The Intimacy Of Mind

Author's Note:

This essay, like many of the essays I write, came out of the actual business of writing a novel. I rarely know in advance what the deeper argument of a book is going to be. I find it by following the characters, by noticing what keeps returning, by listening when a scene begins to mean more than I intended. Sometimes I stop because a character has done something I do not quite understand. Sometimes an image keeps appearing, or an old question comes back wearing different clothes. Then I begin writing around it, not to explain the novel so much as to understand what the novel may already know. These essays grow out of that process. They are part reflection, part excavation, part conversation with the work itself. The novel changes the essay, the essay sometimes changes the novel, and both keep moving toward questions I did not know I was asking when I began.Romantic intellectual intimacy occurs when desire is not simply for the other person, but for continued access to the other person’s consciousness. That is a different proposition from attraction. Attraction may begin in a room, in the body, in the glance held a fraction too long. Literature has made a considerable industry of that moment. Intellectual intimacy requires time. A mind has to reveal itself slowly, through contradiction, argument, memory, uncertainty, enthusiasm, prejudice, silence. One has to discover not simply what another person thinks, but what that person notices. That may be the beginning of everything. What does she see that no one else sees? What does he hear inside a piece of music that never occurred to you before? Suddenly the attraction is not simply toward the person. It is toward the world as it appears when that person is looking at it.

The salon novel is particularly suited to this kind of intimacy because it does not require every conversation to carry the luggage of plot. Two people can begin talking about a painting and somehow arrive at childhood. They can disagree about a book and discover, without meaning to, that they are arguing about forgiveness. They can speak about Napoleon, wine, weather, God, war, oysters, old churches, whether animals possess memory, and eventually discover they have spent the evening describing themselves. Nothing has happened in the conventional sense. Everything has happened. Thought itself has become action.

Jane Austen understood this long before anyone needed a term for it. Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy become interesting not because they are attracted to one another but because each disturbs the other’s certainty. Elizabeth forces Darcy to look at the arrogance concealed inside his understanding of himself. Darcy forces Elizabeth to examine the pleasure she takes in being right about people. Their intimacy develops through correction. They become dangerous to one another intellectually before they become necessary emotionally. Something similar happens between Jane Eyre and Rochester. Rochester has money, age, experience, theatricality, the authority of a man accustomed to controlling the room. Jane has almost nothing except sovereignty over her own mind, and she will surrender everything before she surrenders that. Rochester’s desire for her becomes convincing because she resists absorption. He cannot simply possess her and therefore has to encounter her.

George Eliot pushes the question further. Middlemarch is filled with people who fail one another because they cannot imagine another consciousness existing independently of their own needs. Casaubon does not really see Dorothea. Rosamond does not really see Lydgate. They see functions, expectations, mirrors. Eliot’s great moral act is the effort of imagining that another human being possesses an interior life every bit as elaborate as our own. Intellectual intimacy begins there, with the admission that another mind is not our territory.

Proust takes us into darker water. Marcel’s desire for Albertine is inseparable from his inability to know her. Every attempt at knowledge produces another uncertainty, and uncertainty produces the desire for greater possession. Here the hunger for another consciousness becomes dangerous. To know becomes confused with controlling. To understand becomes confused with owning. The beloved must explain herself, account for herself, surrender those territories of experience the lover cannot enter. The more inaccessible she remains, the greater the desire to close the distance.

Here the beast enters.

For Sam Douglas, as he first appears in The Madness of Beauty’s Light, the beast and the man might occupy opposite sides of a ledger, but the accounting is never simple. The beast wants certainty. He wants possession, loyalty, the body accounted for, the past accounted for. He wants to know where someone has been, what she meant, whom she loved, whether she will remain. The man understands that another consciousness cannot be possessed and that intimacy requires precisely the thing possession fears: separateness. Yet the mistake would be to make the beast evil and the man virtuous. Both are forms of intelligence. Both may have kept Sam alive. Both may destroy him.

Sam’s difficulty, if it can be called a difficulty, is finding the balance appropriate to whatever society he happens to inhabit. Travel makes the calculation unstable. Travel through countries, centuries, classes, wars, memories and cultures means the rules keep changing. What looks like restraint in one place may look like cowardice in another. What one society calls masculine another calls barbaric. Violence that is monstrous in a drawing room may be necessary on a battlefield. Tenderness that is admired in one century might be regarded as weakness in another. Possessiveness may masquerade as devotion. Distance may masquerade as dignity. The ledger changes because the world around him changes.

Memory makes the calculation harder still. We carry obsolete selves into new circumstances. A response learned when it was necessary can survive long after the danger has disappeared. The instinct that once saved a man’s life can later destroy a marriage. The armor appropriate to one landscape becomes grotesque in another, yet the body remembers wearing it. The past keeps voting in the present. Sam therefore is not moving toward some final enlightened version of himself. He is continually recalibrating. Which part of me belongs here? Which part of me belongs to another century, another woman, another war, another frightened version of myself? And if I set that self aside, what happens when I need him again?

That question makes the beast/man ledger more interesting than a moral opposition. The beast may recognize danger before the man does. The man may recognize tenderness before the beast permits it. One knows how to survive. The other knows why survival alone is insufficient. Neither can be entirely trusted, and neither can be discarded. The drama lies in choosing which voice should answer this particular moment and accepting the cost when the choice is wrong.

This is where intellectual intimacy becomes particularly important. The woman capable of reaching Sam intellectually would not be the woman who tames the beast. That is too easy and finally too sentimental. She would be the woman who sees why the beast exists. She may even recognize moments when it is necessary. What she refuses is his use of necessity as an alibi when the danger has passed. She knows enough of his mind to distinguish instinct from excuse. She can say no to him without ceasing to understand him. Perhaps more importantly, he allows her no to disturb him.

There is enormous intimacy in that disturbance. Romantic intellectual intimacy does not require constant agreement. Agreement can become a narcotic. The beloved mind has to remain other or it ceases to be interesting. The important question is not, Do you think as I do? It is, Why do you see this differently? One person says something certain. The other says no. Not angrily, perhaps not even loudly. Simply no. Because her judgment matters, the certainty becomes unstable. He has to think again. There may be no more intimate intellectual act than allowing another person to endanger an idea you have carried for years.

A.S. Byatt makes this almost literal in Possession, where scholarship becomes courtship. Roland Michell and Maud Bailey begin by reading other people and end by reading one another. Manuscripts, poems, letters, interpretations, arguments become erotic objects because each reveals not simply information but a way of seeing. Intelligence itself, however, is not intimacy. Two intelligent people can perform cleverness at one another indefinitely and never expose anything. Intellectual intimacy begins when performance stops, when one offers the other an unfinished thought.

“I have sometimes wondered…”

Then silence.

The other waits.

That waiting matters. An unfinished thought is vulnerable because it has not yet acquired its defenses. It may be foolish. It may contradict something said yesterday. It may lead nowhere. To allow another person access to the unfinished regions of the mind is a form of trust. Emotional intimacy says, I can tell you what happened to me. Intellectual intimacy says, I can tell you what I think happened to me although I am no longer certain. Romantic intellectual intimacy goes further still: Help me think about it.

At that point the other consciousness begins entering the architecture of the self. One begins collecting things for it. A paragraph in a book. A story overheard at dinner. A peculiar cloud. A piece of music. Something ridiculous on a train. “I saw something today you would have liked.” It is an almost perfect declaration because it means that in the other person’s absence, her consciousness remained present. Desire has moved inward. One is no longer merely waiting to see the beloved. One is waiting to continue the conversation.

That is also why absence reveals intellectual intimacy so clearly. Something happens and instinctively you turn toward someone who is not there. You know what she would say. Perhaps even more intimately, you know she would disagree. The beloved becomes an anticipated intelligence. Over time the two people construct a private archive. Remember Lisbon. Remember the waiter in Arles. Remember what you said about the moon. Entire histories contract into phrases. A subject abandoned twenty years earlier can return with a different meaning because the people discussing it are no longer the people who began the conversation.

The salon novel has room for this recurrence. Indeed, recurrence may be one of its great strengths. A conventional narrative can be anxious about repetition because it has been taught that everything must advance. But human beings return to things. Memory returns. Desire returns. Old arguments return wearing different clothes. At thirty, two people discuss whether forgiveness is possible. At sixty they ask the same question after one has given the other something to forgive. The words may hardly change. Everything else has.

There is another use for this kind of intimacy in Sam’s world. Once another consciousness has become sufficiently present inside his own, it can loosen his attachment to the time and place in which he is standing. Intellectual intimacy becomes, in a sense, the grease on the skids. Sam already possesses a proclivity to descend into another world, another time, another memory, but another mind can give him the first slight push. A remark, a disagreement, a remembered sentence, the peculiar way someone once looked at a thing can disturb the apparent solidity of the present. He does not merely remember the person. He begins seeing through the consciousness the person left behind.

This matters because Sam’s movement through time is not really travel in the conventional sense. He does not leave one chronological location and arrive neatly in another. The worlds lie beside one another. Memory, history, physical sensation and present consciousness become adjacent until the boundary separating them is no longer particularly useful. Intellectual intimacy prepares him for that condition because it has already taught him that consciousness itself is permeable. Another person can inhabit his thinking without becoming him. A former self can therefore inhabit the present in much the same way. So can a dead person. So can a century.

The opening of The Hidden Wake makes the process physical before it becomes philosophical. Sam sits at the helm of Delphis in the middle of the Atlantic at night. Above him are the stars. Below him, plankton flare green as the hull and rudder disturb the black water. The ordinary references by which a person locates himself begin disappearing. Europe exists somewhere beyond an invisible horizon. Land has become an idea. The instruments glow red in the darkness, small assertions of human order surrounded by an ocean indifferent to them. Above is one universe. Below is another. Sam is sailing between them.

This is not simply atmosphere. It is the bodily experience of the novel’s conception of time. Once the horizon disappears, the assumption that one thing lies clearly ahead and another clearly behind becomes harder to maintain. The wake is behind the boat, certainly, but its light exists only because the boat is passing through it now. The past illuminates itself through present disturbance. That is almost exactly what memory does.

Sam is especially susceptible to these crossings because he does not seem to experience the past as something completed. A remembered person does not remain obediently in memory. A historical place does not remain historical. The dead do not remain entirely dead. They become available through association, sensation and thought. A smell, a temperature, the quality of light, a woman’s sentence remembered twenty years later, and suddenly chronology has lost some of its authority.

Intellectual intimacy gives this tendency another dimension. When Sam has known someone deeply enough to anticipate how she would see a thing, her consciousness becomes capable of accompanying him into places she has never been. He can stand somewhere alone and nevertheless experience the place in dialogue. What would she notice? What would she question? What would she refuse to believe? The absent mind changes the visible world. It is no longer merely Sam looking.

From there the distance between conversation, memory and historical imagination becomes surprisingly small. If another person’s consciousness can remain alive inside his perception, why should another version of himself not do the same? Why should a place not retain its former inhabitants? Why should a ruined wall belong entirely to the century in which Sam happens to touch it?

The salon form permits this descent without requiring a trapdoor. There need not be a declaration that we have entered memory. There need not even be a clean transition. Sam can look at something long enough for the present to become porous. A conversation can wander until another century is sitting at the table. A physical sensation can summon an experience before he understands why. History can arrive as intimacy rather than information.

Travel allows this recurrence to become even more complicated. Sam can encounter the same philosophical question in another country or another century and discover that the answer he once considered moral no longer fits. Places interrogate us. Societies do too. We like to imagine character as something fixed that travels intact through the world, but perhaps character is partly revealed by the compromises required to inhabit different worlds. The question is not simply who Sam is. The question is who Sam becomes in Paris, in Africa, at sea, in war, in love, in memory, in another century altogether, and whether some recognizable self survives the transformations.

Intellectual intimacy offers one possible continuity. Another person may see the transformations while also remembering the earlier selves. She knows the man he was and the man he is pretending not to have been. She remembers an argument he has forgotten. She notices when a belief has shifted. She can recognize an old fear appearing beneath a new vocabulary. This gives her enormous power, and intellectual intimacy should never be treated as automatically noble. Knowledge creates weapons. The person who knows the architecture knows where the walls are thin.

“You used to ask me what I thought.”

An entire marriage can live inside that sentence.

So can its opposite.

“What do you think?”

Years after curiosity disappeared, the question itself can become an act of love.

Perhaps that is what separates intellectual intimacy from simple compatibility. Compatibility says we enjoy the same books, dislike the same politicians, laugh at the same jokes. Intellectual intimacy says I remain curious about what happens inside you, even when what happens there inconveniences me. Romantic intellectual intimacy says I desire continued access to that mystery without requiring the mystery to disappear.

The beast cannot tolerate that indefinitely. He wants the account settled.

The man understands that there is no settling it.

Yet even that distinction remains too clean. Sometimes the beast’s hunger is exactly what drives Sam toward another person. Sometimes the man’s restraint may become another way of refusing intimacy. Civility can conceal fear as effectively as violence can. Self-control can become distance. The ledger therefore never balances because neither column contains only virtue or only danger. Sam’s task is not to defeat one side but to know, as precisely as he can, which world he is standing in and which part of himself he has brought into it.

This is also why his movement into other times and worlds cannot be separated from the beast/man argument. The body remembers rules the intellect has discarded. The beast carries old responses forward. The man tries to determine where he actually is. Sometimes the supposedly primitive response belongs perfectly to the world Sam has entered. Sometimes civilization itself is the anachronism. He is not merely passing through different periods. Each period alters the terms by which he judges himself.

So the dramatic question is not simply whether Sam can descend into another world or time. He does that almost too easily. The question is what he brings back.

A man cannot repeatedly enter other consciousnesses, other memories and other centuries and remain entirely convinced that the present has exclusive claim upon him. Each descent leaves something behind and retrieves something else. The borders become less secure. The ledger acquires entries made in different currencies.

That, perhaps, is why intellectual intimacy matters so much to Sam. Loving another mind gives him practice in crossing without possession. He enters without becoming. He is altered without disappearing. It teaches him the movement the larger novel asks him to make again and again: from one consciousness into another, from one society into another, from the present into memory, from memory into history, and back again, carrying something that was not his when he left.

That seems to me a particularly salon understanding of character. There is no final correction, no completed self waiting at the end of the novel. There is movement, memory, contradiction, recurrence. A man encounters different worlds and discovers that each calls a different self out of him. A woman encounters those selves and refuses both the flattering simplification of the man and the convenient condemnation of the beast. They continue looking at one another. They continue arguing. They continue noticing.

The conventional romance asks whether they will end up together.

The salon novel can ask something stranger.

What happens when two consciousnesses have inhabited one another long enough that departure no longer entirely separates them?

The body can leave. The country can change. The century can change. The lover can disappear into memory. Yet something remains because each has entered the way the other thinks. The surviving consciousness carries an argument, a question, a phrase, an objection. Another mind has become part of its internal weather without ever becoming its possession.

The beast wants to say: be mine.

The man may eventually learn to say: tell me what you see.

The stars above. The green fire below. The boat moving through darkness between them.

Sam is already learning how to cross.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847.

Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. Chatto & Windus, 1990.

Dodgson, Scott. The Madness of Beauty’s Light.

Dodgson, Scott. “The Hidden Wake.”

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871–72.

Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. 1913–1927.

scott-dodgson.com.