The judge in the house

A little after nine in the morning. The sun has come over the ridge behind me and put the whole cove in shade.

It’s already the warm part of the day. The road down there has been mown, and you can smell it from up here. That’s a smell I’m not going to argue with.

Bo is ahead of me at the low gate, doing the thing he does where the ground turns to gravel.

I’ve walked this same half mile three mornings running, and I’ve got nowhere on any of them.

Here’s the thing that happened, and it isn’t a story about anybody else. It’s about me, and it took about an hour, on Tuesday evening.

I let Bo out of the back door at the shop at half past eight. He’d been asking at that door for twenty minutes.

Then I didn’t sit down.

I went back inside, stood in the middle of the floor, and ran a trial. A whole one, in my own head, at speed. I won it, and I was glad about it for most of a minute.

Now, doing that isn’t new and it isn’t broken. I’ve been doing it for years.

What was new on Tuesday was that I went looking for the evidence afterwards.

I wanted to know where the sentence had come from. Not what I deserved, because I’m not the judge of that and never have been. I wanted the source.

And I found out that I had exactly one charge.

One sentence, ready to go, and it took me no trouble at all to get hold of it.

It wasn’t about that evening.

It was old. It’s a sentence I finished assembling about myself some years back, on a bad day, out loud, to nobody. And then I never looked at it again.

And on Tuesday evening at half past eight, I used it to convict myself of something else entirely.

I sat down about an hour later. Bo had been out the whole time. He came in when I opened the door and went straight to the bowl. He did not look at me, and that’s the one time he’s never done it.

So here is the question for today.

Why am I convicted on evidence that is years old?

That’s the question. I’ve been carrying it about three days now, and it hasn’t got any smaller.

I’m going to warn you that I’m not going to answer it all the way. I’ve got part of an answer, and half of that came from a man who is dead, so there’s nobody at the other end of it to argue with.

The part I’ve got is this. Nobody writes the date on a sentence.

A sentence is a lid with no label on it. It fits whatever is under it right now, mostly because you put it there yourself. And you put it there so fast that nobody saw your hand do it.

That is the bit, and it is not that I was wrong on Tuesday. It is that the charge was older than the crime, and in a different county.

Anyway, I went and got out the old man again.

Before I go on, I’m borrowing here. I’d rather say so out loud than let it sound like mine.

I’m standing a long way outside that old world, and I’m taking one thing out of it, and I’ve got to say what it costs me later.

The name is Epictetus.

I’ve brought him on this trail once already, about the line you draw on the floor, and I’m not going to do his life again.

He was born about the year fifty, in a town in what is Turkey now. He was a slave in Rome as a young man, and he was freed. He taught for the rest of his life in a Greek town near the coast.

Not one line in his own hand. His student wrote it all down, and he is the reason we have it.

Now, the idea I want isn’t the line. The line is made out of this one.

He says, and I’m going to say it my own way, that a thing doesn’t trouble a person. The trouble is done by the sentence the person has put on the thing.

I don’t mean that nothing you do to me matters, or that a hard day is only in the telling. I’ve been on the end of a hard day, and it mattered.

I mean that the thing that’s just happened is over there being a thing, and it doesn’t have a handle on you. The sentence is what reaches over and picks it up.

Here’s what I did with that on Tuesday night, and it’s taken me about four years to be able to do it.

I didn’t look at the door. I looked at the sentence. Where did this come from, how old is it, and who wrote it?

Because the sentence was the whole of the trouble, and the door was a door.

And there’s a second thing of his that I want, and it’s a warning rather than a comfort.

He spent a lot of his teaching telling people not to take their measure of themselves from other people.

Now think about how that sounds in a room where other people’s opinions are the weather.

A man who takes his measure from the weather spends his life being blown about by people who never once looked at him.

I want to answer that one with my own experience, because it isn’t a theory to me.

The judge in my house isn’t old in the way people expect when they hear a story like this. It didn’t arrive fully formed.

It came in by the back door, in pieces, from people whose opinion I needed at some point.

Somebody who said it kindly. That’s the worst of it. It was never shouted. It was handed over like a tool, and I’ve been holding it so long that my hand has the shape of it.

And the last person to hand it over has been dead for years, and he’s still the loudest thing in the room.

So I don’t think a judge in the house is a natural fact about people. I think it is inherited.

Two more names, and I’m going to be quick with them.

The first is Schopenhauer, and he is seventeen eighty-eight to eighteen sixty, and German.

He wrote one very large book, and he kept adding to it for most of the rest of his life. It isn’t a cheerful book. He wrote about wanting, mostly. The push underneath ordinary wanting that doesn’t stop when you get what you were after.

The one thing I take from him here is that the trial isn’t a punishment somebody hands you afterwards. The court is already in the house, and it never closes.

That picture is mine, not his. But I think he’d have recognised the building.

The second is Emerson, born eighteen oh three, dead eighteen eighty-two, and American. He wrote an essay about trusting yourself against the crowd’s estimate of you.

It isn’t a rule about doing as you please. That’s the way it gets quoted, and that isn’t what it is.

His version is about which measure you’re holding up to yourself. Two rulers, that’s the shape of it. One cut by the people around you, one cut by you.

I’m not going to overcook him on this trail. He gets handed to somebody as a slogan, and that isn’t the man.

I’ve got to do the part where I say what’s wrong with all this. Otherwise it’s only an old habit, and any common philosopher could have sold it to me.

First, the cost of it. That line about the sentence is powerful, and powerful things have an edge on them.

Somebody who has been done a wrong has just come back from being angry about it, and somebody hands them that line. And now they are not allowed to be angry either.

And the anger was the last honest thing left in the room.

I have watched that go somewhere it should not have gone. And I am not going to dress it up for the sake of the walk.

Standing inside an old idea does not make you right. It can make you very well spoken at somebody who is bleeding.

There’s a worse version of the same mistake, and this one is about me, not about a person I am trying to protect. The version where the sentence is so old that nobody’s ever argued with it, so I call it true.

That’s the trap in this whole walk, and I’ve got to say it plainly. A thing you decided about yourself a long time ago is not automatically a fact.

It’s a thing you decided, and deciding is cheap, and you were tired, and there was nobody there.

So I put the whole thing to a test this week, and it’s the only test I know.

I went to get the sentence again on purpose. Saturday morning, the same floor, on purpose.

And here’s what I found. It is not one sentence.

It’s about six. They’re all the same shape, and none of them is about anything. He is slow. He cannot be trusted with a thing he said once. He does not finish things. That is a list about a person I was, and it is four years old.

The man on the floor in front of me is not him.

And the one that has been running the whole time is the ugliest, because it’s the one I cannot check. He does not listen. That’s the one. He has not listened to anybody properly in a very long time.

I have no idea whether that’s true. I have not gone and looked. It’s the oldest one in the pile, and the one that costs me the most.

It is also the one that has never been on trial.

So the honest position is this. Some of it is probably true, and I am not going to pretend it’s all rubbish. That’d be another kind of easy answer, and I have had enough of those this month.

And the reason it can run for years without anybody checking is that judging yourself costs nothing, and no one ever sees it happen.

That’s the exact thing I said on an earlier walk. I was congratulating myself for standing still on a bend and winning an argument with a man who was not there.

There’s no audience for this. That’s the trouble with the whole arrangement.

And I had a plan about it, which did not survive Saturday. What I was going to do was catch it. Not write it down after. Catch it in the act, the way you’d catch somebody doing something in a room.

Say the date out loud while it is still happening.

You cannot do it. That is the whole finding, and it took me three days of standing in shops waiting for my own voice to start.

Because the sentence is not a thing that happens to you. It is already finished by the time you notice it, and by then you are in it. It is talking in your own accent, and it sounds exactly like a fact.

Back on the ridge now, and it has got warm while we’ve been at this.

Bo is in the shade of the gate post. Bo has given up on the gravel, and he’s watching a beetle go along the edge of it. He’s been watching it long enough that I think he’s made a decision about it.

One more, and this is the one I did not expect to need.

William James. Eighteen forty-two to nineteen ten.

He wrote about how a person decides when the deciding cannot be put off any longer. Not what is true, which is a different question. What you do when you have to act, and you have not got what you’d need in order to be sure.

And the bit I’m keeping is that the evidence runs out before the wanting does. That’s the ordinary condition of a person who is alive. You get to the end of what you know, and the wanting is still there, standing at your elbow.

He was not talking about this in a book about deciding. He was talking about it in the plainest possible terms, the way I’m talking about it now. I’d rather have it that way.

Here’s what I actually think I’ve got. I’m going to put it plain, and then I’m going to stop putting it.

The old idea says the sentence does the troubling. The second old man says the sentence is the whole court, and the court never adjourns.

Both of those are about one thing. They’re about where the trial happens. In the house, with nobody in it.

And the thing neither of them will do for you is tell you when to stop.

Here’s my own part of it, and this is the part I did not get from a book.

A conscience is a thing with a witness in it. It knows what you did, and it knows when you did it, and it can be answered to.

The audience is a thing with no witness at all. It is a room with nobody in it, and whatever you do in it can be argued about forever. Nothing in it can ever be settled, because there is nobody there to settle it with.

That is the difference I can hold on to. The judge in the house is real. The audience is a rented room with the door unlocked.

Because here’s the thing that took me four years to get round to. The verdict is not the problem. I’ve been treating the verdict as the problem since Tuesday.

Nobody has ever got less wakeful because a sentence in their own head said they were a certain kind of person. You cannot sleep for a sentence.

What actually puts a person down is not being convicted. It’s having nobody to hand the case to.

A trial you can finish is worth having. You put the evidence in, and the other side puts its evidence in. One of you is wrong. That is the end of it, and you go home.

The trial in the house has no other side. Nobody ever turns up. So the case gets reopened every single day, and nothing is ever decided.

That is the whole of what has been wrong with it. I had the sentence in the wrong place in my head for four years.

Here’s where it lands, then, and I will do it in three sentences and stop.

Write the date on the sentence. That is the practice.

And when the date is old, do not argue with it. Look at whether there is a witness, and if there is not, close it.

A trial with no witness is not a trial. It is weather.

Now, back on the ridge properly, because I have not asked you to do anything yet, and the shade has come over the gate.

There’s a thing I do not need to warn you about, and I’m going to warn you about anyway.

There’ll be a moment this week when you get that voice. The one that’s been making notes about you since you were about nine years old.

And my only request is that you notice how fast it talks, and how rarely it has anything new to say.

Here’s the thing to try, and it’s one walk, and it fits the way to the mailbox.

Write one of them down. One sentence of your own, in your own handwriting, on anything that takes a mark.

Then, underneath it, write how old it is.

Not the year. You will not know the year. The season is enough. That winter. Since the kitchen. Before the move.

That’s it. Two lines, and it’s the whole assignment.

Now do one thing with it, and the thing is not to argue with it. Ask whether it has a witness. Not whether it’s true. Whether anybody actually saw anything.

Say that answer out loud, where somebody could hear it. The somebody is allowed to be a dog.

If the answer is that there’s no witness, then close it. Out loud, one short sentence, and then you’re finished with it for good.

You may well find you cannot close it. That’s allowed, and that is not a failure of the exercise. If it cannot be closed today, write the next time you’re going to look at it, and then stop.

No paper, no app, nothing to download. A pen and a scrap is plenty.

And if you’d rather do the longer version, do one sentence a day for a week. Seven lines on one sheet, and keep them in order. That’s where it gets good, because the third day is always shorter than the first.

I would rather somebody found that out on their own.

Nobody has to know. Keep the scrap in a pocket or burn it, and it’s still yours.

And I’m not going to ask you what came up, because there’s nowhere for an answer to go.

Skip it if you want. You still got a man on a ridge trying to be on trial with nobody to prosecute. That’s a walk, and I’ve done it four times this week.

And I want to say the true thing about it before the last two minutes.

Writing a date down is not the same as being forgiven. It is only knowing what you are looking at.

Bo has got up off the gate post and come to see what I am doing. He’s decided that what I am doing is a smell on the ground.

I did not win the trial. I have one date written down.