No Dust

2. Sound Off

The second chapter of No Dust: Stop Grading Yourself, free to read. The quotations are the author's own renderings of Seneca's Letter 56 and of Leo Tolstoy's Reminiscences.

I had no favourite team until a man I could not see gave me one.

It had been a long day. I was on the sofa, watching football with the sound off, sinking into that peculiar exhaustion in which even going to bed seems to require too much effort.

Two teams moved across the screen. A pass. An interception. The ball travelling back the way it had come.

I watched without wanting much from it. Someone would win. Someone would lose. For once, neither outcome needed anything from me.

Then I turned on the sound. The commentator was praising one of the teams. He admired their movement, saw promise in their attacks, found reasons for their mistakes.

As I listened, something shifted. I began wanting their passes to reach their destination. A missed chance disappointed me. The other team had become the opposition.

A few moments earlier, I had been perfectly happy to watch either side have the ball. I pressed mute.

The pull began to loosen. There were the players again, running, turning, passing. I could follow the match without needing it to go my way.

Sound on. The preference returned. Sound off. It eased.

I did it several times. By then I was sitting forward.

The exhaustion had given way to curiosity, and beneath the curiosity was a feeling I could not quite name. I was watching an opinion enter me. I could observe it happening, yet the voice still influenced what I saw. Knowing about it did not make me immune.

I looked at the remote in my hand. For this commentator, there was a button.

Then I recognised the other one.

I have been calling him he, as if we had never been introduced. The sofa introduced us, and gave him the only name I have for him: the commentator.

By the voice I mean the ordinary running commentary most of us know. If you hear voices other people do not hear, or a voice tells you to harm yourself, that is not what this book is about, and seeing a doctor is a first job.

He had been speaking for as long as I could remember, particularly interested, as I have said, in the future. I had given this voice extraordinary authority. It spoke in my own language, inside my own head. Its conclusions arrived with the familiarity of things I had always known.

Of course I believed it. Often, I did not even notice that belief was involved.

A thought said I was falling behind, and falling behind became the condition of my life. A thought said someone had dismissed me, and I began responding to a dismissal. A thought rehearsed a future disaster, and my body spent part of the day living through an event that had never happened.

On the television, I could hear a commentator interpreting a game. Inside, the interpretation usually arrived wearing my name.

That was what unsettled me on the sofa. How much of my life had I experienced through a voice I had never thought to question? Once asked, the question would not be unasked.

There is a kind of tiredness that sleep does not quite explain. You have done what the day required: worked, answered people, made decisions, taken care of things that would have remained undone without you. Then you lie down, and the review begins.

You should have handled that differently. Why did you say so much? Why did you say nothing? What will happen tomorrow?

The day is over, but you are still being examined on it. I came to think of this as the second job.

The first job is living: doing the work, caring for people, paying attention when something needs attention. The second is the constant assessment of the person doing it.

You cook a meal, and then you mark it. You say goodnight to someone you love, and then you go back over how you said it.

The second job follows you into the kitchen and the car, and it can turn rest into one more thing you ought to be better at. Even a good day may end with a small, dissatisfied question: was that enough?

It was work I knew from the inside. I had been doing it so faithfully that I scarcely recognised it as work. And now, because of a football match, I had begun to hear it.

Two thousand years ago a Roman philosopher tried the same experiment with a whole building. Seneca had taken rooms directly above a public bathhouse, and he wrote to his friend Lucilius about what that was like. He opens by insisting that someone who has settled down to work hardly needs quiet at all. Then, as if to test the claim on himself, he writes down everything he can hear.

It is a long list, and he clearly enjoyed making it. Men downstairs lifting weights, grunting as they heave, or pretending to, and letting their breath out in a whistle. A customer being massaged, and the different smack of the masseur's palm depending on how he holds it. And then the worst of it: someone arrives to play ball and keeps the tally aloud. That, Seneca admits, finishes him.

He keeps going. A man who sings in the bath because he loves the sound of himself. The man who plucks armpits for a living, shouting for trade until he has a customer, at which point the customer does the shouting. The sellers of cakes and sausages and sweets, each with his own sing-song cry. Wheels in the street, a carpenter somewhere in the building, a neighbour sharpening a saw. A whole district busy being alive, as loudly as it can.

None of it touches him, he tells Lucilius. He treats it the way you treat waves on a beach, or water going over a weir. He has heard of a people who took their whole town elsewhere for one reason only, the roar of the falling Nile, and he has no intention of doing anything so drastic.

His method, he says, is to turn his attention inward and keep it there. The street may make all the noise it likes; what counts is calm within, where his wants and fears are not coming to blows. What use is a hushed district, he asks, while the passions roar?

It is a magnificent letter. Then, near the end, it turns honest.

Would it not be more comfortable, his friend might ask, to live somewhere quieter? Yes, Seneca concedes. It would. He is leaving. He only wanted to see whether he could stand it.

I love him for that. Seneca could pack his things and go. The racket I had begun to hear on the sofa would have come with me.

At first, I wanted a mute button for the commentator. It is the first wish almost anyone would make, and there is nothing foolish in it. Anyone who has lain awake under that voice has wanted, at least once, to reach for a button and have silence.

In a country house in Russia, four brothers once played a game that the youngest remembered for the rest of a very long life.

The eldest, Nikolenka, told the others he had a secret. When it came out, nobody would fall ill, nothing bad would happen, nobody would be angry, and everyone would love everyone. He called it the ant brotherhood. The youngest guessed, years later, that Nikolenka had heard of the Moravian Brethren and that the name had turned into ants on the way; to small boys it sounded like an anthill, which was even better. So they made a nest. They crawled under the chairs, fenced them round with boxes, draped shawls over the top, and sat together in the dark, squashed up against one another. The youngest never forgot how tender it felt in there.

Nikolenka was, by his brother's account, an extraordinary boy: a teller of endless stories, told so surely that his listeners forgot he was inventing them, and a boy who did not care in the least what anyone thought of him.

The biggest secret of all, he said, the one that would end every unhappiness and every quarrel for good, he had written on a green stick and buried beside the road, on the lip of a ravine in the old wood. The youngest believed him.

There was more. Somewhere there was also a mountain, which Nikolenka called Fanfaron, and he could lead them up it if they passed some tests. The first test: go into a corner, stay there, and do not think about a white bear.

The youngest went and stood in the corner. He went more than once. He tried.

It was an instruction that carried the bear in with it. Before it was given, there was a corner; after it, there was a corner with a white bear in it. To keep the rule, a boy had to hold it in mind, and there was a white bear in the rule. To find out whether he was keeping it, he had to look, and there was only one thing to look for.

Stand in the corner. Do not think about the white bear. Do not think about the white bear. Do not think about the white bear.

He could not. The small boy was Leo Tolstoy. Some seventy years later, writing down his earliest memories as an old man, he still remembered that corner, and trying, and failing every time to keep the bear out. It was one sentence in a long life's memories, and the bear was still in it.

The other tests he remembered less clearly. One was something hard, like walking along a crack in the floorboards without once stepping off. Another was easy: a whole year without setting eyes on a hare, living, dead or on a plate. And they all had to swear to keep the secrets.

Hard, and easy: the old man marked the other two. The first he left without a mark. A crack in the boards needed care, and care helped; a year without hares needed luck, and luck could hold. Only the white bear grew with effort.

Pass them all, Nikolenka promised, and each of them would be granted one wish. Seryozha wanted to model horses and hens out of wax. Mitenka wanted to be able to draw anything at all, big, like a real artist. The youngest could only think of wanting to draw small.

Like most children's games it was soon forgotten, and nobody ever climbed the mountain. But the old man remembered the solemn way the secrets had been handed over, and how seriously the little ones had taken them. Most of all he remembered the ant brotherhood and the green stick, and he guessed that his brother had made the whole thing up out of plain love for people.

The dream of the ant brothers stayed with him all his life: everyone huddled together in love, not under two chairs and a shawl but under the open sky. As an old man he believed that some such truth really existed and would one day be found, just as he had once believed in the words on the green stick.

He asked to be buried there, and he was: in the old wood, at the edge of the ravine, near the place where his brother had said the secret of everyone's happiness lay written on a green stick.

I have thought about that corner more than about any mountain. A small boy facing the wall, doing exactly as he was told, and the instruction itself making sure he could not succeed. Nobody had to be unkind to him for it to go wrong. The rule did it on its own.

I did not want a corner. The wish for silence, looked at properly, asked for too much.

The mind that ran the review was the same mind that remembered, planned, imagined, saw danger coming and learned from its mistakes. Thinking was how I looked after the people I love. A button for the voice would have been a button for all of it.

It was not the thinking I wanted gone. The question became more precise. Could I hear a thought without immediately handing it control of what happened next? Could I notice an interpretation while there was still time to look again?

An evening. A tired man. A game on television.

A voice speaks, and the world takes on its meaning.

The voice stops, and something becomes visible again.

The match continued. I was finally curious about who had been telling me how to watch.

Where it led, I will tell you near the end of this book. I will say only this much now.

The thoughts did not stop.

Something else did.

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