Barnes. Pdf

 
Chapters 
77
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they turned it up. They found the wreck of the Medusa not long ago, off the coast of Mauretania. There wasn't any hope of 
treasure, they knew that; and all they salvaged after a hundred arid seventy five years were a few copper nails from the frigate's 
hull and a couple of cannon. But they went and found it just the same. 
What else can love do? If we're selling it, we'd better point out that it's a starting-point for civic virtue. You can't love 
someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good 
lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me 
the tyrants who have been great lovers. By which I don't mean great fuckers; we all know about power as an aphrodisiac (an 
auto-aphrodisiac too). Even our democratic hero Kennedy serviced women like an assembly-line worker spraying car bodies. 
There is an intermittent debate, in these last dying millennia of puritanism, about the connection between sexual orthodoxy 
and the exercise of power. If a President can't keep his pants on, does he lose the right to rule us? If a public servant cheats on 
his wife does this make him more likely to cheat on the electorate? For myself, I'd rather be ruled by an adulterer, by some 
sexual rogue, than by a prim celibate or zipped-up spouse. As criminals tend to specialize in certain crimes, so corrupt 
politicians normally specialize in their corruption: the sexual blackguards stick to fucking, the bribe-takers to graft. In which 
case it would make more sense to elect proven adulterers instead of discouraging them from public life. I don't say we should 
pardon them - on the contrary, we need to fan their guilt. But by harnessing this useful emotion we restrict their sinning to the 
erotic sphere, and produce a countervailing integrity in their governing. That's my theory, anyway. 
In Great Britain, where most of the politicians are men, there's a tradition among the Conservative Party to interview the 
wives of potential candidates. This is, of course, a demeaning occasion, with the wife being vetted by the local members 
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for normality. (Is she sane? Is she steady? Is she the right colour? Does she have sound views? Is she a tart? Will she look good 
in photos? Can we let her out canvassing?) They ask these wives, who dutifully vie with one another in supportive dullness, 
many questions, and the wives solemnly swear their joint commitment to nuclear weapons and the sanctity of the family. But 
they don't ask them the most important question: does your husband love you? The question shouldn't be misunderstood as 
being merely practical (is your marriage free from scandal?) or sentimental; it's an exact enquiry about the candidate's fitness 
to represent other people. It's a test of his imaginative sympathy. 
We must be precise about love. Ah, you want descriptions, perhaps? What are her legs like, her breasts, her lips, what . 
colour is that hair? (Well, sorry.) No, being precise about love means attending to the heart, its pulses, its certainties, its truth, 
its power - and its imperfections. After death the heart becomes a pyramid (it has always been one of the wonders of the 
world); but even in life the heart was never heart-shaped. 
Put the heart beside the brain and see the difference. The brain is neat, segmented, divided into two halves as we imagine 
the heart should obviously be. You can deal with the brain, you think; it is a receptive organ, one that invites comprehension. 
The brain looks sensible. It's complicated, to be sure, with all those wrinkles and frowns and gulleys and pockets; it resembles 
coral, making you wonder if it might be surreptitiously on the move all the time, quietly adding to itself without your noticing. 
The brain has its secrets, though when cryptanalysts, maze-builders and surgeons unite, it will surely be possible to solve those 
mysteries. You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible. Whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a 
fucking mess. 
Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that's why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that 
the mechanical and the material needn't be in charge. Religion has become either wimpishly workaday, or terminally crazy, or 
merely businesslike - confusing spirituality with charitable donations. Art, picking up confidence from the decline of 
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religion, announces its transcendence of the world (and it lasts, it lasts! art beats death!), but this announcement isn't accessible 
to all, or where accessible isn't always inspiring or welcome. So religion and art must yield to love. It gives us our humanity, 
and also our mysticism. There is more to us than us. 
The materialist argument attacks love, of course; it attacks everything. Love boils down to pheromones, it says. This 
bounding of the heart, this clarity of vision, this energizing, this moral certainty, this exaltation, this civic virtue, this 
murmured 1 love you, are all caused by a low-level smell emitted by one partner and subconsciously nosed by the other. We 
are just a grander version of that beetle bashing its head in a box at the sound of a tapped pencil. Do we believe this? Well, let's 
believe it for the moment, because it makes love's triumph the greater. What is a violin made of? Bits of wood and bits of 
sheep's intestine. Does its construction demean and banalize the music? On the contrary, it exalts the music further. 
And I'm not saying love will make you happy - above all, I'm not saying that. If anything, I tend to believe that it will make 
you unhappy: either immediately unhappy, as you are impaled by incompatibility, or unhappy later, when the woodworm has 
quietly been gnawing away for years and the bishop's throne collapses. But you can believe this and still insist that love is our 
only hope. 
It's our only hope even if it fails us, although it fails us, because it fails us. Am I losing precision? What I'm searching for is 
the right comparison. Love and truth, yes, that's the prime connection. We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when 
some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some 
God-eyed version of what `really' happened. This God-eyed version is a fake - a charming, impossible fake, like those 
medieval paintings which show all the stages of Christ's Passion happening simultaneously in different parts of the picture. But 
while we know this, we must still believe that objective truth is obtainable; or we must believe that it is 99 per cent obtainable; 
or if we can't believe this we must believe that 

---

J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½
 
Chapters 
78
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43 per cent objective truth is better than 41 per cent. We must do so, because if we don't we're lost, we fall into beguiling 
relativity, we value one liar's version as much as another liar's, we throw up our hands at the puzzle of it all, we admit that the 
victor has the right not just to the spoils but also to the truth. (Whose truth do we prefer, by the way, the victor's or the 
victim's? Are pride and compassion greater distorters than shame and fear?) 
And so it is with love. We must believe in it, or we're lost. We may not obtain it, or we may obtain it and find it renders us 
unhappy; we must still believe in it. If we don't, then we merely surrender to the history of the world and to someone else's 
truth. 
It will go wrong, this love; it probably will. That contorted organ, like the lump of ox meat, is devious and enclosed. Our 
current model for the universe is entropy, which at the daily level translates as: things fuck up. But when love fails us, we must 
still go on believing in it. Is it encoded in every molecule that things fuck up, that love will fail? Perhaps it is. Still we must 
believe in love, just as we must believe in free will and objective truth. And when love fails, we should blame the history of the 
world. If only it had left us alone, we could have been happy, we could have gone on being happy. Our love has gone, and it is 
the fault of the history of the world. 
But that's still to come. Perhaps it will never come. In the night the world can be defied. Yes, that's right, it can be done, we 
can face history down. Excited, I stir and kick. She shifts and gives a subterranean, a subaqueous sigh. Don't wake her. It 
seems a grand truth now, though in the morning it may not seem worth disturbing her for. She gives a gentler, lesser sigh. I 
sense the map of her body beside me in the dark. I turn on my side, make a parallel zigzag, and wait for sleep. 
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