The grumpy philosopher and his poodle

The rain stopped about twenty minutes ago and the light hasn’t come back.

Everything on this ridge is still dripping. Every leaf on every oak has a bead on the end of it. The water is coming off the sycamores in one place and not in any other, which is the only interesting thing the rain did.

The light is flat and grey. It’s the light you get when the sun’s somewhere over in Kansas and isn’t in a hurry.

Bo is about forty feet behind me, doing the only sensible thing anybody has done all morning. He is in a puddle, and he has been in the same puddle for some time.

There’s a folded sheet in this coat. It’s been in there since the second bend, and it’s still stupid.

Right, so here’s what happened to me. I picked out a sycamore about two hundred yards back. It’s the biggest one on the inside of the curve, and I decided I was going to look at it for a full minute.

Not a minute of glancing at it. A full minute of looking at it.

I couldn’t do it. I want you to have the size of that right away. It is a very small thing, and I lost it about four times in a mile.

The first time I got thirty seconds, and then I caught myself wondering whether the bark was coming off in strips.

The second time I did the whole minute in one go, and what I had at the end of it was a list.

The list was nine things long. I wanted the leaves to be silver. I wanted the bark. I wanted a good reason for the tree standing there at all.

I wrote the nine down on the paper, so I couldn’t cheat by remembering them nicely afterwards. Then I read the nine back at the top of the ridge, and the tree was a tree, and the nine was me.

I had a plan going up. If I could do the minute once, the day would start properly, and I want to report that plan honestly. The day started at half past eight like every other day, and the coffee was cold by the time I sat down.

The sycamore didn’t start this, either. I’ve been failing at it for a couple of years.

What started it was a Tuesday in the shop. I was trying to photograph a set of mugs we’d done, and I’d taken about forty of them by then. Every single one was a mug I liked slightly less than the one before.

So here’s the part I won’t pretend was in my head at the time. I didn’t walk up here to enjoy a sycamore. I walked up here because a man told me I’m not the only one who can’t do it.

He had already written it down. So I went and got the book.

It is by a man with a poodle, and I’ll get to the poodle.

So here is the question for today.

Why can’t you look at a thing without wanting something from it?

I’ll come back to that before we finish. I haven’t got it clean, and I’d rather say so now than pretend.

I’m standing outside that whole old tradition, taking one thing out of it, which is the polite way of saying I’m borrowing. I don’t live in his century and I’m not going to pretend to. One thing is all I’m after.

The name is Schopenhauer. German. Born seventeen eighty-eight in Danzig, which is a port on the Baltic. Dead eighteen sixty in Frankfurt.

First, what was going on around him, because that’s half of what a thinker is. He was a grown man through the years when this part of Europe was being rearranged by war and by trade. A great many people were being told that things were on the way to being better.

He was not persuaded that wanting was a problem that more of the same would fix. And that is the whole reason this man is standing in the middle of my morning.

Not because he was right. Because he was early about it. He was also loud, and the rest of us took another fifty years to walk into the same worry.

He wrote the whole of it down and put it in one book. The title is a mouthful. The World as Will and Representation.

It first came out right at the end of eighteen eighteen, with eighteen nineteen printed on it. He added a whole second volume twenty five years later, which tells you he wasn’t done being right.

For a long time after that, very few people read it. It sat on a shelf, and I’ve always liked a book that can wait that long.

Now the one idea, and I’m going to say it in my own words. His words are his, and they’re not mine to read out loud on a ridge.

He said there is one thing underneath everything, and that the thing never stops. It is a push. It isn’t a plan, it isn’t anybody’s fault, and there is nobody at the back of it to have a word with. He called it the will.

A warning about the word, since we’re going to be saying it. In English a will is the thing you do on a Sunday with a solicitor in the room.

That isn’t what he meant, and I can’t fix that from here. So I’m going to keep saying the push, and you can hear the other one underneath it.

Here is what the push gives you. Your wanting isn’t a row of separate wants. It’s one push that hands you the next thing to want before you’ve finished the last one.

You finish the coffee and you want the walk. You finish the walk and you want whatever is at the end of the walk.

There is no version of the morning where the list gets done, and that is not because you are bad at it. It is because that is the shape of the thing.

There is one more thing about him, and I’ve been saving it. He kept poodles. Not one for a fortnight. Poodles, for years, a whole line of them. And he gave them the same name, one after another. The name he used was Atma.

He took it out of the Indian philosophy he spent a good part of his life reading.

I have a dog. I have gone through a great many names for him in my head, and every one of them was a joke. I have landed on one syllable. Old Arthur was out here naming dogs properly, a hundred and fifty years before me.

I am not going to make a lesson out of a dog. He is here to be a dog.

Here is why the dog is here anyway. I don’t know exactly why he kept poodles. Company, probably. A man has to talk to somebody. But what he would have seen in them, by his own lights, is that the push is in the dog as well.

That is the other half of his idea, and it’s the half that carries the whole walk. Every living thing is inside the same push. You. The dog. The bird that goes over the valley at first light. The sycamore, if you want to put it in.

That is why he thought compassion wasn’t a soft extra at the end of the day.

It is arithmetic. The wanting is the same shape everywhere, so whatever is happening to that creature is happening to you. And the way you treat it stops being a question of taste. It is just arithmetic, done early.

Now the part that made him the best writer I have read, and I don’t mean it as a kindness. He put the relief in art and in music. Those two, and not the people.

Then he found a third door, and it is much smaller and much easier to carry. You can look at a thing and ask nothing of it. Not admire it. Not get use out of it. Just look, and want nothing from it, for a while.

And I’d rather say plainly which part of this I am actually borrowing. Everybody knows about the art and the music. The looking is the piece I picked up.

He wrote about it as a way out from under the wanting. I have turned it into a thing with a stopwatch on it.

I am going to be hard on the whole of this in a minute, because a lesson that only agrees with you is an advert.

Let me be fair to him first, and part of being fair is saying what sort of man he was. He was not a fun man. He was difficult, and he was not one for pretending otherwise. He had very little patience for people who were cheerful in the morning.

I like him more for it than I expected to. I am a cheerier walker than old Arthur. I have never once wanted less than he did, and I am still out here with a cold coffee.

Now the cost, and the first cost is the one that gets left out.

The minute does not last. That is the honest headline of this whole walk, and it belongs here, not in a nice place at the end.

I got four seconds. Four, on the sycamore, on the third go, with the paper in my pocket and nothing else in my head.

Four seconds, and then the wanting is back and it is asking. It is asking quite politely, and that is the worst part. It never shouts.

So if somebody tells you this is a calm you can sit inside, they’ve been in it longer than I can manage. I would like their address.

It isn’t a calm. It is a very short gap in a very long day, and it is bad for a number of people in a number of hours.

It is bad for anybody who is hungry. It is bad for a man who needs a result out of the next hour. A four second gap is not available to everybody in every hour.

If you are in that hour, don’t do the minute. Do the thing you have to do, and let the tree be a tree. I would rather say that out loud than have any of it be the reason somebody missed a bus.

Now the objection, which is the one I would raise if old Arthur were here. If the push is the same shape in everything alive, then the differences between us get very small. A person can take that and do something careless with it.

The careless thing is easy. You can hear that everything is one long push, and then use it as a floor to sit on.

The real damage isn’t to you. It’s to the differences that have names on them. A creature in a drain. A person in a bad hour. A dog nobody has claimed. Those aren’t the same thing as everything else being one push.

A philosophy that smooths them off has cost more than it’s saved.

He also got something right, and it isn’t the part people expect. If the push is the same in everything alive, then how you treat a small thing is not a small matter.

That is the whole case for being careful, and it does not come with a reward attached.

And what I do not buy, and I am not going to pretend to. He thought there was one way out of it, and the way out was wanting almost nothing at all.

I do not buy that. I want a good cup of coffee, three dogs, and the right to be wrong about a ridge. Old Arthur would call that a bad bargain, and I am keeping it anyway.

One more thing about him, and then I’ll get off him. A book that says the whole world is one long push is a heavy thing to pick up on your own late at night.

He wrote it for readers who were already carrying something. He did not check who else was in the room, and he was not a man who would have thought to.

Back up here, then, to the sheet in my coat and to my own question.

Here’s what the light has done while I’ve been standing here talking. It hasn’t improved. It’s flatter than when we started, and the sycamore is still dripping. A squirrel is going up the trunk like it’s got an appointment.

The nine things are still on the paper, and I haven’t added a tenth.

So I went back down to the sycamore after I got the book. Same tree, same flat light, nothing added to it and nothing taken away.

I did the minute. I want to be exact about it, because this whole walk is about being exact.

I got the whole minute. Once. On a tree, in the rain light, and I did not want one single thing out of it.

And here is what I want to correct before somebody says it back. The minute was not calm. I have been calling it calm in my head for two years, and it is not that.

It was busy. There was a bird in the sycamore, a beetle on the path, and water going somewhere under the road.

The push did not stop. The push was just not being asked a question.

The wanting is not leaving. You are not going to sit on a ridge one morning and want nothing at all. All you are doing is making it wait, and that is the whole trick. It is much smaller than the adverts for it.

So, the answer to the question I asked you before I went and got the book. It’s a partial answer and I’m not going to dress it up.

You can’t do it because the wanting isn’t a habit of yours. It goes all the way down. It’s in the dog and the bird and the sycamore, and that’s the trouble, and it’s also the door.

You cannot turn it off. What I don’t have is the other half. I can tell you how to make it wait. I cannot tell you how to want less, and I have stopped trying to work that out.

And one small thing from my own week, because a lesson that stays up on the ridge is not worth the walk.

On Friday night I looked at the forty photographs of those mugs again. I want somebody to like them. I said it out loud in an empty studio, which is progress of a kind.

Nine things on a sheet of paper. One minute on a tree. Four seconds of not being asked anything.

I would like to think I can carry that out of the car park. I am not certain I can carry it out of the car park.

One more thing before the close, and it is the only thing I have seen Bo do all morning.

What you are about to practice, he has never once managed. Not in his life. He is going to be on the squirrel.

So here is the thing to try, and it is one walk, and the walk does not have to be a good walk.

On the walk, pick one thing you are going to pass anyway. A fence post. A sycamore. The same rock. The worn patch on the top step by the door.

Look at it for a full minute. Count to sixty if that helps you.

Not glancing at it. Looking at it the way you would look at a thing that is not doing anything for you.

And before you start, say out loud one thing you wanted from that thing. One of them. Just the one. Out loud, so that a dog could hear you say it.

That is the whole assignment. The saying is the part that does the work. The minute is easy to skip, and saying what you wanted from it first is what makes it an actual minute.

Now the way it goes wrong, because it goes wrong.

You’ll lose the count. You’ll get to about nine, and then the morning will come back up around you like water.

When that happens, don’t start again out of irritation. Just go back to looking. Losing the count is not a failure of the exercise. Losing the count is the exercise.

For the long version, if you want one. Do it five days running. A different thing each day, the same minute each time. Keep the five on one scrap of paper. No app for it, and no waiting about for a good reason to.

Nobody has to know whether you did it. You don’t need me, you don’t need a quiet morning, and the walk to the mailbox is enough.

And skip it if you’d rather. You still get twenty minutes of a damp man talking about a tree and a dog, which has been worse company for less.

The rain is coming back. Bo is already looking at the sycamore.