The empty chair

There is an excellent argument for a chair with nobody in it. It does not interrupt. It does not ask whether the coordinates are correct, whether I have eaten, or whether the phrase “minor atmospheric complication” means that we should be running. One can explain an entire theory to an empty chair and emerge with one's reputation intact.

I have tried this. It is a terrible way to test a theory.

The difficulty is not silence. The ship has never been silent. There are small sounds inside larger sounds, and tonight I can distinguish far too many of them. Somewhere a mechanism is performing a task which would have astonished an early industrial civilisation. Here it sounds rather like an elderly person clearing their throat before objecting to a sermon.

I would welcome an objection.

Ava and Cal have chosen a life with work in it. Anna has chosen a place where tomorrow will require her presence. There are things that can be built only by being there again the next morning. I know this perfectly well. I have said it to people. I have occasionally delivered the observation with such authority that they probably thought I practised it.

Their staying is not a failure of my invitation. I am writing that down because the brain can be an exceptionally gifted barrister for a very foolish client. Give mine a quiet room and it will assemble a case in which every departure is a verdict, every door a judgement. Evidence to the contrary is then filed under special circumstances and never consulted again.

No. They stayed because they had something to do. Because there were people to know and a future to make, and neither of those things could be carried away in my pockets.

I ought to be pleased. I am pleased. Being pleased has not prevented me from noticing the chairs.

Florence will not become kinder because I count what I could not do. Neither will the people we helped become less real because there were others beyond reach. I dislike that sentence. It has the sound of an argument somebody might use to excuse indifference. Perhaps that is why it needs the rest of the page beside it: names, choices, the obligation to try. Limits are real. So is the temptation to hide behind them.

There is no satisfactory column in which to enter a life. Saved is too large a word for a moment that still has a whole future attached to it. Lost can conceal everything a person was before the losing. I have spent a great deal of time defending people against systems that turn them into entries. It would be a poor evening to construct another one.

So this is not an account of the journey. The journey has its own witnesses. This is a note about a room afterwards, written by someone who has mistaken movement for recovery often enough to recognise the handwriting.

I shall leave the chair where it is. Nobody has to occupy it to justify the space it takes up. I do not have to set a course this instant to justify being here.

For the moment, I will finish the page. Then I will sit down without explaining anything at all.