Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

James grinned. Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern looked at me earnestly.

What do you like about it?

It has a good finish. Someone has taken care and I like that.

But it’s nothing special. You don’t think it’s special, do you?

It’s effective and sometimes that’s enough to make something special. Neither ostentatious nor, nor—

Reticent?

Exactly. It has the right molding for the room, picks up the dado, and all the edges are properly chamfered so the eggshell won’t chip or wear for a while yet. You can see, too, even at this distance, that the paint’s been sanded between coats.

You’re able to see that?

Bad paintwork shows a mile off, I replied, especially on MDF, since it absorbs so much paint. In fact, if you don’t give MDF a heavy primer to begin with, I continued, you end up having to lay on five or more coats of emulsion, which in turn increases the risk of paint runs.

Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern was nodding agreement, as if already familiar with this. For the first time, but not for the last, I wondered if I was being manipulated.

You then have to take even greater care to sand between coats, I added.

As I talked to Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, I noticed Emily’s posture: her eyes fallen to the floor, her shoulders slumped.

It’s a nice bookshelf, I added inanely.

How do you know it’s made from MDF and not pine or a hardwood or even ply? asked Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

MDF, I replied, is a standard material for this sort of furniture. It’s cheap — if it’s going to be painted, it doesn’t make sense to splash out on wood, so to speak. Bookcases and cabinets make good use of alcoves either side of a chimney breast. You can see, by the way, that the bookcase wasn’t installed at the same time as the rest of the woodwork in the room, such as the architrave around the door and the dadoes, because its skirting doesn’t precisely match the skirting boards where the walls meet the floor, although, very sensibly, the carpenter who built this didn’t try to form a ninety-degree miter joint where the two skirting boards meet, which would simply have failed to key up, but instead scribed the skirting of the cabinets at the bottom of the bookcase over that of the wall.

I wanted to ask a question, but I knew that to do so would be to call attention to something potentially embarrassing. How does someone of her background — her social standing, which defines so many Brits — how does she know about MDF and ply? Brits are embarrassed — are required to be embarrassed — about showing they know about something that doesn’t properly belong to their orbit in life. And here I knew it in my bones that there was some kind of embarrassment just around the corner. I don’t know what tipped me off. I cannot point to anything specific that signaled the presence of a potential embarrassment in the room, but the presence was unmistakably there. It might have been the way Emily leaned forward in the same moment or the way James’s eyes glanced upward or perhaps it was the ear recoiling from the dissonance between the rugged contraction “ply,” instead of “plywood,” and the rest of the honorable Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern’s speech. I don’t know. Embarrassment is possibly the paramount emotion of the English, and efforts to avoid it account for many of the small peculiarities of social life in England.

Mentioning “miter joints” and “scribing” should have called forth questions from Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, if she had been unfamiliar with those terms of trade, if only to ask out of surprise how I knew about such things. People do that, they ask you how you come to know about something, whenever the conversation shows you know a thing or two about a field of which they themselves know nothing.

It is possible, looking back, that the fact that I hadn’t hesitated to use such language — miter joints and scribing — might have suggested to her that I’d noticed she had a knowledge of the carpenter’s vocabulary, that perhaps I had caught her reference to “ply” and caught her familiarity with things of which she ought to know nothing. It’s possible she was sitting there wondering why I wasn’t asking her how she knew about MDF.

Therein lies the heart of the matter: England and an English education, in which to carry knowledge was a social act, a statement of class and position. At Oxford, young men and women sat on oak benches in the wood-paneled dining hall, beneath large gilt-framed paintings of great men. Here were Adam Smith, Cardinal Manning, and Charles Algernon Swinburne peering down the lengths of their noses, knowingly. Over there were three prime ministers of Britain, there were writers, judges, and field marshals, and there were dukes and earls, enough to fill an entire legislature. One day Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, more recent old boys, may join them, but for now, beacons of the age of Empire illumined the great hall, their white flames of hair, their ermine, their cocked heads full of mission, their fucking belief and self-belief commanding obeisance. And beneath these paintings, beneath the vast vaulted ceiling, there sat men and women — boys and girls, many still in their teens, for God’s sake — speaking as if their every utterance was borne aloft by God’s grace, as if their opinions resonated reflection and scholarship, effortless superiority in the place of effort. They inflated what little they knew to fill the voids. Because everyone knew and accepted this — a prerequisite of being in denial — no one upset the precarious suspension of disbelief, everyone was complicit in a stage-managed pretense. This then, right here, against the stone and ivy, beneath leaded windows and time-beaten timbers, is where my hate began. In England, the root of true, rightly guided power, the essence of authority, was not learning but the veneer of knowledge, while projecting genuine ignorance of all that is vulgar. This applies to the new aristocracy as much as it ever did to the old, to the neoaristocracy , an international elite waving passports bloated with visas and residence permits, permanently everywhere, shielded from the vulgar by fast tracks and VIP lounges.

At Harvard, when I attended, it was different. Knowledge there, amid the innocence of the New World, was regarded differently. The people and their history was of another kind. Many were Jews and East Asians, many bearing the mark of outsider, for whom knowledge was never a citadel of power to be defended against the hordes but the object of assault, the prize to be fought for, so that when it was won, it was hard earned and, being wrested from those who would deny it them, it was opened up, the turrets blown apart by egalitarian rage. I did indeed expect it to be the same in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as in Oxford, England — power is power, isn’t it? — but it wasn’t. Maybe it will be one day, if power hardens over time, like water under pressure, as layers of snow turn to ice under the accreting burden of subsequent snowfalls. But that day has yet to come in America. That’s why America frightens and seduces Brits, especially the British elite. It bears the forbidden fruit of egalitarian hope, and everyone, high and low, can shake the branches of that tree.

I believe that Zafar was rather naïve about his American experience, though not wholly unaware of it; why else say when I attended , a caveat to his description of Harvard that could only serve as an out? Why bulletproof the eulogy unless you thought it vulnerable?

Am I naïve? he continued. Am I wrong? Let me tell you about the High Court judge — Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge — who interrupted counsel during a trial to ask who the Spice Girls were, when that girl band was at the peak of its popularity. Among the elite of Britain, education, which is to say the administration of knowledge and learning, at places like Eton, Harrow, Oxford, and Cambridge, is about ensuring ignorance of all the right things — or is that wrong things? — all about ensuring disdain toward them, or better still, blessed indifference.