A Comfortable Silence
27 April 2009, 4:37 p.m.
48° 47' 34.23" N, 8° 9' 40.05" E
Lambert, in the seat beside me, is now taking his duties as navigator seriously—he opens a paper map, flapping and snapping, to compare it to the GPS.
“Exit 51,” he says, looking at the map. “There it is—right there.”
He seems to be in a good mood. Maybe this is a good time to get to know him better. As a writer, a thinker.
“Look,” I say, “I’ve been meaning to ask you...”
“Hmmm...” he says, without lifting his nose from the map.
“Well,” I say, “It’s about your work... I’m not sure where to start...”
One thing about having a conversation while you’re driving—you don’t have to look at the other person. And without that eye contact, there seems to be no limit on the length of pauses. You pause when a Mercedes zips past your rented minivan, you pause when you pass a truck, you pause for entire minutes, for kilometers, you pause for farms, for rivers, for ancient villages, for whatever tension builds up in your mind.
Eventually I manage to state my question to Lambert, and it goes something like this:
“I guess I wanna ask what your thoughts are on, well...”
(pause)
“...you know, the role of narrative in history, storytelling, I mean, given the scarcity...”
(pause)
“...the relative lack of documentary evidence, of course you yourself are one of our greatest sources, for your period, and from what I’ve read, the parts that have been translated...”
(pause)
“...I’ve tried translating some myself, but my Latin...”
(pause)
“...anyway, your annals, from the references I’ve seen, the extended quotations, they seem to have a great narrative energy...”
(pause)
“...But...”
(pause)
“...there’s always a tendency for any narrative, any story, to structure our understanding in terms of, well, of stories we’ve heard before, pre-existing models...”
(pause)
“...you know, story templates as it were, casting this person as the hero, this other one as the villain, one side as the good guys, the other side as the bad guys...”
(pause)
“...so when we tell a story, we might not be understanding the past, as much as projecting our own world, our own conventions, our own social expectations, back on to the past...”
(pause)
“...I guess I’m curious, as to what you would recommend, as to how we should deal with...”
(pause)
“...the essential...”
(pause)
“...unknowability of the past... that is, of what we really want to know about the past, all the questions of subjectivity, personality, motivation...”
(pause)
“...I guess it comes all down to what it was like to be alive back then...for example, we talk a lot today about identity, you’ve got your Palestinian identity, your gay identity, your Asian identity—which is interesting because it's mainly found outside of Asia—and maybe, let's see, your evangelical Christian identity, though it’s odd that people usually only talk about identities on the left, but the same principle ought to apply to groups on the right, don’t you think?”
(pause)
“...so what sort of identity did an unfree man have, a serf, some guy working out in the fields at the Abbey of Cluny? Or your abbey? Hersfeld, right? and what about that guy’s wife? Did that serf’s wife have anything that we would recognize as an identity?”
(pause)
“Or even an inner life? Now I…, I assume she did, 100%, at least the inner life part, because I’m a liberal 21st-century guy and it’s part of my world view to recognize her as fully human as you or me, but if social structures constrain consciousness and the social structures were so constricting that....”
(pause)
“...so my main question is, how would you respond to one of those contemporary historians, I had professors like this in college, who dismiss all attempts at narrative as a sentimental exercise, as if telling a good story is just satisfying the appetite of the crowd....”
(pause)
“...you know, those scholars who think that the appetite for narrative, the human need for a good story... it’s like a craving for sugar. And the historian’s job, whatever it is, well it sure isn’t selling candy to the sugar-addicted masses...”
(pause)
“So. What do you think?”
Lambert takes a while to respond. The silence feels comfortable, relaxed, friendly.
Finally he says “You missed it.”
“What?” I say.
“Exit 51,” he says. “Iffezheim slash Paris. About three kilometers ago. You drove right past it. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
Next episode: Una Orfana
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