When you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire — and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company you may muster, can only be faced alone. But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from the future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records — in words, sound, pictures — you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’
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Julian Barnes’ novel The Sense of an Ending is the story of a man coming to terms with the elusive past. Divided into two parts, the first part follows Tony Webster and his friends at school, “Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit.” The last to join their clique is Adrian, more serious and mysterious than the others, certainly more intelligent, the other boys embrace him, secretly vying for Adrian’s attention and good opinion. The group drifts apart when they go to university and then Adrian’s life takes a sad and unexpected turn and all of them, especially Tony, move on and try to forget.
In the second part of the novel, Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career, a marriage and a friendly divorce. He gets along with his daughter and his ex-wife. He’s given up on his youthful passions and lived a steady, but blameless life. However, an unexpected letter from a lawyer leads Tony on a search through his seemingly straightforward past, suddenly full of shadows.
At a slim 150-pages, Barnes’ novel is best read in one sitting (preferably on a rainy day with cup after cup of your favorite hot beverage). It is a lucid page-turning meditation on memory, remorse, our collective unreliability as narrators and how little we actually remember or can say we know for sure. The mystery at the heart of The Sense of an Ending is relatively mundane, but Barnes creates genuine tension from Tony’s growing realization that his own history, the well-worn paths of stories he has told himself and others over and over again, might be slightly untrue and, consequently, completely wrong. The appearance of long forgotten details and new information force Tony to rearrange his memories and with these shifts, his sense of identity.
It is the slightness of his errors, the subtlety of his misunderstandings that are most interesting here. Tony is cast as a decidedly ordinary man, he hasn’t spent his life creating Big-Fish-sized stories or outright lies, his stories are mostly true, but still wrong. We have this disorienting experience in small ways all the time — meeting someone, sizing them up, interpreting their motivations through the prism of our feelings about their looks, their words, how they seem to us, our mood in that moment, our general predisposition to like or distrust. Then we get more information, we realize that we’ve taken their shyness for snobbery, their charisma for depth, their broken heart for unkindness. The question at the heart of the novel is how much do we really remember and how accurate are those memories? If we are apt to forget or never have all of the information, how much do we really understand about others or ourselves?
***
There’s a story about my childhood that I’ve told several times during the last few years. It’s about my seven-year-old self lying in bed long after I’ve been put to bed, sweaty with fear and anxiety because I’m trying to figure out where God came from — if he created us, who created him? Where did he come from? I remember going round and round, growing more and more agitated — it felt like those dreams where you are falling, a panicky descent into an abyss — until I decided that the answer is unknowable and I had to put the question out of my mind. I think I’ve been telling this story because it seems to represent something, a foreshadowing of the twists and turns my faith has taken as an adult. The memory of late-night grappling with the existence of God has been given more weight as I’ve grappled with loss of faith and how little I know as an adult. However, this portrait of myself as a young skeptic is not the whole story of who I was as a child. I do not have any distinct memories of bearing my testimony, pure-hearted and fully flushed with belief, but this is probably because it was more common. I was a skeptic in that moment, but I was more often a believer.
In the weeks since I read the novel, I’ve been thinking about the fluidity of my own memories, how they can be true, but not the whole story, and I’ve also been thinking about truth and how we construct the narratives of our religion, especially the multiple versions of the First Vision.
-The woods.
-A prayer.
-The transcendent.
All of the recorded and reported versions contain these elements, but the elements shift and change meaning, sometimes very subtly, in the retelling. Whether this means nothing or everything depends on where you stand. For me, it illustrates the difficulty of articulating spiritual experiences and the mutability of memory. It is easy for me to imagine Joseph Smith telling himself and others slightly different stories about the day in the woods as his understanding of his own role and purpose evolved, as certain aspects of his impressions seemed more or less important and as he was speaking to different audiences. The young man sees an experience with deity and a forgiveness of his sins. The experience is personal, intimate, between himself and the Lord. Later, the authority of God himself is invoked, the day in the woods becomes a marker of his role as prophet and leader of a new church, especially as the story is retold after Joseph Smith’s death and the story moves to the center of Mormons’ understanding of themselves. Or maybe I read it that way because that is the way it was told to me, countless times in lessons and meetings. Joseph Smith did X and X means this. But I’m not sure any of us really know what it means beyond our personal, subjective, changeable understanding.
Seeing my own memories and the First Vision this way moves me away from certainty and towards complexity, in awe of the layers of human memory and understanding. For much of my life, I found this groundlessness terrifying. Now I find it simultaneously liberating and sobering. Where does it leave you?
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Your post reminds of a very important article in my own spiritual journey by Lavinia Anderson ‘A Prayer under the Pepper Tree’ in BYU Studies. She collects and analyzes all the available accounts of a particular spiritual experience shared by Elder McKay and others on a Pacific Island. This is line resonates clearly with your post: “spiritual experiences are often untidy, paradoxical, unfolding their meaning slowly over time as the participants understanding matures and as other experiences illuminate it”.
Further I am reminded of the extent to which our identities are narratives, carefully constructed and, ultimately, quite fragile.
What a beautiful quote, thank you for sharing.
I’ve been reading a book by Pema Chodron (over the last year or so it seems I’m always reading something from Chodron.) The other day I was reading a chapter about regarding all dharmas (paths, moments) as a dream, which seemed to fit in quite nicely with the topic of this post, which had been on my mind for weeks. And I was thinking, yes, I’m really getting that — all dharmas are dreams.
And then this morning I read:
Your post was very eloquent and beautifully worded. Thank you.
Thanks for this Heidi. I appreciate you connecting your faith transition to a current literary work. Looking to the arts for the development of ethical and aesthetic judgment is not something that modern Mormon culture does well. For me, finding any sort of narrative to work through the issues that arise in the re-negotiation of my Mormon identity has been hugely helpful. So thanks for the book tip. It sounds great.
Curse you. As if I didn’t have enough books to read already, my desk is already invisible thanks to the piles of books on it and then you go and write a wonderful view that only adds to the ever increasing list of books to read. But seriously, thanks, I want to read this book now, rather then out of general obligation for my studies.
Job done, then. :)
I LOVE julian barnes. His words are kind of the soundtrack of my faith journey. Thank you for writing this. I haven’t gotten around to reading this one yet but it just jumped up in priority on my bookshelf.
After reading Being Wrong by Kathryn Shultz and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Dan Arieli’s Predictably Irrational, I was pretty well up to speed with the notion that our memories are simply a narrative we compose and recompose to make sense of our experiences. How we see an event is a subjective slice when it occurs and changes dramatically over time. About all I can really assert when I recall an event is that this is how I presently feel/think about a prior event and it is likely only loosely related to what happened. I realize my recollection will be deeply flawed. I don’t know if Barnes spends a lot of time keeping up on psychology or behavior economics, but The Sense of an Ending struck me as a masterful work of fiction that illustrates cutting edge thinking on non-fiction ideas about how our minds work.
As for Joseph Smith, who knows what he saw in the Sacred Grove? Who knows what he thinks he saw? Who knows what someone thinks Joseph thinks he saw? Did Joseph know that his recollection of events changed over time? Was he aware that by simply recalling events he was probably causing his recollection to be altered? We often discuss the Sacred Grove like it’s a hard science, like it’s quantifiable and unchangeable. But for me it’s easier to examine it in the context of a liberal art, something that has multiple meanings and interpretations. It’s easier for me to look for meaning in Joseph’s experience rather than fact.
I am a fiction challenged reader but Barnes was a wonderful discovery. I look forward to reading more of his work. The Sense of an Ending was jam packed full of meaning.
Beautiful, Heidi. I relate to that story and all that you said about it. I wish I could articulate as well as Julian Barnes and you do. I’m adding this to my Goodreads list immediately.