Mark de Silva - Square Wave

The wind sheared an inch of ash off the cigarette. “The other thing is that there is nothing much here of the struggle between the Europeans, your ancestors in particular, and the Sinhalese. Isn’t that the crux of the project?”

He let the butt fall from the ledge and re-entered the office. The door was made of thick glass but it took Stagg the merest swipe of the fingertips along its edge to close it behind him.

“Oh, let me just show you what the fellows’ offices are like. I said I would do that. And thank you again for coming so early. I’ve got to be elsewhere by ten, my wife needs me.”

They wound their way down the central staircase, marble, a soft white. The steps were deep and unusually broad, as if meant for the traffic of a major university library.

“I haven’t exactly used the monk’s methods,” Stagg said. The stairwell was also rock, a speckled gray granite, and his words boomed. He lowered his voice. “But the problems with history, his ones, my ones, aren’t totally unrelated. It’s not a correspondence — that’s too strong — but an affinity. Interpretation, evidence, expression, we’re both figuring out how to do history. It would be one way of setting up the other lectures, since historiography itself is at issue. But there are other ways, yes.”

“Right, well,” Kames said as he reached the base of the stairs and led them out through a corridor of offices. They were each trimmed in dark wood on three sides and sheathed by a glass door, tinged blue, on the fourth. Only the last office on the right was in use. The man within, sleeves rolled loosely just below the elbows, clicked lazily at a mouse. Principia Ethica was open, facedown on the black desk, colored stickies poking out on the sides and bottom. “That’s Max. A philosopher too. But we are going to leave him alone this very early morning.”

The corridor merged with a wider walkway flanked by two larger offices with cherry doors ajar, both looking out onto courtyards through far walls of glass. Kames tapped the doorframe of one. “This just came open,” he said. “Better, I think.” Stagg peered in for his sake. Besides stacks of boxes not much could be seen, though there were the vaulted ceilings, and the walls were covered in a creamy paper that looked like cloth. “He’s returning to academe, Chicago. Nothing as nice as this. I think we may have spoiled him.”

They passed through to the atrium, which functioned as the central reading room. The ceiling, thirty feet up, was a single slab of glass, as were the walls to the left and right. Beyond one was the pond, still shaded. The water had more blue in it from here, and the surface, stirred by the wind, had more texture. The clouds shifted, redistributing the sunlight, and from the fringes of the pond a red cloud of rose finches ascended to the branches of the trees.

Beyond the other glass wall was a manicured lawn. Violets circled the bases of oaks. White rocks circled Japanese beeches. Fifty yards into the grass stood a high stone wall with a semicircular entrance cut into it, and farther back, at what Stagg assumed was the edge of the property, he could see, just above the wall, the tops of trees arranged like the pickets of a fence.

The two of them sat at a large circular table in the middle of the atrium, empty of all but rows and rows of books on all sides.

“Did you need coffee?” Kames asked.

“No.”

“Good. Well, the lecture. The approach to historiography.”

“I think there is an affinity,” Stagg said, “but that isn’t the only reason to start with it. It does get into the domestic politics. Whatever tensions were present there, they weren’t simply imported. There’s an internal tension that gets complicated by external forces. My thought had been to begin with that. The distribution of power between the priesthood — a lot of their authority came from being the minders of history — and the king and his court. Then there’s the warrior class, which overlaps with the court but isn’t always allied with it, sometimes siding with the priesthood. Some of the rebellions seem to be spearheaded by it.

“I get into the present-tense of that internal struggle, which happens in the midst of external pressures. But I leave those offstage until later. The complications. The Europeans. The interplay.”

Kames gave no response. He was waiting.

“There’s also the other lecture I showed you, just before, which starts with Rutland’s encounter with the monk. I just think… it’s not as if our own problems, today, are mostly like this, with insides and outsides. There’s no outside anymore. September 11, yes, then, maybe. And that jump-started something. Opened a door, as you put it.

“But now, no one now thinks these things in the news, the hall, the convention center, really have, or have to have, anything foreign about them. Maybe it’s more economic than cultural now.”

“Intra- rather than trans-. Right,” Kames said. “Wherever there are conditions for friendship, really. And its other half, enmity. I think Schmitt was right about that much. But we can’t assume economics is always the basis. We never could.”

“Yeah. But money does make friends. Enemies too. Think about the museum—”

“Well that’s certainly the way it’s being set up in the press. It misses the mark, and pretty badly.” He turned sharply to Stagg and stood. “You might be interested in something I’ve just written on this. I have it in the office.”

“I am. And I read it yesterday.”

Kames stayed on his feet. “So?”

Finches continued to ascend from the pond, not in groups now but singly.

“Shall we walk?” Kames said. “It is cold. The garden you haven’t seen. It will bring back England. Cambridge. I remember Caius had something very like this, for the fellows. Here, though, we are all and only fellows. And you can walk on the grass if you want. Do you miss England?”

Stagg only smiled. He followed Kames past the shelves of books, through the automatic doors and onto the pink pebble path cleaving the lawn. He wrapped his hands in the wool of his pockets as a high gust lashed his eyes.

“So you disagree with my little editorial,” Kames said.

“Only about excluding the economics, in that case.” Fog trailed from Stagg’s mouth as he spoke. “But you don’t really do that.”

“No, that’s right. But I make room for the possibility, even the probability, that it’s not strictly relevant in this instance.”

“That Celano is idle.”

Kames paused on the path and Stagg did too. “That’s more possible than it seems,” Kames said. “I do think that, yes. Why shouldn’t he be? He’s very clever, I understand.”

“But he would have a reason to retaliate.”

“Well you haven’t read very carefully it looks like. He and I and you have so many reasons.”

“But after the pool hall—”

“It’s their force that matters, when we talk about reasons, Carl. Their felt force really, how they appear to the parties involved at the moment of decision, under whatever circumstances prevail. It’s got nothing to do with how rationally compelling they are in fact , how persuasive they ought to be found by them, given their interests. As if we even know, reliably know, what our own interests are. And that’s putting aside how willing we are to reveal them to others. Do you see what I mean?”

They started to walk again.

“This is all very hard to calculate,” Kames said. “So, in the face of this, we simplify. We abstract. We assume likenesses between parties, and in doing that steal all the nuance, the eccentricity, from them. From whatever’s actually driven them to act, I mean, which is often many-faced and not infrequently touched by some element of delusion or self-deception. Even then, though, knowing how un-illuminating it is, we’ll insist on the formulas: ‘Certain sorts of actors are likely to find reasons of such-and-such a kind persuasive.’”