Bergson, "What is a dream?" (part 1)

The first part of a lecture given at the Institut général psychologique by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

The subject that the institute invited me to talk to you about is so complex and raises so many problems – some psychological, others physiological and even metaphysical – and would require explanations of such length (and we have so little time), that I request your permission to forgo all prefatory and non-essential remarks and come immediately to the heart of the matter.

So here is a dream: I see marching before me all sorts of objects; none of them exists in reality.  I feel that I am coming and going, enduring a series of adventures, when all the while I am asleep in my bed, and quite peacefully at that.  I listen to myself speak and I hear how I am answered; nonetheless, I am alone and say nothing.  Whence comes this illusion?  Why do we perceive people and things as if they were really present?

But first, is there nothing at all?  Isn't a certain perceptible material offered to our sight, to our hearing, to our touch, etcetera?

Let us close our eyes and see what happens.  Many people will say that nothing happens, but that is because they are not looking attentively.  In reality, we notice a great many things.  First of all, a black background.  Then spots of various colors, sometimes drab, sometimes of a singular clarity.  These spots dilate and contract, change forms and nuance, encroach upon one another.  The change may be slow and gradual.  On occasion this change also takes place with extreme rapidity.  Whence comes this phantasmagoria?  Physiologists and psychologists have spoken of "luminous dust," "ocular spectra," and "phosphenes"; in any case, they attribute these appearances to slight modifications produced incessantly in the circulation of the retina, or to the pressure which the closed eyelid exerts upon the human eye, mechanically exciting the optic nerve.  Yet it matters little what the explanation of the phenomenon may be, or what name we choose to give it.  It is found in everyone and it provides, without a doubt, the stuff from which we carve out our dreams.

Alfred Maury and, around the same period, the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys had both remarked that these colored spots in moving form might be consolidated at the moment of our becoming sleepy, thus sketching the contours of the objects that will compose our dreams.  This observation was taken, however, with a grain of salt because it came from psychologists who were half-asleep.  G. T. Ladd, an American philosopher and professor at Yale University, has since devised a more rigorous method, if one of difficult application as it requires some training.  It involves keeping our eyes closed when we wake and retaining for a few moments the dream that is about to disappear from our field of vision and soon, of course, also from our memory.  Here we see the objects of our dreams dissolve into phosphenes and become confounded with the colored spots which the eye really perceived when our eyelids were closed.  For example, let's say we were reading a newspaper: this is a dream.  We wake up, and from the newspaper, whose lines are fading, we see a white spot with vague black streaks: this is reality.  Or we might think of a dream coming to us on the open water.  As far as the eye could see, the ocean was nurturing its grey waves crowned in white foam.  Upon waking, everything gets lost in a large spot of pale grey sprinkled with brilliant dots.  During sleep, therefore, something was offered to our perception, a visual dust, and this dust is used to create dreams.

Is it the only thing used?  To speak only about our sense of sight, let us say that beside these visual sensations whose source is internal, there is also an exterior cause.  The eyelids may have been closed, yet the eye still distinguishes light and darkness and even recognizes, up to a certain point, the nature of that light.  For the sensations provoked by real light lie at the origin of many of our dreams.  A candle lit suddenly will evoke in the sleeper, if his sleep is not too deep, an ensemble of visions dominated by the idea of fire.  Tissié cites two such examples: "B. dreams that the theater of Alexandria is on fire; the flames illuminate an entire city quarter.  All of a sudden he finds himself transported to the center of the basin at Manshieh square; a streak of fire runs along the chains connecting the bounds placed about the basin.  Then he finds himself in Paris at the Expo which is on fire ... he witnesses some harrowing scenes, etcetera.  He wakes up with a start.  His eyes had been taking in the ray of light projected by the dark lantern which the nurse on duty had turned towards his bed when she passed by..."; "M. dreams that he has been engaged by the marine corps, where he once served.  He goes to Fort-de-France, to Toulon, to Lorient, to the Crimea, to Constantinople.  He sees flashes of lightning; he hears thunder ... finally, he takes part in a battle in which he sees fire leaving the mouths of the cannons ... He wakes up with a start.  Like B., he was woken up by the stream of light projected by the dark lantern of the nurse making her rounds."  Such are the dreams that can be provoked by vivid and unexpected light.

Very different are those which suggest a continuous, soft light, such as that of the moon.  Krauss tells us that one night, as he was waking up, he noticed that he was still extending his arms towards the person who had been, in his dream, a young girl, towards what was nothing more than the moon, amidst whose beams of light he squarely sat.  This case is not the only one.  It seems that the rays of the moon, caressing the eyes of the sleeper, may have the power of provoking such virginal apparitions.  Would this not explain the fable of Endymion, the shepherd forever asleep, whom the goddess Selene (otherwise known as the Moon) loves so profoundly?

The ear also has its interior sensations – buzzing, chiming, whistling – which we make out rather poorly while awake yet which sleep cleanly detaches.  What is more, once we are asleep we continue to hear certain noises from outside.  The creak of furniture; the crackling fire; the rain beating against the window; the wind playing its chromatic scale in the chimney; as well as other sounds which catch the ear and which dreams convert into conversations, cries, concerts, etcetera.  When scissors and tongs are rubbed together before the ears of a sleeping Alfred Maury, we get the following: he immediately dreams that he hears an alarm and that he is witnessing the events of June 1848.  I can cite other examples.  But one must understand that sounds have as much place in the majority of dreams as forms and colors do.  Visual sensations predominate; in fact, often we do nothing more than see although we may believe that we hear at the same time.  According to Max Simon, we may even have an entire conversation during a dream and then suddenly realize that no one is speaking and that no one has spoken.  It was a direct exchange of thoughts between us and our interlocutor, a silent interview.  A strange phenomenon this, and yet one easy to explain.  For us to hear sounds in a dream, there generally need to be real sounds that are perceived.  With nothing the dream does nothing.  And so, when we do not provide our dream with acoustic material, it has trouble creating acoustics.

Moreover, the sense of touch interferes as much as the sense of hearing.  Contact and pressure affect consciousness more when one is asleep.  As it influences the images that at that moment occupy the field of vision, the sense of touch may be able to modify their form and meaning.  Let us suppose that all of a sudden the sleeper feels his shirt touch his body; he will remember that he is dressed lightly.  If he were then to believe he was walking down the street, he would think passers-by were gazing at him as he had very little on.  Those passers-by would not, however, be shocked, because it is rare that the eccentricities to which we subject ourselves during dreams have any emotional effect on our spectators, regardless of how confused or embarrassed we may be ourselves.

I have just referred to a very well-known dream.  And here is another, which many among you must certainly have had.  In this dream, we feel we are flying, gliding, and traversing space without touching the earth.  In general, when it happens once, it tends to happen again, and at every new experience, we say to ourselves: "I have always dreamed that I was in motion above the ground, but this time I am fully awake.  Now I know and I will show others how they can free themselves from the laws of gravity."  If you wake up suddenly, this, I believe, is what you will find.  You felt that your feet had lost their foothold since you were stretched or spread out.  On the other had, thinking you were not asleep, you were not conscious of being in bed.  Therefore you said to yourself that you were no longer touching the ground and, what is more, that you were standing up.  It was this conviction that developed your dream.  Notice that in the cases in which you feel that you are flying, you believe you are launching your body to the right or left side, lifting your arm in a sudden movement as if you were flapping a wing.  For this is precisely the side on which you are sleeping.  When you awake, you will find that the sensation of making an effort to fly was created by nothing more than the pressure of your arm and body against your bed.  This phenomenon, detached from its cause, was nothing more than a vague sensation of fatigue imputable to your effort.  Re-attached to the conviction that your body left the earth, it became the precise sensation of making an effort to fly.

It is interesting to see how the sensations of pressure, encompassing even the field of vision and taking advantage of the luminous dust present therein, can be transposed in this field into forms and colors.  One day, for example, Max Simon dreamed that he was standing before two piles of gold coins, that these piles were uneven, and that he was trying to even them out.  But he did not succeed.  Here he experienced a vivid feeling of anxiety.  This feeling, increasing from minute to minute, finally woke him up.  He then noticed that one of his legs was caught under the folds of his covers, and that his two feet were not at the same level, and were trying in vain to come closer to one another.  It is obviously from there that he derived his vague sensation of unevenness, which, having intruded upon the field of vision and finding there perhaps (this is the hypothesis I propose) one or more yellow spots, was expressed visually by the unevenness of two piles of gold coins.  Thus there exists, immanent in tactile sensations during sleep, a tendency to visualize ourselves and insert ourselves in such a form into our dreams.

More important still are the sensations of "interior touch" emanating from all points of the organism, in particular from the viscera.  Sleep may give them, or rather imbue them with a singular delicateness and acuity.  Doubtless they were there during waking hours as well, but since we were distracted from them by other actions, we were living outside of ourselves; sleep has made us return to ourselves.  It has happened that people suffering from laryngitis, tonsillitis, etcetera, have found themselves afflicted in the middle of a dream with a disagreeable stinging sensation in their throats.  A simple illusion, they tell themselves upon waking.  Alas, so quickly does the illusion become reality!  We can enumerate serious illnesses and accidents, epilepsy seizures, cardiac afflictions, etcetera, which were discovered this way, prophesied in a dream.  We are thus not surprised that philosophers such as Schopenhauer claim that dreams transfer to our consciousness the shocks sustained by our nervous system; that psychologists such as Scherner attribute to each organ the power of provoking specific dreams that represent those organs symbolically; and that doctors such as Artigues have written treatises on the semiological value of dreams, on the manner in which they aid in the diagnosis of illnesses.  More recently, Tissié has shown how troubles with digestion, breathing, and circulation can be conveyed in certain types of dreams. 

The Small Rain

Why on earth would a college graduate volunteer for the armed forces, is the question subtending this story (it is asked in numerous different ways of more than one person, but only once directly).  Even if most privates almost necessarily do not have such an education, the reasons for risking one's physical and mental well-being for flag and country are so variegated as to render the query useless.  Some join for the adventure; some for the escape (not quite the same as the adventure, which may involve a wholly positive desire); some for the funding that will allow them, in time, also to become college graduates; some because their ancestors have always been soldiers, and ancestor worship is the most fundamental form of honor; some, we hope not many, because they admire gunmanship and destruction of nameless foes; and some, doubtless, who are indeed patriotic, a wonderful word that in recent decades has been diminished by a consanguineous term, nationalist.  A phrase-book might instruct you that patriotism involves pride in one's country of origin, while nationalism suggests feelings of protective superiority, but I do not often if ever consult phrase-books.  And in the most ethnically diverse country in the world, your patriotism and my nationalism may well reflect precisely the same sentiment.

The place is Fort Roach, Louisiana, and the year is "back around mid-July of '57," when even fewer of us were lucky enough to have completed work at a higher institution of learning.  One war of sorts has just been concluded on a distant peninsula whose strife persists to this day; and we should not forget, we cannot forget what happened to the previous generation of Europe and much of non-Europe.  In this setting, we meet Nathan Levine, our lodestar through what will be designated as a swamp, if a swamp that has become a shrine to death: 

Nathan "Lardass" Levine, specialist 3/C, had been assigned to the same battalion, the same company, the same bunk, for thirteen months now, going on fourteen.  Roach being the kind of installation it was, this circumstance might have driven more ordinary men to the point of suicide or at least insanity; indeed, according to certain more or less suppressed army statistics, it often did.  Levine, however, was not quite ordinary.  He was one of the few men outside of those bucking for section eight who actually liked Ft. Roach.  He had quietly and unobtrusively gone native: the angular edges of his Bronx accent had been dulled and softened into a modified drawl; he had found that white lightning, usually straight or else mixed with whatever happened to be coming out of the company Coke machine at the time, was in its way as agreeable as scotch on the rocks; he now listened to hillbilly groups in bars in the neighboring towns as raptly as he had once dug Lester Young or Gerry Mulligan at Birdland.  He was well over six feet and loose-jointed, but what certain co-eds at City had once described as a plowboy physique, rawboned and taut-muscled, had run to flab after three years of avoiding work details.  He had a fine beer belly now, in which he maintained a certain pride, and a large behind which he was not so proud of, which had earned him his nickname.

"Run to flab" is so marvelous an image that the rest of the passage could be middling and still enjoyable – but our fictitious flabster is far from middling.  In short order Levine is dispatched with a gaggle of other soldiers, including one, Pierce, who attended a far more prestigious university than he did (nevertheless, it is Levine who is accorded "the highest I.Q. in the damn battalion"), to a hideous assignment: the removal of corpses from a small gulf coast village misinformed about a hurricane's landfall.  For "ten hours" a day, then, Levine aids in "picking up stiffs," including one impaled upon a barbed wire fence that does something he could not expect.  The barbed wire, the very obvious detail that Levine is a Jew, his (reciprocated) interest in "Buttercup," a blonde waitress with a "slight Rebel accent," and the image of innocent and utter death should remind a reader, even more now than at the time of the story's publication, of the particular horror that occurred in Europe.  This image remains a shadow, however, if a long one, and allows us to comprehend why Levine would feel so comfortable in surroundings so alien.  Alien unless one accepts that surroundings, be they clothes, a city, or a language, do not make a man – but this is an argument for another day.                   

That The Small Rain is this author's first work may not surprise his completists, who perhaps would be loath to welcome its similarities with the literary output of another writer.  But this latter point should not be surprising at all.  Consider Salinger's preeminence in the late fifties, his prolongation of a won war through tales so harrowing in their implications and consequences that no one ever needed to read about a bloody battle again, and you have a sense of his will imposed upon American literature.  For my part, I likely have not read enough Pynchon (my boredom with this novel will surely apostatize me) to comment with adamantine authority.  So I will leave the commentary to the author himself, or, I should say, to his beloved specialist from the Bronx:

What I mean is something like a closed circuit.  Everybody on the same frequency.  And after a while you forget about the rest of the spectrum and start believing that this is the only frequency that counts or is real.  While outside, all up and down the land, these are the wonderful colors and x-rays and ultraviolets going on.

The immediate reference appears to be the military, but it can appertain to any thinking collective, any mission, program, or system of belief.  For some people being in a closed circuit spares them the rather onerous task of developing their own values and personality, thus staving off the persistent fear that there might not be very much to develop.  As it were, Levine endures the squalor without too much of Esmé, although that precocious, verbose little child would have nothing much to share with Buttercup.  And what of our title?  One, simple explanation is provided, and we may nod our heads in slight disappointment (I will not disappoint you in advance), but the clever reader can think of many others.  Some well outside a closed circuit. 

Pushkin, "О Байроне и о предметах важних"

An essay ("On Byron and important matters") by this Russian poet, on the 225th birthday of this Englishman.  You can read the original here.

The clan of Byrons, one of the oldest in English aristocracy (which, in turn, is the youngest among European aristocracies), descended from the Norman Ralph de Buron (or Biron), an associate of William the Conqueror.  The name of the Byrons is mentioned with honor in English chronicles.  Their family's title was created in 1643.  It is said that Byron valued his noble birth more than his literary works.  A very understandable sentiment!  The lustre of his forebears and the honors which he inherited from them elevated the poet; on the other hand, the fame he himself earned brought him merely petty insults which often humiliated the noble Baron, consigning his name to the mercy of hearsay and rumor. 

Captain Byron, son of the famous admiral and father of the great poet, won illustrious and seductive fame.  He stole the wife of Lord Carmarthen and married her immediately upon her divorce.  Soon thereafter, in 1784, she died, leaving him one daughter.  The following year, in order to right his upset state of affairs, the calculating widower married Miss Gordon, the only daughter and heiress of George Gordon, a Gight landowner.  This marriage was unhappy: 23,500 pounds sterling (587,500 rubles) were squandered in two years, and Lady Byron was left only with her 150 pounds of annual income.  In 1786, husband and wife departed to France and returned to England towards the end of 1787.

On the following January 22, Lady Byron gave birth to her only son, George Gordon Byron.  (Following some family tensions, the Gight heiress was obliged to bestow upon her son the name Gordon).  His leg was harmed during the birth, to which Lord Byron imputed his mother's bashfulness or obstinacy.  The newborn child was christened by Duke Byron and Colonel Duff.

In 1790 Lady Byron left for Aberdeen and her husband pursued her.  For a while they lived together.  But their characters were too irreconcilable, and soon they separated.  Her husband went to France, but not before bilking his poor wife out of the money he needed for his trip.  The following year, 1791, he would die in Valenciennes.

Once, during his short stay in Aberdeen, Captain Byron took in his small son, who ended up spending the night.  The next day, however, he rendered the fidgety child back to his mother and never again invited him over.

Lady Byron was a simple woman, irascible, and, in many respects, reckless.  But the solidity with which she was able to endure poverty did credit to her rules.  She retained only one servant and by 1798, when she accompanied young Byron to his inheritance of an estate in Newstead, her debts had not surpassed 60 pounds sterling.

It is worth noting that Byron never made any mention of the domestic circumstances of his childhood, deeming them mean and debasing.  Young Byron learned to read and write at an Aberdeen school.  He was among the last in his class, gaining greater distinction in games.  According to his coevals' accounts, he was a lively, irascible, and rancorous boy, always ready to fight and avenge some offense.   

A certain Patterson, a rigorous Presbyterian, but a calm and scholarly thinker, was his mentor then, and of him Byron would always have very good memories.

In 1796, Lady Byron took him to the mountains to recover after he had a bout of scarlet fever.  They settled close to Ballater.  The severe beauty of the Scottish natural surroundings made a deep impression upon the lad.  Around that same time, eight-year-old Byron fell in love with Mary Duff.  Seventeen years later, in one of his journals, he described this early love:

"I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff.  How very odd that I should have been so utterly, devotedly fond of that girl, at an age when I could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning of the word.  And the effect! – My mother used always to rally me about this childish amour; and, at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me one day, 'Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to a Mr. C.'  And what was my answer?  I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much, that after I grew better, she generally avoided the subject – to me – and contented herself with telling it to all her acquaintance.  Now, what could this be?  I had never seen her since her mother's faux-pas at Aberdeen had been the cause of her removal to her grandmother's at Banff; we were both the merest children.  I had and have been attached fifty times since that period; yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness, my tormenting my mother's maid to write for me to her, which she at last did, to quiet me.  Poor Nancy thought I was wild, and, as I could not write for myself, became my secretary.  I remember, too, our walks, and the happiness of sitting by Mary, in the children's apartment, at their house not far from the Plain-stones at Aberdeen, while her lesser sister Helen played with the doll, and we sat gravely making love, in our way.

"How the deuce did all this occur so early?  Where could it originate?  I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl were so violent, that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since.  Be that as it may, hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder-stroke – it nearly choked me – to the horror of my mother and the astonishment and almost incredulity of every body.  And it is a phenomenon in my existence (for I was not eight years old) which has puzzled, and will puzzle me to the latest hour of it; and lately, I know not why, the recollection (not the attachment) has recurred as forcibly as ever.  I wonder if she can have the least remembrance of it or me?  Or remember her pitying sister Helen for not having an admirer too?  How very pretty is the perfect image of her in my memory – her brown, dark hair, and hazel eyes; her very dress!  I should be quite grieved to see her now; the reality, however beautiful, would destroy, or at least confuse, the features of the lovely Peri which then existed in her, and still lives in my imagination, at the distance of more than sixteen years.  I am now twenty-five and odd months."

In 1798 old Lord William Byron died in Newstead; four years before him, his own grandson had died in Corsica.  As a result, young George Byron became the sole heir to the wealth and title of his clan.  As a minor he was placed under the guardianship of Lord Carlisle, his distant relative, and, delighted, Lady Byron left Aberdeen that same fall for old Newstead with her eleven-year-old son and her faithful servant Mary Gray.

Lord William, the brother of Admiral Byron, the child's grandfather, was an odd and wretched man.  He once stabbed his cousin and neighbor, William Chaworth.  They fought without witnesses in a bar at candlelight.  The case made a great deal of noise and the House of Lords declared the murderer guilty as charged.  He was, however, freed from punishment and from that time on lived in Newstead where his whims, stinginess, and gloomy character made him the subject of slander and gossip.  The most preposterous rumors circulated as to why he divorced his wife.  It was believed that he once attempted to drown her in a Newstead pond.  

He tried to ruin his properties out of his hatred for his heirs.  His only interlocutors were an old servant and a housekeeper who served another purpose as well.  In addition, the house was filled with crickets, which Lord William fed and raised.  Despite his niggardliness, the old Lord was often in need of money and got it by means often reprehensible to his heirs.  But such a man could not possibly care about these matters.  In this same way he sold Rochdale, his family estate, without having any right to do so (a fact known full well to the buyers, who wished to make a profit before his heirs succeeded in demolishing the illegal sale).

Not once did Lord William get in touch with his young heir, to whom he referred only as the boy who lived in Aberdeen. 

Lord Byron's first years, spent in impoverished conditions that did not befit his birth and under the watchful eye of an ardent mother who was as reckless in her displays of affection as in her fits of rage, would have a powerful and lasting effect on the rest of his life.  His injured self-esteem and eternal sensitivity bound his heart with the acrimony and irritability that would later become the marks of his character. 

The strange qualities of Lord Byron were partially innate, and partially bestowed.  Moore has justly noted that Byron's character reflected both the virtues and the vices of his ancestors.  On the one hand, we find his daring entrepreneurship, magnanimity, and the nobleness of his sentiments; on the other, his unchecked passions, caprices, and insolent disdain of public opinion.  Doubtless, the memory of Lord William strongly affected the imagination of his successor: he adopted many of his great-uncle's customs and one cannot but concur that Manfred and Lara recall that solitary Newstead baron.

Trivial circumstance, it seems, had just as great an influence on his soul.  At the very minute of his birth, his leg was injured, and Byron would remain lame the rest of his life.  This physical shortcoming also wounded his self-esteem.  Nothing could compare with the fury he felt when Lady Byron once berated him as a "lame brat."  Although a very fine-looking fellow, he imagined himself ugly and shunned the company of those who did not know him well, all because he feared their mocking leers.  This very shortcoming strengthened his desire to distinguish himself in every feat requiring physical strength and agility.     

Mallarmé, "Renouveau"

A work ("Spring-tide") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

Serene-arted winter, lucid in its squall,   
The morbid spring has sadly chased away;
Yet in my blood, still bleakness holds its sway,     
As impotence into long yawns will sprawl.

Like coronals atop an old sad grave, 
White crepuscules above my skull grow warm;
Whilst I through vague and lovely dreams roam on ,
Through sap-strewn fields immense which prance and rave. 

Rankl'd, weary from the tree-borne scents, I swoon,  
And with my face, so dig my dream a pit, 
And bite warm earth that feeds the lilacs' bloom;

I sink in hope that this ennui will quit ...
The Azure laughs now at the waking hedge,  
And flower'd birds chirp at the sunlight's edge.   

Separate Lies

Despite claims that it involves “moral decisions across societal divisions” (granted, I made that up, but it captures the gist and has a nice ring to it), this film is more about a crumbling marriage whose origins are themselves rather questionable.  Questionable not in terms of legitimacy or inheritance, but with regard to why two so utterly different people could ever hope that anything more than a fleeting dalliance might exist between them.  If that type of decision, hardly made in the blink of the eye, is beyond their capacities, then faulting them for poor hairpin maneuvers seems on our part to be a bit cruel.  There is also a tragic incident involving the complicity of one member of the couple, unbeknownst to the other.  The crime itself, detailed (if not entirely) to the audience, is more an act of carelessness than anything else, but it has grave ramifications for the well-to-do marriage of fiftyish James Manning (a superb Tom Wilkinson) and his significantly younger wife Anne (Emily Watson).

Anne usually passes her very wealthy and lonely time just outside London waiting on James, a barrister of inflated billable hours and reputation.  As is customary in such screen characterizations, we are provided with a few short instances of James’s booming voice, terrifying presence, impeccable wardrobe, and general impatience with the world, as if it were costing him a considerable amount of restraint not to sue us all collectively for being stupid and inferior.  We also know that such villains, if that is really the right word here, tend to be brought down to terra firma rather viciously.  They are then given an opportunity to mend their ways, slow down their frenetic ambitions just a tad, and join the human race.  There are so many films and books about this kinder, gentler un-Scrooging of a moneyed tyrant that I can only shudder at the future slew of fairy tales starring evil technocrats charmed by the batting eyelids of a sick child in an impoverished country.  Not that they shouldn’t be charmed or, better, shamed by their gluttonous wealth in the face of such indigence.  But that, more often than not, if there is a change it is either half-hearted or halfway.  The latter scenario can be found in this film, where the titular character does in fact adopt a poor child in an economically underdeveloped country.  He then writes him, however, morally complex letters that his new ward could not possibly understand, thereby cleansing his own conscience of its trouble.  I suppose that’s better than nothing.  In Separate Lies, we see the half-hearted method.  And abiding by the old you-only-get-what-you-give mantra, the results are quite predictable.   

What spurs this desire to fix what has long since been unfixable is the revelation by Anne that she is having an affair with neighbor Bill Bule (Rupert Everett) who, unlike James, doesn't work and, when in England, is usually out in the countryside.  That would be bad enough if it weren’t for the additional detail that their flirting and irresponsible behavior may have inadvertently led to the death of someone they know.  Of course, the victim is a member of the working class, accustomed to paying for the sins of their masters.  The ensuing back-and-forth  on culpability must have resonated much more strongly when the original novel was written in 1950s England than it does now, when class barriers have given way to ethnic walls.  To reflect this development, director Julian Fellowes opts to change the ethnicity of the policeman investigating the death (David Harewood) from working class white to black, but middle class.  Still, the inspector appeals to one of the working class characters late in the film with the words: “You don’t have to do this.  You don’t owe them anything.”  Whether this method is truly effective depends, I suspect, on whether you buy into the whole “societal divisions” motif, which seems a little affected at times.  You can have tragedy in any society and at any income level; but the more privileged the characters are, the less sympathetic are we to their plight because most of humanity cannot afford to get bogged down in their petty neuroses.

Throughout the history of letters, it has always been difficult for me to sympathize with a king or queen in love or in doubt being consoled by one of their twenty lieutenants or handmaids.  And for that reason it was hard to foster compassion for the separate fates of the “them,” here to mean James and Bill, because they represent the same selfishness albeit with different motivations.  For Anne we feel a little more sympathy since she, as the epicenter of the story, has to make the majority of these moral decisions and Emily Watson’s acting could not be any better (I have said that, I think, about every single film of hers that I’ve seen).  You may guess the twists coming at the end of the story, but one final wrinkle is particularly correct and saves the enterprise from collapsing under a few extra drops of sentimentality.  The title itself, which plays on an omission of a letter from a well-worn phrase, is supposed to inspire us with pity for lovers split by fate.  But the novel’s title, A way through the woods, as in the choices we make during the journey of our life within a forest dark, might be a little more appropriate.