Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

At the same time, however, I felt no satisfaction either. Before his death our conversation had taken the form of a philosophical discussion. Strange to describe, but I suppose I experienced a sense of pain and pleasure combined as my mind assimilated the fact that my brother was going to die, and that it was I who was going to kill him.

Largely our discussion centred around the topic of immortality, although I rather think that many of the views which he expressed to me were really Plato’s. But that’s another issue. At its most simple, we discussed whether it was a man’s body or his soul which matters most. Considering where we were at the outset of this dialogue — a gay bar in Chiswick — it is strange to report that Socrates was of the opinion that it is the latter which must be cultivated at the expense of the former. If this seems an unduly ascetic position to take, this may have been due to the fact that I had spiked his Brandy Alexanders, not with hemlock, as you might have thought, but with ZZT, the so-called Obedience Drug much favoured among S & M devotees, and thus he may have been led to agree with me.

Nevertheless, his famous last words seem to me to be curiously ambiguous. Before I shot him, he asked me to offer a cock to the god of medicine. Perhaps there was some humorous homosexual double entendre to this remark. Or he may have been trying a little irony with regard to the Lombroso Program. At the same time, and this is the interpretation which I myself favour, he may also have been trying to indicate that death itself is a cure for life.

It is often assumed that death is the negation of life. But how can this be? Anyone who understands negation knows that two negations yield an affirmation. Can it therefore be said that ‘this man is not alive’ and that two such negations would equal an affirmation, ergo, life? Of course not.

You see how mysterious life really is. Life is no more the negation of death than death is the affirmation of life. Yet it is only death which can confirm that there has indeed been life as we know it. Death is not the opposite of anything. It is death, and nothing else besides. Schopenhauer writes of how a state of non-existence is really man’s more natural condition, given that we spend so many billions of millennia in this fashion; and of how life itself is little more than an unnatural blip on the supramillennial screen.

Aside from an approximately real experience, the nearest one ever comes to the full comprehension of death is the contemplation of the non-existence of that which itself gave life: the death of a parent.

It is curious how this Brown Book works both as a journal of my life and as an event in my life. And you who come after me — well, to you this may be a book like any other: but just as I have read a story and then myself am a participant in it, I hope that this will be true of this story and you.

Perhaps now you can see what it means to speak of ‘living in the pages of a book’. This is because the human body is inessential for the occurrence of experience. Indeed, many of my most profound experiences have occurred within the pages of a book. Experiences which have affected my life. If we understand one sentence, even a sentence in a child’s comic, it has a certain depth for us.

Have you ever caught yourself reading? You know, you’re sitting in a chair engrossed in a good book, enjoying the story and the author’s prose-style, and then suddenly, it’s as if you have an out-of-the-body experience and you catch sight of yourself as you really are: not trading wisecracks with Philip Marlowe, or struggling with Moriarty atop the Reichenbach Falls, but as someone sitting alone in a room, with a book open on your lap. It can be quite shocking. Like a sudden jolting shot of phenothiazine to the schizophrenic. One minute he’s battling international Communism and the next he’s just a guy in a wet bed and a pair of dirty pyjamas.

It is this rare ability to step in or out of the picture which distinguishes reading. Perhaps Keats perceived as much when he wrote to his sister describing the pleasure he should take in being able to sit beside a window on Lake Geneva and spend all day reading, like the picture of someone reading. Like a picture of someone reading... that’s a lovely revealing sentence. And quite typical of those Romantics, always trying to escape themselves. It conjures up such a powerful image of someone not only living but lost in the pages of a book, oblivious to the exterior physical world, to the hand which turns the page, even to the eye and visual field which conducts the printed information to the brain. Without a book I am chained to the earth. Reading I am Prometheus Unbound.

But perhaps our subject, namely my story, has stolen away from us while I have been theorising, like a shadow from an ascending bird. Perhaps you have found that the bird and its shadow are too far apart. I could make more matter with less art, if that was what you really wanted. But must this Brown Book of mine become simply a catalogue of blood with every lethal detail painstakingly described so that you can witness the full horror of my work? Surely we can agree that this improvised bible of my endeavour should remain something detached, a sideshow inside the main show that is my dark heart. And after all it will be entirely your affair how you read it, day and night.

Just remember this, however: thou read’st black where I read white.

Jake drove herself to Cambridge and enjoyed the two hours she took to get there. During the journey she listened to the Rachmaninoff second piano concerto on the disc player and resolved to buy the software to play the piece on her own piano at home. The melancholy product of the’ composer’s own hypnotherapy, Jake had always believed that it was essential music for anyone who wished to gain a profounder understanding of depression.

Further on into her journey she stopped at a little tea-shop in Grantchester only to find that it had closed. So for a while she just sat in the car, allowed the windows to mist up, and smoked a cigarette thoughtfully while she listened to the opening moderato, with its famous eight chords, once again.

It felt strange, she thought, to be going back after all this time. Stranger than she would have believed was possible.

It was almost twelve by the time the wheels of Jake’s BMW rolled down the ramp of Cambridge’s short-term multi-storey car-park. She unfolded the sun-visor and, particular about her appearance as usual, checked her make-up in the vanity mirror.

When she exited onto Corn Exchange Street, her direction lay east, down Guildhall Place and across Market Hill, and it was only force of habit that carried her footsteps up Wheeler Street towards King’s Parade, and the turrets and pinnacles of her old, eponymously named college’s long roofed chapel.

Confronted with the magnesian white limestone of the place close up, memories of another person she had once been awoke in her like krakens. As usual, it was raining, but the rain felt good after the drought of London. A harsh wind blowing south off the nearby Fens cooled the old market town and she was not inclined to linger there. Instead she turned into the face of the wind and walked briskly away from her past, from the friends she had had, and from the acquaintances who there seemed friends.

Jake did her best to ignore the pink granite, techno-Gothic tower that was Yamaha College, now occupying the site of old Great St Mary’s Church, which had been destroyed by fire at the turn of the century, and hurried on to Trinity Street.

Entering Trinity College by the Great Gate, she reported to the Porter’s Lodge and informed a bowler-hatted Chinese, who reminded her of Charlie Chan, that she had an appointment with the college Master.