermined creatures. On the other, we would be similar ones. Who we are is both who our family are, and who we want to be. We are the whole and the part, we are the detail in the painting that makes that painting what it is – a masterpiece.

“Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself endlessly.” (290) Here is yet another interesting quotation from that very same Lawrence book. That passage is not dealing with someone anymore, but with a newly-built town – one of these industrial bunch of houses of the East Midlands at the beginning of the twentieth century. It certainly reflects our History, which looks all so blurry to us, but which possess such an anaphoric character. We are once more confronted with an amalgamation of components: the shapeless feature comes from the unpredictability of our actions, and the regularity and likeness of the events ensue from the foreseeable consequences of our individual history. See why I was talking of mixes and blends? Every one is a bit of both. We are dots on a line. Wait, no. We are the dots that constitute the line. We make the line. We are the line. As another character in the book says: “You wouldn’t be yourself if there were no nation.” (261) But the nation couldn’t either be what it is without us. We can call it a virtuous or vicious circle, depending on how pessimistic we want to be. Or we can just call it a circle, without judging its nature. But that’d be beyond our human power to simply look at something without gauging it. We have to ponder on the value of this or that, on the potential existence of God, on how the human machine works. But hey, that’s what we live and are known for!