information deficit

who absorbs it all

Hello friends. I was sitting in Starbucks yesterday reading Mary Webb’s unfinished final novel on kindle. Possibly because of the book’s mediaeval setting, I realised when I put it down that I have been thinking recently quite a lot about a general loss of information. For example, as I was reading, I could hear tinnily over the speakers a doo-wop style recording of ‘Jingle Bells’ (Shazam told me it was Smokey Robinson and the Miracles). Okay, fine, but there is so much information and qualia from even this brief visit to Starbucks that I cannot even begin to capture or convey. Maybe this isn’t much of a realisation — why else would Joyce have set Ulysses on a single day? why use so many and such dense prose styles if not to try and capture life as it actually feels to us? and why else would Proust examine the minutiae of memory and spend 150 pages on a single set of interactions? — but I think the implications go beyond the literary.

Because even the best artists provide us with only glimpses of what it feels like to be them — or, indeed, us. What I mean by this is that there is so much living and thinking that lies behind a single diary entry (and why does the entry have to be by somebody renowned?) and then there is so little that ends up on the page. I’m finding what I mean hard to convey, so I’ll give a more concrete example. When I am walking down a street in Cambridge or perhaps in Shrewsbury, I am aware that there are a unique combination of people also walking down the street. I am also aware that my thoughts at that moment are not precisely as they have ever been before, and that the same is true of everyone there. Indeed, instant to instant we are not the same.

Say this has been occurring (for humans) for thousands of years — how are we to come to terms with the fact that none of this living leaves a trace? I can know that Wordsworth walked down this or that street in the town centre, but it only leaves me with a muted sense of wonder, it doesn’t strike me as real or concrete, but rather fantastical. This awe isn’t because I think poets are privileged to better thoughts or anything so pretentious and cynical, but really because I can’t fathom how so much time has passed and just how many people have had experiences of any kind. In all that time, think of the unique experiences that have been forgotten — not only by the dead but by the living… I can picture myself on the road leading to Emmanuel College after having seen Greta Gerwig’s Little Women with my mum. I can remember shuffling towards a bus and this all shortly before everything was locked down in 2020.

But not only are my memories of this moment unique to me and (possibly) one other person, but they are also quite unreliable. I certainly couldn’t pick out anyone’s faces that I encountered then if I saw them again. I know that I enjoyed the film, but can I recreate the exact feelings I had when stepping onto that bus? Not even close. It’s not even as if the emotions I felt then are latent in the film itself: I’ve watched it since and had an anomalous reaction, finding both enjoyment and disappointment where I hadn’t seen them before. Was I already scouring the internet for traces of the Dvořak string quartet movement that played when Laurie and Jo dance in the early stages of the film? Did I have enough phone data that month to do such a thing? or did I have to wait until later in the day to find that piece?

I hope that these miniature pinch points get to the nub of what I’m interested in: the uniqueness and un-replicability of consciousness. I know that what has really been haunting me is something like what Adrienne Lenker is referring to when she sings:

Why do leaves turn yellow and fall
And who absorbs it all?

It’s not for nothing that the song these lines appear in is called ‘Already Lost’. As each moment of our lives slides onto the next, what is that moment if not lost? already changing and changed by its successors?

Although thoughts like these plagued me during Michaelmas, since coming home I find I am mostly liberated from them. Why might this be? I think for all the reasons that I spoke of in my last piece: since being home, I have been able to let go of my need for constant stimulation and ‘deeper’ and ‘deeper’ thought about things. The passing of time need not be a source of worry, and the loss of the ‘data’ of living is not my concern. It feels miraculously simple to let these things go considering they were causing so much worry before. Fundamentally, what lay behind all this? The answer, really, is mortality and ageing. I had just found a new way to spin them. This is why I think writing (and not just academic writing) provides a kind of respite. Even though all the dense layers upon layers of sheer information of my weeks during Michaelmas will be lost — I will never eat that exact breakfast with those exact people in that cafeteria again, nor will I remember much of what was said at the time — I have a little distilled capsule, in the form of an essay, that charts some of what I thought and felt during back then.

You may have noticed that this piece is itself an attempt to capture an emotionally charged thought. You may also have been shouting at the screen counterpoints like ‘photography!?’, ‘video!?’, but I know from experience that attempts to document my life in these ways on any grand scale are fruitless and, possibly, unhelpful. Anyway, they do not capture life, but only a simulacrum of it. For now, I find sufficient comfort in my short diary entries and these posts.

- Angus