Two conflicting images have come my way recently. Firstly, with my book club I read a book called The Anomaly. It’s about a flight that takes place first in March and then in June. Exactly the same flight, same people, same pilot, lands again three months later. And so, once the US Government have fiddled about with logistics within a very unique situation, people start to meet their doppelganger – eg the March ones meet the June ones. One is looking and talking to oneself. Quite a weird thought. After all, I guess we often feel interested in how other people see us versus how we see ourselves and so this presents just that opportunity. But would one really want that? To meet oneself?
The second image came when we had a school reunion of Cranborne Chase, Class of 1967, and there was a friend I hadn’t seen for 58 years but enjoyed talking to. I was also flattered that she had brought a copy of my novel No Lemons in Moscow for me to sign for her. We shared experiences of the last years since we left school. And then a few days later she died. And so all of a sudden I was presented with another image – of not existing.
So those two strange images of firstly meeting myself and secondly non-existence made me horribly aware of both the strangeness and fragility of life and also of the limitations of one’s imagination.
There are many moments in life that are hard to imagine – one can never truly understand what it is to be a parent until one is one. One has these ludicrous ideas that it isn’t going to change one’s life, that one will be able to continue as a loving and functioning partner or spouse, carry on one’s work or career just as efficiently … and then one’s life is turned completely upside down by this demanding little creature that stimulates a love so strong that one could never have imagined it until it happened.
I think people who become ill with a life-threatening illness also meet a crossroads where their sense of self is turned upside down.
And all of this makes one wonder at life, wonder at what it means to be alive for these years one exists… and then doesn’t. And people talk of an afterlife but we have as yet been unable to prove that there is one. And so one bumbles along trying to make the most of it all, though as we get older and experience illness and death in those around us, we have to develop a resilience and an acceptance that it could be us next. This is the nature of life – looking forward to being grown up when we are children, being too busy to think whilst in middle life, and then longing for things to slow down as we live with that shadow hanging over us wondering ‘what is next’ and yet not being able to imagine it exactly.
One prepares for illness, a little, but one likes to imagine it won’t happen to oneself. One prepares for death but one really can’t imagine it other than wishing that it will be speedy and without pain.
Our minds are creative. They can imagine much but there are certain things that defy one and are, in truth, unimaginable. One is to meet oneself and the other is to be no more.
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