The School of Life

Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures. On our own, when we’re furious, we don’t shout, as there’s no one there to listen – and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for fury. Or we work all the time without grasping, because there’s no one calling us to come for dinner, how we manically use our jobs to gain a sense of control over life – and how we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us labouring. At night, all we’re aware of is how sweet it would be to cuddle with someone, but we have no opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us that would start to make us cold and strange if ever it felt we were too deeply committed to someone. One of the greatest privileges of being on one’s own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with.

With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we aren’t in any position to know who we should be looking out for.

Almost all religions have made use of material objects. They’ve invested in particular sorts of furniture, clothes, buildings, statues and images, and seen these as adjuncts to their spiritual mission. This has not been without controversy within the religions themselves. Reliance on material forms has intermittently come under fire from a minority of believers who have argued that spiritual transformations should only ever require spiritual means, material objects being redundant in the project of healing the soul.

An eerie gap opened up between the dramatic events that were being narrated and the inertia and nonchalance one typically registered on reading two dozen of them over breakfast.