A point of contention

by Louisa McDonald

There was no reason why it had to have been such a problem, really. It was just a copy of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, or, more accurately, Das Phänomenologie des Geistes – Aubrey’s husband had insisted on acquiring it in the original German, even though he could hardly read a word of the language.

The trouble with such a book is that there are quite probably more people in the world who pretend to have read it than there are people who have actually read it. Aubrey could never tell which category her husband belonged to. He would talk about the book often enough – at parties, at the table, among colleagues – but then again, he often talked about things he did not really know much about. One time, she remembered him trying to impress a dinner guest who happened to be from Cambridge by spouting facts about the university. ‘Did you know,’ her husband had bellowed, exuding confidence. ‘That Cambridge University is the oldest in England? They reckon it was founded in the year 1167!’
His guest had replied, ‘No, it isn’t. The University of Oxford is the oldest; it was founded around that time.’
At this, her husband had fallen silent for a few seconds, then muttered, ‘That’s what I meant.’ It was not.

No matter how many times he was humbled in such a way, Aubrey’s husband never failed to speak every single word that came into his head with a level of confidence she could only grudgingly admire. Like Aubrey, he was an academic, and he lectured in the philosophy department at the same university as her; despite his specialism, he saw his knowledge as infinite, extending to and beyond all disciplines, rendering him an infallible source of wisdom. In particular, he denied Aubrey any credibility whatsoever, seeing her as his intellectual inferior in every possible way, someone who toyed with the tools of knowledge but could not possibly reach the kind of perfection of the mind he strived for. One time, when Aubrey had felt rather proud at having her article included in a periodical about 20th century film, her husband had rolled his eyes and said, ‘Why would anyone devote energy to old films? The point of the film industry is to be constantly changing, to be focused on the present. Art always imitates life, but film is a particularly mimetic art form; it literally captures the world as it is. Why would anyone be interested in films that barely represent life at all, like your German expressionist nonsense?’
Aubrey had wanted to tell him that he had got it all wrong, that this was not what films stood for at all. That film, like any other art form, invited life to imitate it as much as it imitated life; that film could be abstract, mysterious, multifarious in meaning. But somehow, no words had come out of her mouth.

One evening, as they were enjoying a dinner that Aubrey had spent hours preparing, her husband had smiled, rather smugly, and said, ‘You know, I have been thinking, and I have come to the conclusion that everything is philosophy, really. Take the study of English Literature – it is nothing but the philosophy of the written word; the study of History is nothing but the philosophy of time, of how we ought to relate to and interpret events present and past. And Film Studies is nothing but the philosophy of the image on the screen, wouldn’t you agree?’
Aubrey, who was barely capable of anger, felt something resembling it rise in her throat. She folded her arms and sighed. ‘No,’ she had replied, rather sternly. ‘No, everything is not philosophy. Sometimes, to study the world is about observing it, rather than theorising. Sometimes, it is about trying to learn from art, rather than trying to capture its meaning in a few neat words. Sometimes, it is about learning how art can set you free.’
At this, her husband had scowled. ‘You don’t know what you are talking about,’ he had huffed. He left the dinner table, having barely touched the food she had prepared, and headed upstairs to read Hegel.

Aubrey knew this was what he had done, because when she finally summoned the willpower to go to their bedroom and check on him, she found him curled up on the bed, squinting at the words he could not understand. She had felt strangely smug at seeing him struggling over the pages and had considered asking him what the point of poring over something he could not understand was. But something told her to leave him to his torments. Eluding his attention, Aubrey turned and walked out into the night.

The dim glow of the streetlamps made everyone who passed by seem like a shadow of themselves, weightless counterparts to the people of the day who heaved under the burdens of life. Aubrey felt the weight of her husband lift gracefully off her shoulders as she gazed up at the singular star that made itself visible from among the clouds. It reminded her that the universe was larger than she was, that all she had to do to forget about her problems for a moment was stare at the sky.

As people weaved their way in and out of restaurants, the world seemed artificial and charming, like a scene from an old film. The thought that everyone else in the world was like an actor was one that occurred to Aubrey often as she marvelled at the ease at which they navigated their lives, impossibly sure of how they ought to live. Aubrey, on the other hand, could not remember a time where she did not feel as if she were in one of those dreams where you end up on stage without knowing a single one of your lines, petrified amidst the lights and the expectant faces. No matter where she went, she always felt inexplicably lost. From an outsider’s perspective, one could have argued that Aubrey had a lot of things in order in her life: she had been married for several years; she had a stable career; she already had several publications under her belt although she was not yet in her mid-thirties. But to Aubrey, everything in her life seemed as uncertain as lines half-remembered on stage.

When she had first met her husband, he had seemed as if he were almost too perfect to be true. In a world where all anyone had watched was Marvel and Star Wars films, here was someone who had watched all the Truffaults, all the Godards, all the Rohmers. In a world where no one saw the merits of reading anymore, here was somebody who had made his way through every volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which he read with such careful attention that one thought that he must have been searching for something himself, something more elusive and beautiful than lost time. She had fallen in love more quickly than she had even known herself do before, fallen in love with what she thought was a gentle, sensitive, intelligent soul. But the man she had fallen for seemed almost unrecognisable now, transformed into a chauvinistic caricature of what she had once seen in him. Aubrey could not help but ask herself if this was all he had been all along: someone pretending to be more than he was.

As she so often did when she wandered the night alone, Aubrey found herself sitting alone in a bar. She had ordered an Old Fashioned, the kind of drink that made you feel as if you still possessed a shred of sophistication despite the constant efforts of the world to take it away. Quite spontaneously, she had chosen the kind of bar where everyone around her was dressed up to the nines, crammed into suits that were too narrow or dresses that were too tight, smiling and keeping up the pretence of glamour despite their discomfort. Although she was only wearing torn jeans and a threadbare jumper, Aubrey somehow did not feel out of place in the bar; she found herself strangely charmed by the fact that, in a world where there was so much to worry about, people’s main priority here seemed to be to keep up the pretence of beauty. It was not long, too, before Aubrey started to notice all the handsome young men who leant across tables on their dainty elbows, sipping at sparkling cocktails. Almost all of them had beautiful women on their arms, but one of them, a gentleman with dark hair and luminous eyes, appeared to be alone. He sat at a table full of laughter, but he himself was not laughing; rather, he was looking wistfully around the room, perhaps silently wondering if anyone else shared in the loneliness that had taken hold of his heart. There was a delicateness about his manner that Aubrey found almost irresistible. A voice whispered in the secret parts of her mind: Go and talk to him, Aubrey – look at how lonely he is, Aubrey. Perhaps he would like someone to talk to. Perhaps he is just like you…

Turning away from the young man, Aubrey found herself getting up out of the seat and hurrying out of the bar, her Old Fashioned only half-finished. She pushed gently past elegant figures in fur coats and satin dresses as she made her way to the door, ignoring the cold eyes they cast at her as she slipped back into the night. She kept on walking down the street until she was far away from the bar, far away from the attractive stranger who had caught her eye. With each hasty step, Aubrey felt more pathetic. What would have been the harm in talking to that young man, anyway? Clearly, her instincts as a married woman still had not deserted her, but she knew that her husband had not been repaying her fidelity for a long time. She had seen him sneak out at strange hours in the night; she had seen the lipstick that did not belong to her tucked in his briefcase, and she had become aware of the scent on the pillow that was nothing like her perfume. Aubrey would have confronted him about it, but confronting him meant facing the truth, and the truth was something Aubrey could never quite bring herself to believe.

As the night closed in on her, as the streetlamps guided her further and further away from all that was causing unrest in her heart, Aubrey found her mind wandering, quite spontaneously, back to Hegel. Was her husband still curled up in bed, she pondered, trying to twist his mind around Hegel’s metaphysics? Try as he might, she knew her husband could not truly have read Hegel, not properly. She, on the other hand, did know a thing or two about the musings of the famously difficult German philosopher. She knew a little of his metaphysics, but it was Hegel’s aesthetic theory that had always lit a fire in Aubrey’s imagination. In particular, she loved his idea that art’s most important function was to give expression to the freedom of the spirit; rather than imitating the realities of life, art’s purpose was to show people how life could be free. She had first come across this idea as an awkward teenager, poring over the books on the top shelf of the library in order to avoid the overwhelming empty noise of the common room, and it had lingered, in some form or other, in her mind ever since. She had even been discussing Hegel’s aesthetics in the latest book she had been working on, not that her husband cared to read it. And as she thought back to the people in the bar, Aubrey wondered if what they were striving for, subconsciously, was a kind of freedom of the spirit achieved through art; specifically, through turning themselves into art. Yes, forcing oneself into a tight dress or narrow suit might at first seem antithetical to freedom, but the scene all those people created – a scene of dazzling beauty in an ordinary, troubled world – was one of defiance. It was a scene that said, Let us be beautiful despite the disorder that pervades the universe. Let us be careless and free.

The night pressed on, and the glow of the streetlamps became dimmer. One by one, the lights switched off from the windows that looked out onto the street, and the shadowy figures that dreamed in shirtsleeves began to retreat to their beds. Aubrey thought of returning home, for it was getting late already, and she had a class to teach at 10am the next day, but she asked herself what she would return home to – to her husband, still struggling through Hegel, unable to understand a word but equally unable to admit the limits of his understanding? Or worse still, to a house deserted, to a note on the bed that excused his absence for the night, a night that he would spend in the company of the woman with a different perfume, the woman who was in the habit of leaving lipsticks in his briefcase, as if to persuade Aubrey of something she was trying desperately not to believe. No – the house would not welcome her back tonight. Tonight, she was on her own, and, strangely enough, she felt as if her own company were what she needed most. So, Aubrey carried on into the darkness, watching the world hold its breath as if it were a still from a silent film, unable to articulate the ruminations of its soul.

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