Dorset


I am a former religious fundamentalist. This seemed like an appropriately bold start. The presentation was over, but this was how it began. In the bland conference room, a single university student had sat listening. 
I had taken a long breath. 
I am a former religious fundamentalist. Back then, in my early twenties, I had the Truth. Everyone, I said to anyone who would listen, must follow the Buddha (the Buddha, I specified, of the Theravada), or else suffer inevitable misery in this life – and an eternity of misery in the rounds of rebirth that are to follow. I wanted to live the Dhamma to the letter. I could never be extreme enough in my own ascetic practices, and those practices became so violent that I almost starved to death. 
But how I interpreted the body, guided by the Buddhist Tripitaka, was simply wrong. With that little knowledge, there came a question, and then a doubt, and then a rush of questions, washing away my virtue and all the violence against the self that it demanded. This was how I came to the light of doubt. 
This, I had then claimed, is the fire almost all Western universities want to light in the minds of their students. Critical thinking, I explained, means seeking truth – with (and I stressed the word) rationality. I moved forward a slide. Critical thinking is dialectic. You must teach yourself to inhabit multiple perspectives in the search for the truth. And you must gather as much evidence as you can before drawing your conclusions… 
Slide after slide, I had talked liked this for my allotted hour, and the student had dutifully taken the occasional note. Now the presentation was over, I made small talk with the student, as she stowed away her notebook and a well-gnawed ballpoint. The student told me that she was a long way from home. She told me she had grown up in Dorset. 
I would say only one thing in reply, and she would go on seeing me as whatever she saw me as before (a professor with much hard-won wisdom, perhaps), but my heart buckled. A mass of unsuccessfully forgotten things threatened to surge up and over me. To spurt out from under the professorial mask.
   
I had last visited Dorset for a family holiday, a year earlier. 
I had arrived at the coast from north London. Hazel, a woman living in Finchley, had shaken my heart harder than any other woman had shaken it for ten years. With Hazel it was always high boots or leggings stuffed in socks, the same large glasses, and never any make up. She carried her rope of dirty-blonde hair in a braid over one shoulder. She gave the impression of always withholding something. And her face, as much as her love of flowers and lambs, gave the impression of girlish innocence, which belied those high school years spent snorting pills with one of her teachers. 
She had offered me a few nights in a spare room. She herself was staying with her uncle and her loving but rather dreamy aunt, and the house was glorious, a former orphanage, with high ceilings, a garden enclosed in high walls, and a stained-glass window over the staircase. There was a piano in the white entrance hall and an acoustic guitar in the flagstone kitchen. She stayed in the small bedroom at the end of a long and crooked corridor, and I found myself lodged at the other end of the house, hoping the distance between us would one day be closed. 
And perhaps it would be. Her family owned a small beach cabin and, as we shared a bowl of jasmine sorbet one evening, she suggested that she might be able to find the time, before she returned to America, to spend a night there. She met my eyes. She told me I would be invited if she did. 
The next day, we hugged by the Tube station entrance, and I left her, with a single strand of her hair on my coat. And, as the train shuddered over England, a question caught my mind like a fire. How might I bring about the fragile possibility of that beach cabin and all that might happen there? How could I let Hazel know, as I hadn’t over that melting sorbet, how much I wanted what that possibility suggested? Perhaps something forward, something bold? Perhaps that alone would do it? She had once said just friends… But she had also said… But did that mean… So perhaps I should say nothing, keep crossed fingers, avoid discomfort as I had always avoided it? 
On the first day in Dorset, I walked alone along the rugged coastline from Smuggler’s Cove to Durdle Door, making a point to sit on the edge of fatal clifftops and to take always the narrowest paths and least sensible routes. I wanted to prove to myself that, under a lifetime of caution, I had really wanted all along to be the kind of daring man Hazel wanted. In a wealthy London suburb, I told her the flowers smelt so heavenly I could eat them, and, a twinkle in her eye, she told me to go ahead, and I hesitated just a bit too long, so that by the time I put the petals in my mouth the twinkle was already gone. She knew who I was, and I was quiet and furious with myself as I chewed the flower, because I knew that she was wrong, even if, for the time being, she was right.
For all the walking, the shaking fingers of my mind mauled the question into the early hours of the morning, and my body twisted in the narrow bed with its overstuffed pillows, until at last exhaustion made the restless fingers go limp. I woke to a sunlit room and glorious thunder in my chest, as I heard the distant clatter of my family at breakfast. I had been seventeen, as lovesick and twice as shy, the last time I felt terror and pleasure locked in such a tight embrace.
I sent a message to Hazel that morning, hiding my intent in lines that could almost be innocent, if not for the things that had passed between us. 
But she didn’t understand my message. Had nothing passed between us, then? Or had she understood and pretended otherwise? A gentle reproof to spare my feelings, perhaps, or perhaps a twinge of guilt had chilled her, a sense that she had been trying to push me into places I wasn’t comfortable going? But I was comfortable going there. I could eat a roadside flower without hesitating. I could enjoy standing at the edge of clifftops, gazing at the easy death that yawned in front of me. She would leave for New England in three weeks’ time, but there was time enough, still time for both of us to discover that I was the man she wanted, underneath what I appeared to be.
I walked alone for hours that day in a subtropical botanical garden, avoiding my family, my mental fingers mashing the pulp that the question had become. This was surely the climax to a nineteenth century novel, one where the man wanders half blind through the fine shrubbery, his face gaunt and his mind feverish, until at last he turns a corner and finds, to his surprise, the woman that has set the whole storm in motion, ready to resolve the accumulated horror of so many small misunderstandings. I wandered the paths shaking and restless, but Hazel did not appear. The chapter refused to resolve itself. The bold path was still too bold, but every other path proved my failure, my cowardice. I had been one thing all my life and maybe I would be that forever. Prudence looked like cowardice and then cowardice looked like prudence. Hadn’t she said…? But did that mean…? But then two weeks ago… 
I practically scrabbled on the floor for the truth, with all the tools of rationality to hand, picked up and discarded and picked up again. There was too much I didn’t know, a fog of uncertainty that distorted the few objects I could discern. Under the blue sky, I sometimes sat in the greenish shadows, and I sometimes paced the neat gravel paths between the bright flowers, and I heard the warm breeze roar in the trees and felt the frantic trumping of my own heart. I was a mathematician moonstruck, a man turned lunatic in his attempt to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. I retraced my mental steps, looking for some possibility I had missed the first fifty times, trying to discern some neglected data point, trying to find some overlooked action to which I had yet to subject my equation, striving, always, to be logical…
 
Of course, I shared none of this with the student. 

‘Dorset,’ I told her, ‘is a beautiful part of the country.’