It is hard to imagine two more completely different environments than Kathmandu and Kentmere (the valley I live in in the Lake District). The former is busy, polluted, and frenetic a place where you can loose yourself for an hour wandering in back streets: it seems possible to be totally anonymous whilst surrounded by hundreds of people. The latter is quiet, empty, and clear, yet despite this everyone knows you. I have felt an entirely separate set of demands placed on me over the last week to those of the last two months: there I am a young lawyer doing a job, a foreigner, a friend, and a colleague; here I am a son, brother, uncle, family friend, and local(ish).
I don’t mean to suggest that either state is better than the other, but I have noticed the difference, and just as it feels strange to exercise new muscles so it has felt strange to go from one environment to another.
Nevertheless I could not be more delighted to have gone to Nepal. I was last there 4 years ago and left earlier than I would have wished and in circumstances which were not ideal. I had struggled to build a relationship with an orthodox Brahmin with whom I had not built the rapport I would have hoped for. It wasn’t my fault, but I have always regretted the way things panned out; a part of me has long suspected that had I been slightly older and wiser matters could have been dealt with better. What this experience did give me was a love of Nepal- I felt a tremendous affinity for the country and longed to return. To have arrived home this Christmas having had a wonderful time, having completed my tasks, and having achieved all that I hoped to has given me a great sense of perspective on all that happened in 2005 when I was last in Kathmandu.
Part of this is best explained by reference to this article by the great writer David Foster Wallace. He tragically committed suicide in 2008 and this article is almost his self-penned yet unconscious epitaph. His work (and this particular article) was drawn to my attention in Kathmandu by and American friend and I have found real pleasure, food for thought, and inspiration in that which he writes.
The article in question begins with a fable:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
At this point I nearly gave up. The prospect of a few thousand word of moralising sermon about us being the young fish and he being the old was almost too much. To my relief however Foster Wallace was one step ahead. He explains that the purpose of the story is not that he is the old fish, it is simply to demonstrate that ‘the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about’.
The simple truth that we have a direct link to our own thoughts and a much less immediate link with those of others is one such reality. It is this reality which means that we have a tendency to see ourselves at the centre of events. Foster Wallace did not present this as having any moral undertones, he simply called for us to acknowledge its truth:
This is not a matter of virtue — it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
He explained the importance of this by reminding us that
I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
The most poignant section of this argument (remembering that this is written by an author who subsequently killed himself) comes when he considers the effect of our tendency to focus on our own experiences and the benefit of thinking outside them:
It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.
Why is this important? Well for me it has shown me something I have always known but never thought about- that actual anonymity has nothing to do with environment. I began this post by commenting that in Kathmandu it was possible to feel totally anonymous but in Kentmere it wasn’t. I have realised that the key to this is that in a small community the ties that bind us are more obvious: you are likely to know the names of those around you, their family and their business. It is this which makes us more likely to shift our viewpoint from ours to theirs. In a city, where you are one of many, it is similarly more likely to get lost in yourself and in your own problems.
The pleasant thing about my recent trip is that I have discovered that whilst it is possible to feel anonymous in Kathmandu it is not probable. It has been confirmed for me that Nepal is not a society where anonymity rules- it is hardly possible to ask for directions without a five minute prologue in which you discuss your family and business with a passerby, the simple act of having a cup of tea at a roadside stall requires a conversation about who you are and why you’re there, and strangers greet each other as brother, sister, mother or father. I have been reminded in Nepal that a city 4500 miles from home can still provide ample means to avoid ‘imperial’ loneliness (which in retrospect is how I felt in 2005) and for that I am profoundly grateful.
