2013/02/11 12:50
It was the location I really loved. The lodge was a couple of miles or so outside Kinsale on the Rathmore peninsula. The main house to which the lodge was attached was derelict. This meant that Brenin , Nina and I had couple of hundred acres of rolling countryside to run in every day. We just had to walk out of the door to find ourselves in the middle of barley fields as far as the eye could see. These would slope down to woodland and beyond that was the sea. Brenin and Nina quickly discovered that where there’s barley, there are always rats. And they also quickly worked out that to see rats in the barley, you need a synoptic view. And to get this, they needed to bounce. The movement scared the rats and made them scurry, and from their momentarily elevated vantage points, Brenin and Nina were able to see the movement in the barley and pounce accordingly. All I could see of them was the occasional leap into the air, quickly followed by their submergence, like salmon leaping out of a sea of barley. I think it is impossible to be around that much joy without being lifted by it although the rats might have felt differently.
The barley fields sloped down to the wood. On the edge of the wood was a rabbit warren. Here the behavior of Brenin and Nina changed accordingly. From the bouncing of the barley fields, they went into stalking mode trying to sneak up on any careless rabbit sunning itself on the open ground. Brenin was a lot more adept at this than Nina., who would usually give the game away by charging much too early. And for this I was very grateful. Since writing the Animal Rights book, I was now officially, and publicly, against the killing of animals for sports or food even rats, although I tended to turn a blind eye to that when they were housed in my boiler room. Apparently, I was far more equivocal on the issue of violence towards wife-beating midnight intruders. But I was before a moral vegetarian, the strangest of the strange, condemned to live out the rest of my miserable existence without the gustatory pleasures of animal flesh. And, as I kept reminding Brenin, after I had scuppered some or other of his rabbit-catching stratagems, it was entirely his fault.
3
When I left Alabama for Ireland, the plan had been to find a house in the country, as far away from civilization as possible, and where there was absolutely, positively nothing to do except write. And, for the most part, I stuck to that plan pretty well. There were girlfriends, but they came into my life and left it again with a regularity by which you could bet your bottom dollar. The came into my life presumably because I was urbane and witty?at least for a professional academic, with a face not yet ruined by years of alcohol. They left it because they quickly realized I felt little for them and saw little in them other than a convenient sexual release. I was in no fit state to share my life with humans. I had other concerns.
The truth is, I suppose, that I’ve always been a natural misanthrope. This is not something of which I’m proud, and not an aspect of my character that I seek, or have sought, to cultivate. But it’s there and it’s unmistakable. With a small number of exceptions, my relationships with other people have always been permitted by the sense a vague, brooding comprehension that what I am doing is killing time. This is how alcohol first insinuated its way into my life. I always had to get drunk to spend any time at all with friends, whether in Wales, Manchester, Oxford or Alabama. This is not to say I didn’t enjoy myself on the contrary, I had a blast. But I’m pretty sure it would have been different without the alcohol. And this isn’t just some stuck-up academic talking, only wanting to associate with those he regards as his intellectual peers. Academics bore me even more. The fault is not with any of the people I have called my friends. It is with me. There is something lacking in me. And, over the years since, it has slowly dawned on me that the choices I have made, and the life I have lived, have been a response to this lack. What is most significant about me, I think, is what I am missing.
My choice of career is almost certainly an expression of this lack. With the possible exception of the higher reaches of pure mathematics or theoretical physics, one can scarcely imagine anything more inhuman than philosophy. Its worship of logic in all its cold, crystalline purity; its determination to stride the bleak and icy mountaintops of theory and abstraction: to be a philosopher is to be existentially deracinated. When I think of a philosopher, I think of Bertrand Russell, sitting down all day every day for five years at that British Library, writing Principia Mathematica, an unbelievably difficult and ingenious attempt probably unsuccessful to derive mathematics from set theory. It took Russell eighty-six pages to prove, using only the apparatus of set theory, what he, sarcastically, called the ‘occasionally useful;’ proposition that one plus one equals tow. So you can imagine how long the book is. Or I think of Nietzsche, an itinerant cripple wandering from one country to another, without friends, without family, without money; his work, after a promising start, garnering only rejection and derision. And imagine what it cost them. Intellectually, Russell was never played a role here. Philosophy is withering. Philosophers should be offered condolences rather than encouragement.
