After the tenth year

This is a paper written for a man ten years out. Not because the one who left yesterday is the lighter in mind — but because he is at the beginning of the hardest year of his life: he has an argument he has not finished with, a family that has not yet said its piece, and a head that works all night. His need for someone to sit with him is greater than the need of the man in his tenth year, but it is a need for other words than these. These words call for a calm he does not have now, and it is no fault in him that he does not have it.

So I am writing to the tenth year.

To the time when everything has gone quiet. When the matter has become ordinary, and nobody asks you about it, and you no longer read on the subject and it does not concern you. And this is the truest moment for an accounting, because it is the one moment with no opponent in it.

And I will tell you from the first line what I am doing: I am drawing up an account, not frightening you. You will find in this paper no fire and no torment — not out of any softening on my part, but because frightening a man is no argument at all, and whoever has used it on you has wronged you and what he defends together. Half of this account is in your favour, and I shall begin with it.

And I say a second thing: I am calling you to reconsider. I had written in an earlier version 'and I am not asking you to reconsider', then I read it and found it a polite lie: a paper that counts prices out to you and sets two columns before you is a request to reconsider from its first line to its last. So I am asking, and you may refuse; and for me to deny in the next line what I am doing is a trick and not good manners.

First: what was gained — and may not be denied

A sin that was no sin. Take a model case — and I say model, not anecdote: a boy of thirteen through whose mind there passed a sentence he did not intend, and who spent two years believing himself fallen. Then a man who repeats his ablution four times, not out of piety but because there is a counter in his head that will not shut off. This is real pain, and it was laid on the shoulders of children where it should never have been laid. Whoever came out of it came out of something heavy, and its heaviness is not denied merely because the man who came out of it has become an opponent.

And a fear planted in childhood. Images at seven that a boy of seven cannot carry, said in some passing gathering and then settling in the head for twenty years. Whoever pulled them out of himself pulled out something that really was hurting him.

And an authority that speaks in heaven's name. A man who is wrong in a purely worldly matter and then makes disagreement with him disagreement with God, so that he is neither reviewed nor questioned. Whoever broke that in himself broke something that deserved breaking.

And I will not take this back from you after having given it to you. But I make one observation: most of these gains are a release from poor religiosity, not from religion.

And I had written after it 'so refuse it if you like, and nothing in the account changes' — which is not a true sentence, and I know that it is not true. If that observation held, the whole first column would be the mending of a local fault and not a gain from atheism, and that is a change in the account and not a footnote to it. So I put it forward carrying its own weight, and you refuse it if you hold that what you left was not a poor copy but the build of the thing itself — which is a reasonable answer, and an answer that voids my first column rather than adding to it. And I do not hide the weight of my claim by putting it somewhere it cannot be fought.

Second: and its price is not paid in the first year

And I do not exaggerate it. I am not saying that you live in darkness; that is the talk of a man who has never sat with any of you. I am saying four specific things, and what marks them off from the preaching of preachers is that they are paid late, so that they are not felt in the first year or in the second.

1 · Ready-made meaning. Meaning is made, and that is true and I do not dispute it — indeed I go further: the most exact of those who have written on the subject does not say 'make your meaning as you please', but requires that your attraction meet a worth in the thing itself. So it is not a mood conjured up, and this counts in your favour and not against you. Many make it and live a full life by it, and some of the best people I have known are among them.

But the made thing has one property that is passed over: what is made needs its maker present. Your meaning is tied to your work, or to your daughter, or to what you are building; and all of that stands by you. So if you weaken — a long illness, or a year in which you see that what you built in twenty years is less than what you promised yourself, or the collapse of the project you hung twelve years on — it weakens with you.

And ready-made meaning has the opposite property: its logic does not require you to be well. And I say this of the build of the thing and not of its people, or what is plainly seen would give me the lie: how many a believer's meaning has weakened at the first graveside, and the depressed among them loses his prayer before he loses his work, and 'the dark night' is a chapter written into the tradition of those people and no oddity within it. So the difference is in the construction and not in any guarantee to the man who holds it. Indeed I will add this for you: a fault in the ready-made is called a trial among us and so is not counted a fault — and that naming keeps the thing safe from examination, and it counts against me and not for me.

And none of this is an argument for its truth. The ready-made may be false and still work. I am only describing how the thing behaves under fault, because things are known under fault and not in health.

2 · The language of wrong. I do not mean that you cannot say 'this is evil'. You say it, and you say it more forcefully than many of my own community say it. What I mean is a narrower sentence: a man was wronged and died and was never put right. Not in a court, not in a history, not in anyone's memory — his due was taken and that was the end of it.

In what sense do we say of him that he 'was wronged' after everything is over? The act happened, and that is settled. But 'was never put right' is a sentence missing one of its terms: put right before whom? And a ledger kept where? The sentence works in practice in the courts, and stops when every door is shut.

And I do not put this to you the way a winner does, for you have two answers that I know: the weaker of them is that a wrong stays a wrong even if it is never redressed, and that asking for a ledger in heaven is consolation rather than knowledge.

And stronger than it is an answer I do not pass over: that 'a right' has a reference which subsists in nobody and stands in need of no ledger — as mathematics has truths with no place in time or space. It is a position that stands with its own people and has no defeat in it, and I am not the man to void it in a line. With it comes a third objection that tells: existence is not discharge. The theft of a right never redressed is theft, as an equation never solved is true; so the cutting off of the discharge does not entail the cutting off of the right. And the Euthyphro problem stands against me as it is: if the right is right because it was entered in the ledger then the ledger is its source, and if it was entered because it is right then in its existence it has no need of the ledger.

So I narrow my claim: I am not saying that you have lost the word's reference, I am saying that you have lost its discharge. That is narrower than what I wrote at first, and truer. And I say with it that the position which makes moral truths subsist in themselves also buys at a price with a name of its own, rather than getting it free.

And here is a man who is above suspicion in this business: Jean Améry, who came out of the Nazi camps and asked for no heaven and no settlement. His position in 'Ressentiments' is that the refusal to forgive is a moral stand and not a psychological incapacity, that being reconciled to what happened is a betrayal of the victim, and that what he demands is that the deed be undone in history rather than squared. So whoever has brought him forward as a witness to a need for a god has turned his text on its head.

And the truest thing to say is this: his text pulls this position of mine down rather than building it up. For if reconciliation with the crime is a betrayal of the victim, then a ledger in which the account is squared is the very thing Améry refuses, not a remedy for the emptiness I described. So the box I said was empty is not empty: there is an answer in it, only it is not my answer. And I set it out for you in full, not because I have a reply to it, but because a paper that hides it does not deserve to be read.

And I say it without putting it to work: Améry died by suicide in 1978. I build not one letter on his death, and I make him a witness to nothing — whoever does that has used a man who cannot answer back. I mention it only because anyone who knows what happened to him would read my silence about it as either ignorance or a trap, and both are worse.

3 · A door for guilt. The heaviest thing is what you do, not what is done to you. The man you were the cause of ruining, the mother you broke in a year that does not come back, and what you tell nobody. The mark remains — and on that we agree. What has gone is two things: the name and the door.

And I will illustrate the first, because I was too brief about it and was not understood: a friend of yours whose marriage you wrecked with a word. You can say 'I made a grievous mistake', and you can say 'I was a poor man that year', and both are descriptions of a past that happened and is over. What is no longer in your language is a word that makes the deed a standing debt that is demanded rather than an event gone by: that is, a word with a procedure attached to it. That is 'the name'. And the door is the procedure itself: that there should be someone at whose place one knocks.

And something else has been put in its place: 'forgive yourself'. And I do not make light of it — there is that in it which genuinely helps, and for the mending of the psychological mark left by moral injury a therapeutic model has been set out among war veterans — preliminary by the wording of its own title — which is neither publicity nor preaching. But the sentence, at bottom, is oddly built: the debtor discharges himself by himself. So if it helps, it helps as relief and not as acquittal. The two doors are different, and I hope they will not be run together in your mind — and this is no compliment to you, for I do not buy your attention with flattery.

And there is an objection here that strikes me in a vital place, and I put it as it stands: if the debt is owed to the man you ruined and to the mother you broke, from where does a third party who was not wronged get the standing to discharge it? So the oddity I threw at you is worse on my side. What I hold is that the wronged man's right is not cancelled by another's, and that the door I described is no erasure of the debt but a second entry alongside which the payment of the first is demanded. And this is the claim of a school which I state so that you may know where I stand, not so as to argue against you with it; and whoever has read forgiveness as a closing of the ledger has described something I do not defend. So what is left between us is a smaller difference than what I wrote at first: with you the mark is there with no procedure, and with me there is a procedure that does not cancel the right of the man it belongs to.

4 · A community that carries for you. And this is the thing I have heard complained of most in closed rooms — I am reporting on those I have sat with and not on a sample — and the thing least mentioned in argument, because it cannot be said in a debate: whoever says it looks weak.

If your country is like mine you know what I am describing: your father dies, and forty men come, half of whom you do not know. He is washed, and carried, and buried; and people sit for three days; and the food arrives with no asking and no arranging. You run nothing at all in the heaviest week of your life. This is a machine that works by itself, and you neither built it nor paid for it.

And I say it in full so that it does not become a false argument: this is a matter of society and not of theology, and it shows the truth of nothing. And a community like this can be built without religion, and has been built: in Denmark and Sweden there are networks of support that rest on no belief whatever, and the man who described them in the field described them as contented and not bleak. So the door is not closed in principle, and that is recorded against me.

But my question is practical and not doctrinal: has it been built in your city? And it is a question I do not bind you to answer, and I make no accusation of a 'no' in it — you are not required to build alone in ten years what a community built in fourteen centuries. I am only saying that what has not been built yet does not carry for you today.

Three moments — and I offer them as description, not stagecraft

I had once written these paragraphs with scenes timed to the minute: 'two weeks later, alone, in the car', and 'one hour after the birth'. Then a man from your side read them back to me and said: this is a contrivance suggesting that you know my insides better than I know them. And he is right. So I took the timings out and left the description bare: if you find it in yourself it is yours, and if you do not find it then my description is wrong, and you know yourself better than I do.

At the death of someone close. Not at the funeral; the funeral is busy. Some time after it, when the place empties. Those present had words to say, and you had a respectable silence. And it will pass, and people do pass through these things, and I claim nothing beyond that.

The difference I mean is between a man who came out of the room with a sentence and a man who came out with a piece of information — if you have not found it in yourself then I described you wrongly, and I do not bind you to what you did not find.

And at a birth. More than one man has told me that a gratitude welled up in him for which he could find no address; he says 'praise be to God' by the habit of the tongue and then catches himself, or says 'my God' and moves on. If it has not happened to you, let it be, for I am not describing your insides.

And I build nothing on this — a feeling is no evidence, and you are right to turn away anyone who makes it evidence. I am only drawing your attention to the fact that gratitude, as the word was laid down, is a construction with two ends to it. And you may say that there is a gladness with nobody thanked which does the same work, and that is a sayable thing; so the disagreement becomes one of wording and not of the state itself — and that is slighter than what I intended, and I concede it.

And at a wrong there is no way of redressing. And it is the place I described above. Its harshest form is when you are not the one wronged, but are standing looking at someone who was, with nothing in your hands for him, and nothing you can say to him but: 'I know'.

And on the other side: what the believer loses

Had I written the first column alone I would be a salesman and not a keeper of accounts.

He loses the difficulty of the question. And this is a loss counted against him and not for him: he has a sentence that shuts the door on pain before he feels it — 'wisdom' — and with it he puts out a question he ought to have burned in. And I have seen this often, and I have seen that a ready answer in the hand of a lazy man stops him from looking.

And he loses being questioned. A man in the majority is not asked for a proof. So he walks his whole life on a position he has never examined, and he does not have what you have: a price you paid which forced you to know why you were paying it. And this counts for you and not against you.

And he loses the ease of a man who does not love. And I put it briefly in one line and the reader passed over it, and to my mind it is the heaviest thing in this column, so I shall set it out: the problem of evil, for one who does not believe, is a puzzle of the intellect — the cruelty of the world is a fact to be described and resisted, and there is no betrayal in it, because there is nobody who was trusted. For me it is a complaint made to the face of one I love. A child dying of cancer at four puts me in a place it does not put you: you stand before a hideous fact, and I stand before a hideous fact and a question addressed to one I love. And the complaint is no lighter than the puzzle; more often it is harder. And this is a price on my own side, which I record as I recorded what is on yours.

And a question I ought to have asked: are these the prices of atheism or the prices of leaving?

And it is the strongest thing that has been put to me, and I bring it into the paper and not into a footnote.

The four that I counted out — the community that washes and buries, inherited meaning, a shared language, and the door — most of them are the prices of parting from a majority and not the prices of a creed. And the man born secular in a secular society buries his father by a machine that works by itself as well: a municipality, a funeral home, and colleagues from work, and he pays nothing under this head. So the head of community falls away from him entirely, and I concede it.

And what remains after that subtraction is narrower than what I counted out, and it is three and not four: made meaning's requirement that its maker be present, the cutting off of the discharge of a right and not of its existence, and the absence of a procedure in guilt. And these do not fall away by a change of country; they fall away by an answer to them. As for the fourth head, it is the price of geography and time and not the price of a position.

And what would void this paper?

I was asked: you wrote 'the ledger is not evidence' and did not say what would have to happen for you to say that you were wrong. And a paper that draws up an account without setting itself a condition of falsity remains a letter in the shape of a scale. So these are my conditions, and I am bound by them:

1 · If there is found a non-religious society in which the machinery of death, of mourning and of support stands as it stands in my own country — the fourth head falls entirely. And it has fallen, on what I have seen of the descriptions of Denmark and Sweden, and I struck it out above with my own hand.

2 · If it is established that made meaning holds up under fault as the inherited holds up, or better — the first head falls. And its measure is not a feeling: a man who has lived thirty years by a meaning he made and then lost what he built, does he hold or does he weaken? A question to be researched, and I do not claim to have researched it.

3 · If a right can be given a reference that needs no discharge, and the loss of the discharge is made good by something else — the second head falls. And I have put a position before you that says as much, and I did not void it.

4 · And if you say to me: 'I have been through these places and found in them nothing of what you describe' — then I believe you, and I do not tell you that you failed to know their name.

And the ledger is not evidence

And here I stop, before everything that has gone before is misunderstood.

Nothing in this paper weights truth or falsity. The bleak idea may be true, and the comfortable one may be false, and the universe is under no obligation to be fit to live in. So if your position is true, then everything I have counted against you is a price that must be paid, and no other position is bought with the price. And this is a letter and not a proof, and whoever has offered you a sheet of profit and loss as evidence has sold you goods under the wrong name.

So what is it good for, then? One thing only: that you should know what you bought.

For most of those I have known on both sides did not know. The man who came in thought that he had bought ease and found a question that does not sleep. And the man who went out thought that he had bought honesty for nothing.

And I do not claim that a bill is bound to reach you, nor that if you deny it you have hidden it from yourself — and I had written that in a first version and cut it, because a claim that cannot be answered is no claim at all: whoever makes your denial a witness against you has taken his words out of accounting and into fortune-telling. I say only this: if something of this passes through you, know its name; and if it does not pass then my description of you is wrong, and you know yourself better than I do.

And I ask one thing: that there should be two columns in your ledger and not one, and that in the column that is against you there should be something written in your own hand. And I have done that in this paper of mine as far as I am able: I struck out one head with my own hand, put an argument to you that pulls my own position down, and named what would void me.

To pay the price knowing its name is more honourable than to pay it thinking it free.