Ian
McEwan (no relation so far as I know, unless you go way back far enough,
presumably) is an unorthodox but always fascinating author, nicknamed “Ian
Macabre” in the British press. Nonetheless, he’s won the Booker
Prize outright once (Amsterdam), and been shortlisted for it twice (On
Chesil Beach and Atonement, also Time’s best novel of 2002). Personally,
my reaction to his works has ranged from rapt fascination to turning-away-in-dismay. But for talent and inspiration he lacks not.
Our text for today comes from his 2005 novel, Saturday,
chronicling a day in the life of a 48-year-old London neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne. Describing
Perowne in the operating theater, McEwan writes:
For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption that has dissolved
all sense of time, and all awareness of the other parts of his life. Even his
awareness of his own existence has vanished. He’s been delivered into a pure
present, free of the weight of the past or any anxieties about the future.
In retrospect, though never at the time, it feels like profound happiness.
It’s a little like sex, in that he feels himself in another medium, but it’s
less obviously pleasurable, and clearly not sensual. This state of mind brings
a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books,
cinema, even music can’t bring him to this. . . . This benevolent dissociation
seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands on concentration and skills,
pressure, problems to be solved, even danger. He feels calm, and spacious,
fully qualified to exist. It’s a feeling of clarified emptiness, of deep, muted
joy.
Have you ever felt this way?
As a lawyer, I mean: Formulating
an argument, crafting a brief, imagining a deal structure, envisioning and
laying out the documents that would embody it?
Isn’t that a state to
which we all can/do/ought aspire?
A moment of dissolving into the absorption of a dream, in a pure present of prolonged demands on concentration and skill?
