In the Light of What We Know

I was given a copy of A House for Mr. Biswas over the summer in Cleveland. I think I may have been the only one in the group — and probably the whole cohort — excited to receive a free book, especially one by V. S. Naipaul. Like many things about that summer, the book led to some unexpected interactions, the sort that resist summary.

This book follows in the same authorial and literary tradition. In lieu of compression, I must say it was one of the most influential books I’ve read recently. In pursuit of compression, I’ll say the following.

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I think one way of understanding how we relate to others — albeit a flawed model — is that we all have different selves within us, each called upon for different situations. Things become interesting when these selves grow further and further apart, with less and less overlap. This, on some level, is a book about what happens when those personalities speak to each other.

I’ve written about this phenomenon before, to varying degrees of explicitness. I have one friend group that has a strong sense of taste and leverages (our collective) resources in creative ways. I have another, more disparate group of friends who are incredibly intelligent and seem to bend the world to their will. Then there’s my friends in college, my friends in Hong Kong, etc. I’m not confident many of these friends would get along as well as I do with each of them, which makes one wonder how it is possible to hold such different inner personas. Sometimes, it’s simple things that bind these selves together — a shared interest in mathematics or a set of literary influences — and most likely, it’s common personality traits or value systems.

I think, though, this is really a book about the unattainable, and I would categorise personal unity in that field. One can find roots and be ripped out of the ground; you can nearly have everything and find the last missing piece to be orders of magnitude harder to obtain. You can dream to be British and have that dream killed once you’re born; you can be British and still have that dream killed once you’re born.

So much of our lives is what happens to us. I used to praise the value of believing everything will work out in the face of what happens; I increasingly believe that we are the ones who make it so. We can’t break the immutable, just as we cannot verify everything that is true, but we can accept, and we can continue, and so long as we carve our own paths, heads bowed and hands up, the walls of knowledge will fall & life will begin.

Why did I like this “everything” book? I suppose there’s surface level reasons: global citizens & interesting characters & good witticisms & class hierarchy & epigraphs & delicious allusions that eluded me on occasion. What I actually liked was that the plot was unexpected. It builds & builds to this climax where you, as the reader, are unsure what transgression actually occurred. And you think it’s one thing when it’s really another, and it only takes two sentences to indirectly say the unsaid. Just as there are weeks that slip away and weeks where the world crashes, there are chapters where you learn mathematics and chapters where everything happens. There are advantages to the delusions of grandeur, but sometimes one must allow humility to enter their consciousness, in the light of what we know, and in the larger shadow of what we don’t.