The Summer Without Men

her?

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    Nobody was on the rampage. Nobody understood Nobody—that was the gist of the problem. The two of us had stumbled onto “the hard problem”: consciousness. What is it? Why do we have it? My highly conscious correspondent inveighed against the monumental stupidities of scientism and the atomization of processes that were clearly inseparable, “a flow, flood, wave, stream, not a series of rigid discrete pebbles lined up in a row! Any idiot should be able to divine this truth. Read your William James, that stupendous Melancholic!” A Thomas Bernhard of philosophy, Nobody indulged in splenetic rages that had a weirdly calming effect on me. I loved the Stupendous Melancholic, too, but I steered him to Plutarch’s flux and flow, the Greek wit who railed against the Stoics in his On Common Conceptions:
     
1. All individual substances are in flux and motion, letting go parts of themselves and receiving others coming from elsewhere.
2. The numbers and quantities to which they come or from which they go do not remain the same but become different, as the substance accepts a transformation with the said comings and goings.
3. It is wrong that it has become prevalent through custom that these changes are called growth and diminution. It would be appropriate that they should instead be called creation and destruction ( phthorai ), because they oust a thing from its established character into a different one, whereas growth and diminution happen to a body that underlies the change and remains throughout it.
    The story is old. When does one thing become another? How can we tell? He attacked Boris, too, as a naïf, a man whose notions of a sub or primal self were absurd, misplaced. “You can’t locate the self in neural networks!” I defended my alienated family member with some vigor, arguing that self was an elastic term certainly, but Boris was quite specific about what he meant—that he was talking about an underlying biological system necessary for a self. According to my invisible comrade, not only Boris but everybody was asking the wrong questions, with the exception of Nobody himself, isolated spokesman for a synthetic vision that would unite all fields, end expert culture, and return thought to “dance and play.” A utopian nihilist is what he was, a utopian nihilist in a manic phase. I kept thinking what he really needed was a good, long head rub. And yet, I did say to myself, When I was mad, was I myself or not myself? When does one person become another?
    Do you remember, I wrote to Boris, that evening two years ago when we realized we had just had exactly the same thought, not an obvious one at all, a rather eccentric notion that was brought about by some mutual catalyst, and you said to me, “You know, if we lived together another hundred years we would become the same person?” Ton amie, Mia
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    When Alice didn’t show up in class and I asked for information, the girls played dumb, or at least, that is what I guessed. I didn’t know whether the hospital rumor was true, and it seemed silly to perpetuate it, so I went to the source. I called Alice’s house, her mother answered, and she told me that Alice had been ill with severe stomach pains and had been rushed to the hospital, but the doctors had found nothing and had sent her home after a night of tests. When I asked how her daughter was feeling, she said she seemed to be out of pain but was listless and low and refused to go back to class. With all the delicacy I could muster I said that there had been talk about “a joke” on Alice among the girls, and it had worried me. I wanted to speak to Alice. The woman was obliging, even eager, I thought, and I heard in her voice that particular note of maternal fear founded not on evidence but on a feeling.
    Alice did not get up for me. I was ushered into her abnormally neat pale blue room, where she lay on top of her pale blue bedspread covered with white cumulus clouds and stared at the ceiling, her arms crossed over her chest like a corpse that had been prepared for burial. I pulled a chair near her bed, sat down on it, and listened as her mother discreetly pulled the door shut behind her. The girl’s face was masklike. As I spoke to her, she didn’t move a muscle. I told her we had missed her in class, that it wasn’t the same without her, that I was sorry she had been ill but hoped she would return soon, once she was fully recovered.
    Without turning