John Banville - The Infinities

His mother, not to be outdone by his aunt, gave him a little clothbound book of curious and amusing facts about numbers. Here he first encountered the magic square. How strange it was, to add up the numbers in the boxes along each side and down each diagonal and come out every time with the same result, the same and yet, for him, always somehow new. This impression of novelty among identical values he could not account for. How could fifteen be different from fifteen? And yet the difference was there, a sort of aura, unseen but felt, like air, like warmth — yes, yes, we gods were there with him even then — like the breath he breathed, the breath that sometimes caught and swelled suffocatingly in his lungs, so avid was he for more facts, more conundrums, more solutions. He borrowed books from the library, by people with letters after their unpronounceable names. He tried to devise puzzles and problems of his own. The terms eluded him, they squirmed and writhed, slipping through the mesh of his mind. He would close his eyes and seem to be seeing into clear depths, where the figures glinted, but when he reached down he would grasp nothing but shards, shards and surds, and all would become clouded and thick with murk.

He counts. How many steps it takes him to walk to school. How many times in the course of a class the teacher will say a certain word. On the way home he counts how many cracks there are in the pavement, how many men he will meet and how many women, how many counted beats it will take to get from one telegraph pole to the next, how often that bird on that bough will chirp before he has passed underneath the tree. At night in bed he counts his heartbeats. The impossibility of accuracy torments him. So many this, so many that, but what before anything is the unit?

And then there is the question of time. What for instance is an instant? Hours, minutes, seconds, even, these are comprehensible, since they can be measured on a clock, but what is meant when people speak of a moment, a while — a tick — a jiffy? They are only words, of course, yet they hang above soundless depths. Does time flow or is it a succession of stillnesses — instants — moving so swiftly they seem to us to join in an unbreaking wave? Or is there only one great stillness, stretching everywhere, in all directions, through which we move like swimmers breasting an infinite, listless sea? And why does it vary? Why is toothache time so different from the time when he is eating a sweet, one of the many sweets that in time will cause another cavity? There are lights now in the sky that set out from their sources a billion years ago. But are there lights? No, only light, flowing endlessly, moving, every instant.

Everything blurs around its edges, everything seeps into everything else. Nothing is separate.

Has the early train gone by yet? Has his wife paid her morning visit?

The waters of time muddy, the figures flicker in silence.

The father of the gods is in a sulk. It is always thus when one of his girls, all unknowing, goes back to her true, that is, her rightful, mate, as she must. What does he expect? He comes to them in disguise, tricks himself out as a bull, an eagle, a swan, or, as in the present case, a husband, and thinks to make them love him — him, that is, and not what or who he is pretending to be, as if he were a mortal just like them. Ah, yes, love, what they call love, it drives him to distraction, for it is one of that pair of things our kind may not experience, the other being, obviously, death. He is convinced the two are intimately linked, to the point, in his case, at least, that one conduces to the other. In this I grant he may be somewhat in the right. Certainly their love takes it out of him. I do not mean the act itself, which gives no pleasure to us since aeons ago, when the world was young and fecund still and required our constant generative attentions — remember those herds of mares all standing with their hindquarters turned to the north in hope of an inseminating breath from Boreas the amber-winged? Nor is it the effort, the vain effort, of compelling a passionate response from them that drains his strength and leaves him limp and languishing, no, but something in the exchange itself, in the needful shuttling to and fro between her humanness and his divinity, this is what debilitates him so, even as it delights him. Hence he keeps coming back for more. Each time he dips his beak into the essence of a girl he takes, so he believes, another enchanting sip of death, pure and precious. For of course he wants to die, as do all of us immortals, that is well known.

This love, this mortal love, is of their own making, the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us? We gave them that irresistible compulsion in the loins — Eros and Ananke working hand in hand — only so they might overcome their disgust of each other’s flesh and join willingly, more than willingly, in the act of procreation, for having started them up we were loath to let them die out, they being our handiwork, after all, for better or, as so often, worse. But lo! see what they made of this mess of frottage. It is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral, complete with baptistry, steeple, weathercock and all. Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable selfobsession. This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not.

And all the time the entire thing is a self-induced fantasy. What my Dad, lusting after their love, does not see and will not hear said is that that which love loves is precisely representation, for representation is all it knows. Or not even that much. Show me a pair of them at it and I will show you two mirrors, rosetinted, flatteringly distorted, locked in an embrace of mutual incomprehension. They love so they may see their pirouetting selves marvellously reflected in the loved one’s eyes. It is immortality they are after — yes, what we would be shot of they long for, or at least the illusion of it, to seem to live forever in an instant of passion. Hence their ceremonies of surrender and engorgement. Agape ? — aye, at that feast they eat each other, gobble each other up. And this, this it is that great Zeus covets, their little manufactured transports from which he is excluded.

Those troubadours and their lays have a lot to answer for.

Maddened by prurience, like an old dog by his fleas, my divine father scratches and scratches, until he has exhausted himself. No bull or bird but a mangy old dog, yes, that is what he is. Or, if you prefer, a hapless boy, a shepherd lad, say, hunched in hiding in some Attic grove, spying on a bevy of nymphs at their bath and frantically rubbing himself and stifling yelps of anguished ecstasy. What else can he do, my poor old man? They will not love him — they do not even know it is he, seeing only whatever outlandish disguise it is he presents himself in and lacking the imagination to conceive of a god. And yet he goes on pressing them for a word, a pledge, a plight. It is pathetic. This morning, with young Adam’s wife, he was more abject in his entreaties than I think I have ever known him. It was shaming, and I would have absented myself from the scene were there not in me, too, sometimes, a panting Daphnis spying on a world of pleasures and passions beyond his savouring.

Besides, I had been working hard and had earned a little diversion. Not only did my Dad set me to monitor the house and ensure he was not disturbed at his illicit amours but I also had to render the lady Helen’s husband sleepless so he would go night-wandering and vacate the bed. Then — and wait till you hear this — then I was commanded to hold back the dawn for fully an hour, to give the old boy extra time in which to work his wiles on the unsuspecting girl. Imagine what effort that little feat of prestidigitation involved: the stars stopped in their courses, the rolling world restrained, all chanticleers choked. And then the readjustments afterwards! You try telling that hotspur Phaeton why he was reined in, or rosy-fingered Aurora why I had to shove her in the face. But an hour of suspended day there must be, and was.