Viewpoints

A large, gold-framed portrait photograph of my maternal great-grandfather dominates one wall of the attic room where I write. With increasing frequency, I find myself musing about the similarities and differences between us. I’m not much concerned with the way in which our shared bloodline has laid down common genetic ground, the familial foundation on which our psyches have been built. What catches my interest is how our outlooks on the world will have been shaped by the attitudes, information, and events current in the particular niches of time and place in which we were born; the milieus in which our lives were lived.

Clearly, in terms of fundamentals, we have much in common beyond our shared genes: species; gender; nationality; language; our dependence on oxygen, food and water; the warm blood flowing in our veins; our susceptibility to pleasure and to pain; our desire for companionship and comfort; our vulnerability to accident, illness, death. It’s equally clear that, alongside these shared human characteristics, our situatedness in different spans of time means that we’re poles apart in terms of many of the things around us that press in upon our awareness, creating that reference range on which the tapestry of action, ideas, and intent that shapes a life is woven.

What intrigues me is the probably unanswerable question of the extent to which our outlooks – how we see the world, our understanding of self and other, the moment-by-moment timbre of our consciousness – is determined by our shared humanity, and how much this is dictated by the particular context in which our humanity happens to be located.

My great-grandfather was born in 1843 and died in 1908, so the topography of his thought-world was clearly missing many of the landmarks that characterize mine. His mind would have been unmarked by any knowledge of two world wars, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, computers, mobile phones. Cars would have been a rarity, the roads still largely thoroughfares for pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles. Air travel was in its infancy. The Wright brothers’ first flights were in the early 1900s. The first aviators to cross the Atlantic, Alcock and Brown, didn’t do so until 1919. Space exploration was unknown. His attitudes to women, homosexuality, people of colour would almost certainly be regarded as reprehensible were they to be expressed today. Non-Christian religions would probably have been dismissed out of hand as demonic, although he’d likely have known nothing about their teachings. The woes of the Anthropocene were decades in the future. The lush Irish countryside he lived in would have had an unspoiled richness of flora and fauna that, to me, would seem incredible – magnificent – but to him would simply be regarded as routine, the unremarkable given of the way things are.

The day-to-day surroundings of his and my experience suggest markedly dissimilar environments. Still more different would be the cognitive atmospheres breathed in them. By “cognitive atmosphere” I mean those points of reference that every society builds up simply through what it does, an amalgam of events, inventions, ideas, a roster of preoccupations and priorities, stated and unstated values. Such an atmosphere is a cultural accumulation that’s always changing and whose composition at any point does much to shape the ethos of an age.

Alongside all these differences – and lessening their distancing impact – we were conceived in the same manner, developed in a womb, we were born, suckled, grew, learned how to walk and talk, gradually discovered the names of the things around us. Our appetites would naturally show individual variation, but we each need to lie down to sleep at the end of a day. We both have (had) dreams, loves, fears, regrets, hopes, intentions, terrors. The usual repertoire of human feelings and failings will have performed their little dramas on our lives, forging – and being forged by – our personalities as they played out their various scenarios upon us.

Looking into my great-grandfather’s eyes as I go up to the attic – the photograph hangs on the wall at the top of the stairs – makes me wonder what went on behind his gaze. What was he thinking as he held this pose for the camera? How did he see himself, others, his surroundings? What was he aware of as the photograph was taken – what was he seeing, hearing, smelling? Was he comfortable in the formal attire he’s wearing, or was he keen to change into something else? And beyond the moment captured in the photograph, what was the day-to-day tenor of his animating consciousness, his sense of who he was, what mattered to him? What sort of person was he, this stern-looking, heavily bearded Victorian man in whose features I can detect – or imagine I can detect – traces of familial likeness? As his image formed on the photographic plate, was the horizon of his mind clear or clouded, his inner weather clement or troubled?

Knowing something of his story, in particular his involvement in what came to be known as “The Lisburn Tragedy” (of which more below), and having this portrait photograph as a daily reminder of his existence, makes me curious about my great-grandfather’s character and passions, what he held dear, what he dreaded. What he might have been capable of doing in extreme circumstances. And if – impossibly, I know, but I can’t help speculating – his gaze could fall on me as I sit writing in the attic, what would his judgement have been, how would he have seen me?

This comparing of my great-grandfather’s outlook and my own is part of a more general curiosity about how other people see the world. I’m not sure why, but I find myself returning repeatedly to a question that has surely haunted human consciousness for as long as it has existed: how secure is our grasp of other people’s outlooks? With what degree of confidence can we claim to understand or share another person’s viewpoint? Can we really know how they perceive things? For all our relationships and connections, our fluency in language, our shared intimacies and sense of closeness, although we can reach out and touch each other, we are still surrounded by the mystery of otherness, by not knowing for sure what the people around us see when they look at the same things we do. We can hazard maybe substantially accurate guesses about how the world reveals itself through the sensory networks of other human beings, but we can never confirm for certain if our guesses hit the mark, never experience what another person experiences, never know what it is to be them. We are each of us locked in the cell of our individual existence. The tempo and taste of things there remains tantalizingly unreachable to others. It is something that, however closely we may imagine we approach it, is finally withheld. Regardless of how much we share, this remains something hidden, secret, private, known only to the individual; an inner essence that is immune to trespass, incapable of being shown in its naked entirety to anyone except ourselves. It’s strangely easy to forget this. One of the most commonly overlooked mysteries with which our everyday experience is studded is surely the unknownness of all the other consciousnesses that throng the world alongside ours. How does existence lay its touch upon all 8 billion of us humans? Hidden from us is the tenor of its imprint on other minds, the way it leaves its mark upon our fellows, how the stamp of the moment is felt by other instances of human sentience (let alone by other creatures).

The photograph of my great-grandfather hangs in the attic. But it’s not always there that I find myself musing about the similarities and differences between us. About twenty minutes’ walk away there’s a place I call “The Viewpoint,” a gentle rise of land on the edge of town that overlooks the sea. It’s on a path that leads to the harbour. At the path’s highest point there’s a small paved area with two benches angled to give the best outlook. On its seaward side, the path is fenced with iron railings. Just beyond them, the land drops sharply to the rocks and beach below. People often stop and sit, or stand leaning against the railings, gazing out toward the horizon.

There’s something about this place that beckons people to it, that draws them as surely as moths are drawn to light. And perhaps it is in part the light that casts a spell here too. It’s surely a key element in the hard-to-explain magnetism of The Viewpoint. It offers an uplifting sense of luminous refulgence, with the sky above you a great arcing space opening out expansively – invitingly – above the sea. It’s hard to be sure exactly what the alchemy is that The Viewpoint exerts, or to identify the source of the potent feeling that it holds something bordering on the sacramental. Whatever it is, it is impressively – elementally – authoritative. It commands people to stop and linger, their gaze always drawn by the great open vista of sea-and-sky laid out compellingly before them.

Sometimes, as I lean against the iron railings and look out to sea, it feels as if my great-grandfather has walked here with me and stands beside me as I try to imagine how this place would lay down its catalogue of sensations on him, how its touch would feel upon the fabric of his senses. As the sights and sounds and smells passed through the filters of his experience and upbringing, his beliefs and hopes and fears, his memories and dreams – the whole set and turn of his mind and heart and being – would that distillation change them enough to mean that what was laid down on his awareness would be significantly different from what is laid down on mine when I stand here? Is the underlying flavour of the world the same for both of us – for anyone – despite whatever differences in taste the spice of our particular histories and personalities might add, or would the signature of this place be written upon us so differently that, if we could compare them, we’d not recognize the signings as being written by the same hand?

My great-grandfather is a frequent companion at The Viewpoint, but sometimes when I pause there it’s not him who stands beside me. Instead, it’s a person drawn from the many who have passed this way over the long years of human occupancy this area has seen, each one stopping, as I stop, to stare out to sea. One recent estimate suggests that Homo sapiens has had a presence here for 12,000 years. This means that many thousands of individuals must have been at The Viewpoint over the course of these millennia, briefly pausing in their lives as the magic of the place claimed them. Because of the crowd of imagined individuals thronging this self-same spot where land meets sea, all considering the same panoramic outlook, I find that The Viewpoint is a place where my thoughts almost always turn to wondering about other consciousnesses and how they perceive what I too am perceiving. Are there enough elements similarly shared between us for it to make sense to think of a common experience, or do our different situations fracture any commonality into a starburst of individual particularities? Does The Viewpoint’s crowd constitute variations on a fundamental theme, or are a multiplicity of themes all sounding the unique notes of their own particular harmonies and discords?

From this crowd of individuals attracted to The Viewpoint over the years, I sometimes pick a child, or an old man, or a woman in her prime, sometimes a boy whose voice is on the cusp of breaking. I might select a priest or a farmer, a mechanic or a scholar, someone wealthy or indigent. They could be from the same century as my great-grandfather, or someone who lived ten thousand years before him. For each of them my questions are the same: what do you see as you look out from here? How does this segment of the world fall upon your senses? How do the moments of existence spent here lay themselves upon you second by second as your life ticks by? Is the fundamental flavour of this place, the heft and touch of sky and sea upon your awareness, substantially similar to mine, or are the life-worlds we occupy sufficiently different that their variability undermines the idea of there being shared constants, common touchstones that we could recognize?

As well as my great-grandfather and individuals drawn from the anonymous crowd of individuals who have stopped here over history, I’m often accompanied at The Viewpoint by a named individual whose life I’ve thought about a lot. He was born three centuries before my great-grandfather and would, I imagine, have shared my curiosity about the currents of similarity and difference that surge and trickle through us, the way the water of experience can at once feel like a common element we all share and yet be as different as a storm-tossed sea, a meandering river, a frozen lake, and a muddy puddle. Having seen portraits of Michel de Montaigne and read his essays, and various studies of his life, he’s someone I can picture with enough texture of particular detail to make it feel as if I know him. What would Montaigne have thought and felt standing at The Viewpoint?

How much do our beliefs shape what we see? To what extent does our awareness depend on the raw impress of sensations, and to what extent on how we’ve learned to read and name them? In what ways is the flow of perceptions we receive from our surroundings parsed and channelled into our understandings of them? It would be naïve indeed to suppose that the world comes to us untouched by our assumptions, or to think that sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches reach us unsullied by our histories. Intelligibility is a construct not a given, and it can be built according to all kinds of blueprints. We manufacture meaning. It does not lie there pre-formed and independent like a rock, there for everyone to uniformly stub their toe against.

Raised as a Presbyterian in the rural north of Ireland in the nineteenth century, my great-grandfather’s outlook would have been set at a different angle to Montaigne’s, whose sixteenth-century French Catholicism would have offered its own interpretative emphases to shift the torque and angle of his worldview according to its particular weightings. The fact that they thought in different languages would give different lexical indexes and intonations to the voices of the things around them; their sense of identity and purpose would be moulded according to all the complicated swirl of contours that determine the landscape of character. Their particular experiences, and the memories they came to hold about them, would have been keyed to the unique cartography of their lives’ unfolding. These dissimilarities notwithstanding, I think that if they stood either side of me at The Viewpoint we’d all read the vista that it offers in ways that share a fundamental harmony. But to hear the notes of that harmony we’d need to be flies on the wall of other people’s consciousnesses – and that is precisely the perspective denied to us beyond what imagination surmises.

As well as summoning Montaigne back from five centuries ago, I sometimes summon an imagined representative of Homo sapiens from five centuries in the future. If an individual from the twenty-sixth century was standing here, they’d clearly have a different reference range to mine, let alone to my great-grandfather’s or Montaigne’s. It would be shaped, like everyone’s, according to the particular milieu they lived in. But I’d be surprised if they were immune to The Viewpoint’s magnetic pull, or if what they saw from here did not have at least some overlapping correspondence with what I see now. Or, since humans have been here for 12,000 years, why not leap forward by twelve millennia and imagine an individual from that far future standing beside me. Would the similarities and differences between us be significantly different to those between me and Montaigne, or between my great-grandfather and, say, a ninth-century fisherman?

On the basis of what he’s written in his essays, there’s much that makes me warm to Montaigne. I like what he calls (following Pliny) his “capacity to spy on himself” – how he scrutinizes his life with a mix of acuity, puzzlement, honesty, and humour. I find it appealing how he recognizes that it’s “a thorny undertaking to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds” and to “pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.” It’s impressive how well, over hundreds of pages of self-reflection, he handles this “thorny undertaking” and allows readers access, if not to his mind’s innermost folds at least to those closely adjacent to them. His awareness of his own shortcomings is engaging. “If I am a man of some reading,” he says at one point – and he is undoubtedly that – “I am a man of no retentiveness.” Anyone who, like me, has forgotten swathes of what they’ve read will surely smile at this admission of fallibility. And Montaigne’s omnivorous interest in everything around him, in the whole spectrum of experience life offers him, means that he’s never a dull companion. “Any topic is equally fertile to me,” he says, “a fly will suit my purpose.” Whether he’s looking at flies, or thumbs, or cannibals, sadness, solitude, the education of children, death, sleep, smells, books, drunkenness, sex, coaches, friendship, or any of the scores of other subjects that catch his interest, he can be relied on for perceptive comment delivered in a tone that’s engagingly open, sceptical, and modest, and always ready to laugh at himself and the world’s pomposities.

But rather than any of his writings, appealing though I find them, it’s a medal or medallion that Montaigne first had struck in 1576 that’s in the forefront of my mind when I stand at The Viewpoint, accompanied by shadowy, unnamed figures from the distant past or distant future, or by my great-grandfather, or Michel de Montaigne himself. This device – medal, medallion, token, it’s variously described by commentators – has his name and coat of arms on one side, encircled by the necklace of the Order of St Michael. But it’s the reverse side that interests me. This shows a set of scales with the motto “Epekho” (taken from the Pyrrhonian sceptic Sextus Empiricus, who lived in the second or third century CE). It means “I abstain.”

The symbolism of the scales recalls justice – for many years Montaigne was a magistrate – and the need in any court of law for a careful weighing up of evidence before arriving at a verdict. But the scales have a far wider application than simply to things legal. The careful weighing of evidence is the approach that characterizes all of Montaigne’s inquiries. He abstains from taking any of the partisan positions that were flourishing so aggressively and intolerantly around him, demanding unthinking allegiance and violently impatient of dissent. He abstains from simply accepting traditional understandings, from taking things at face value or according to popular interpretations. He abstains from hasty judgement, being careful not to leap to premature conclusions. He brings an open mind to bear on things and uses it to keep enquiring into the enigmas of existence. Later in his life “I abstain” was replaced by his more famous motto, “Que sçais-je?” – “What do I know?” (The motto now tends to be given in contemporary French as “Que sais-je?” rather than the Middle French of Montaigne’s original.) The scales remain, though, an unchanged symbol on his personal emblem despite the rewording of his motto.

Throughout our lives, we’re faced with having to weigh up the varieties of experience that come to us. The tilt of the scales prompts us into the decisions, hesitations, actions that mark a life with the individual fingerprints it carries. Sometimes, standing at The Viewpoint, I think of Montaigne’s medal and imagine the scales laden on one side with the raw impress of immediate sensation upon us, and on the other side with all the particularities of our unique combination of history, culture, psychology, physiology. Which weighs more heavily in determining the nature of our consciousness? How is the balance of our mind apportioned between what the philosophers call noumena (things in themselves) and phenomena (things as we perceive them)? Sometimes I think of the disturbing cargoes of knowing brought to the scales of our discernment by events unfolding around us – the vicious sectarianism whose ugly flourishing in sixteenth century France did so much to set the parameters of safety and danger in Montaigne’s world, the way the brutal happenings in Ukraine and Gaza lay their tonnage on our outlook today. And sometimes I wonder how our minds can hope to find any kind of equilibrium – any sense of order, meaning, structure – when faced with some of the wildly contrasting information they can now so easily, and randomly, encounter. For example, put on one side of the scales the fact that our universe contains such things as ultramassive black holes. One, Tonantzintla 618, located some 18 million light years from Earth, is reckoned to be 66 billion times the mass of our Sun. Put on the other side of the scales the brain of a Cuban Emerald Hummingbird. At 0.13 grams, its presence would be hard to distinguish from nothing, just a gentle breath blown on the scales, adding the weight of no more than a tiny increment of air. Yet both loads are aspects of being; they both exist in the milieu our lives are set in and that we struggle to make sense of. Or try to weigh against each other the sum totals of human kindness and human cruelty; or the duration of a mayfly’s lifetime and the age of the universe; or the number of species now extinct and the number still flourishing. Can the scales of our judgement cope with the unsettling evidence we’re met with? Can our cognitive weighing up of what we face hope to arrive at meanings, or will it leave us reeling – seesawing helplessly between the attempted constraints of routine naming, and the stupefaction, incomprehension, terror, and amazement that come from realizing how little those constraints can hold, how slight their control of what we try to shepherd with them?

Some experiences mark us more profoundly than others. On October 9^th 1898 at my great-grandfather’s farm, about eight miles from Belfast, an event occurred that must have had a transformative impact on him. In the early hours of that morning, if the official accounts of what happened are to be believed, his twenty-one-year-old son came into his bedroom, shot his sleeping father in the face and then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide. Although seriously injured and not expected to live, my great-grandfather somehow managed to summon help and survived. Contemporary accounts suggest that the son acted while the balance of his mind had been temporarily disturbed. Previously, he seemed to have got on well with his father and to have been well-liked in the neighbourhood, where he was regarded as a pleasant and equable young man.

What had weighed so monstrously on his inner scales to prompt this extreme act of violence? What drove him to behave in a way that was so completely – horribly – out of character? On that, beyond the view of temporary insanity brought on by unknown factors, the inquest and the newspapers are silent.

But there’s a rogue interpretation of events, wholly at odds with the official account of a son’s inexplicable homicidal attack followed by his self-destruction. This alternative interpretation whispers about a beautiful neighbour at a nearby farm in whom both men had an interest. An aunt – one of my great-grandfather’s granddaughters – once told me that some people suspected it was the father who shot the son and then, seeing what he’d done, and filled with remorse, had tried, but failed, to kill himself. Jealousy between rival suitors was, she said, rumoured to be at the root of it. The widowed father and his twenty-one-year-old son were both hoping to win the heart and hand of the same woman.

The newspapers called what happened “The Lisburn Tragedy” – Lisburn being the nearest centre of population to my great-grandfather’s farm. It was the town to which, though gravely injured, he went for aid, and from where police and a doctor were dispatched to the scene. Whatever the actual unfolding of events on October 9^th 1898, I imagine the world looked very different to my great-grandfather before and after what happened.

Thinking of those gunshots ringing out in the quiet of the small hours, I’m reminded of a comment of Montaigne’s about firearms. In his essay “Of War Horses” he advises – in what were dangerous times – that it’s better to put one’s reliance on a sword rather than a pistol, a weapon which, at that point in history, was still an unreliable novelty. “As for the pistol,” he says dismissively, “except for the shock to the ear, with which by now everyone has become familiar, I think it is a weapon of very little effect, and hope that some day we shall abandon the use of it.” We know now, of course, that hope of such abandonment was at odds with how history played out. It was a Colt revolver that was fired on October 9^th 1898. My great-grandfather and his unfortunate son were only two of what must by now be millions of casualties – and fatalities – caused by handguns worldwide.

Did what Montaigne called “the shock to the ear” affect anyone else? Was it just father and son there that night? Would the noise of the shots have startled the horses in the stables adjoining the house, making them stamp and whinny in the dark? Perhaps a barn owl hunting in the nearby fields veered off course for a moment as its super-sensitive hearing recoiled from this assault. Its brain – large in comparison to a hummingbird’s – would have sent electrical impulses racing down the nerves, instructing the wings to bank and swerve as it read danger in these explosive noises – noises that were sounding out 18-million light years from Tonantzintla’s massive presence; noises that were made at the same moment as, thousands of miles away, a Cuban Emerald Hummingbird hovered by a flower, dinking in its nectar, its wings whirring softly. The gunshots that betokened the Lisburn Tragedy sounded in a world littered with the fossils of ancient extinct species; with the intricate complexities of life living and life vanished; with the catalogues of human kindness and human cruelty.

Did the revolver’s “shock to the ear” reach the neighbouring farm? Would the shots have woken the woman rumoured to have been the innamorata at the heart of these terrible events? Or was she already awake, her mind brooding over the tangle of passions unfolding around her, worried – fearful – of what they might lead to? Or was such a person merely a figment of the salacious imagination of others, with other causes entirely being responsible for what happened?

I can imagine various possible thought-worlds that might have been occupied by my great-grandfather and his twenty-one-year-old son, picture how the world might have appeared to them. But to see things as they saw them, to share their viewpoints, to touch the nerve that sparked those terrible moments on October 9^th 1898, to understand what prompted their occurrence, would demand an intimacy of access that is denied to us. I find my Montaignian scales tilting wildly as I try to assess motive, assign innocence and blame, look at events from different angles, try to weave some thread of sense, find a chain of causes and effects that might lay meaning over what threatens to be meaningless. What really happened that night/early morning? Both of Montaigne’s mottos seem apt in answering – or evading – the question: I abstain; what do I know?

Standing at The Viewpoint the other day, I was musing on these matters, and wondering how to end this essay, when a young man with a baby strapped to his chest in a carrier came and sat on one of the benches. Both he and the infant looked out to sea. Moments later, an elderly woman with two panting spaniels, both straining on their leads, sat on the other bench. We exchanged smiles but said nothing. Six consciousnesses – four human, two canine – each with their own stories, sharing for a moment the spatial and temporal coordinates of the here and now that located us together at this spot, minutely specific in the vastness of spacetime. As with thousands before us, and doubtless with thousands who will come here long after we have gone, we felt the spell of sea and sky and outlook. I thought about my great-grandfather, his son, Montaigne, and the crowd of anonymous cotenants who have paused here over a span of 12,000 years. The moment kindled a sense of camaraderie and connection. But alongside it I felt a powerful counterweight of otherness, isolation, the incalculable strangeness of the familiar, and the impossibility of knowing just how existence appears to any mind except my own. I walked home and wrote this final sentence in the attic, where my great-grandfather’s portrait photograph is hanging, knowing that the scales would tip between these sensations repeatedly, without settling on one side or the other.

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