The Man with Two Souls

by Louisa McDonald

It was a Monday morning in the middle of October, and the mantle the night had cast over the city had begun to lift. Crisp autumn leaves drifted gracefully on the surface of the wide puddles the rain had left, and the pigeons had begun to strut down the pavements in their perpetual search for scraps of food as the cafés opened their doors, letting the aromas of coffee make their way through the morning air. The faint sunlight gave the ornate roofs of the university buildings a warm glow as they reclaimed the grandeur that the shadows of the evening had hidden away. As he watched the world come back to life from where he was sitting on the bench, Laurence thought to himself that Oxford looked more beautiful than ever. He liked it best in the autumn: in the summer, the tourists packed themselves so tightly in the streets that you could barely find space to breathe; in the winter, the icy winds and constant rain drove all the people, shivering in their overcoats, to hide away in cafés, too meek to face the outside world. Autumn was perfect: the city seemed to be able to be its true self, showing off its decorous beauty in the golden light and comforting those who called it home.

Although many years ago it might have filled him with ineffable joy, today, the beauty of the city only deepened the sadness in Laurence’s soul. There is nothing more quietly heart-breaking than to recognise that the world remains beautiful when one’s own life is so far from it. It confirms the knowledge which every man harbours but few care to admit: that the world is indifferent to the individual. Laurence knew he ought not to be sitting on a bench on a Monday morning – he had a lecture to give at 10.00am, and it was already getting on for 9.30 – but somehow, he could not bring himself to move. The bench was located outside a restaurant and faced the road; it was the perfect place to sit and watch the movement of the city without being part of it. All around him, people hurried by, checking their watches between breathless strides; cars and bicycles made their way down the road with a palpable sense of purpose and direction. Laurence found an odd comfort in watching them. In a city of movement, it felt as if he were suspended; he found solace in his decision to be still and to observe.

Long before he had become a lecturer, Laurence had, of course, once been a student; in fact, he had been a student in Oxford. That was many years ago, but the feeling of stillness on that bench reminded him of the times when, back in his student days, he used to take the occasional afternoon trip to Blackwell’s bookshop and spend hours making his way through the shelves. He could remember it with a forceful vivacity that made him feel as if he had never moved on: as he sat on the bench, he felt as if he were twenty years old and in Blackwells once again. He would run his finger over the spines of each title until he found something that interested him, at which point, he would take it off the shelf and begin to peruse for minutes, for hours. He would cram the book into the growing collection that he was accumulating under his arm. It was true, every penny he saved from his job working the night shift at a local bar went on books, sometimes even at the expense of essentials like sufficient food, but it was worth it; a person surrounded by books gave the impression of a person of distinction. In his cramped student dormitory were books of all kinds: not only hundreds of volumes of French and German poetry, which might have come in helpful for his degree, but also books on philosophy, history, literary theory, and even on topics as far removed from his subject area as medical ethics and quantum mechanics. In a way, a book was a book to him; it did not matter that most of them ultimately remained unread on his shelves, cloaking themselves in dust.

But when he did take it upon himself to pick up one of the books and get absorbed in its pages, Laurence always had that same distinct feeling of stillness. It was as if the world outside no longer mattered, and all that existed was that peaceful ecstasy of the soul that only the words of a book can inspire.

There, on the bench, the stillness had returned, but it was different. Laurence no longer felt such a sense of quiet joy in the mind, but rather one of empty hopelessness. It was to be expected, for he was no longer the determined young man that he had been back in his student days; his hair had more than a few grey flecks in it now, and he had not felt the fire that he had once felt in his soul for many years. When he had first started lecturing, he remembered having quite looked forward to introducing his first-year students to the wonders of Goethe and Schiller, but now, every class he taught seemed to take a little more of his remaining strength out of him. Perhaps it was the mental repetitive strain that comes with teaching the same material time and time again; perhaps it was the bored look on the students’ faces that never shifted, even when he was enlightening them about topics which had fascinated him when he had been their age.

In his briefcase were the notes for a lecture he was about to give on Friedrich Schlegel. It was an unusual subject for a tutorial. Friedrich’s ideas were generally taught less often than those of his more sensible older brother, August Wilhelm, and Laurence’s choice of topic had invited a fair few disapproving shakes of the head from his fellow academics in the department. But after so many years, Laurence had grown tired of teaching the conventional material; he wanted to teach something a little different, something which inspired him. August Wilhelm’s literary criticism, in brief, had treated literature and art in an analytic way; his famous Vienna lectures on dramatic art had talked of unity as a key feature of great literature. Friedrich, on the other hand, was concerned with chaos. His unfinished book Lucinde is an example of such chaos: it is fragmented in nature and its narrative is unconventional in form. Yet most importantly for Friedrich, there must be method in the madness; the chaos must ultimately be unified in a systematic way. And the way of unifying the chaos, he suggests, is irony. Being ironic, for Schlegel, is achieved by consciously bringing out the nature of the human perspective as fragmentary, as chaotic. Irony lays bare the limited nature of our perspective; it is the result of finite human consciousness confronted with infinity.

Would his students be remotely interested in the strange and intriguing mind of Friedrich Schlegel? Laurence did not know, or even particularly care. Recently, this theory of chaos and irony had been occupying his mind like a tune on the radio which, once heard, refuses to stop playing over and over in one’s brain, an invisible broken record of the soul. Perhaps it was because he had been sensing for a long time that his own life, which had once been the epitome of order, was drifting further and further towards chaos. He thought back to when he was twenty-eight years old. Back then, he had thought his life was assuming the perfect unity: he had secured his first job as an associate lecturer, which he was greatly enjoying, and he had just got married to the beautiful Lucille, the woman with whom he had envisioned a long and rewarding future. They had been a spectacular couple to behold; sometimes, despite the pain it inevitably brought to his heart, Laurence would look through their wedding photos and simply admire how slim and handsome he looked in his sleek black suit, and how exquisite she looked in her flowing dress.

Lucille. She had called that morning. It had been exactly fifteen years since they had shared that beautiful wedding day. For a brief moment, Laurence had thought that perhaps she had been phoning to mark the occasion. When he picked up the phone, he had almost said, ‘Happy anniversary!’ Thinking about it now, it would have been a foolish thing to say; why would you wish someone a happy anniversary when she had been separated from her husband for five years, especially when that husband was yourself? Perhaps fortunately, Lucille had spoken before him.
‘Hello Laurence,’ she had said, her voice cracking a little from the poor signal.
‘Hello Lucille,’
‘How is René?’
The question had almost made Laurence spit out his coffee; even though she did it almost every time she called, it never ceased to surprise him that the first thing Lucille would do was ask about the cat, René – a cat which they had acquired shortly after they had got married, but which only Laurence had ever taken any interest in. René was the one fragment of the marriage that remained with Laurence, since Lucille had gained custody of their son, Maxime.
‘René is doing well,’ Laurance had replied. ‘He is getting old now. He has grey fur around his muzzle, and his ribcage shows through his skin. But he is doing well.’
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ Lucille had said. Laurance had thought that he could sense a hint of laughter in her voice. Laurence did not appreciate her subtle mockery of him; that cat was important to him, and he found nothing humorous in it.
What Lucille said next seemed to Laurence to be even more of a mockery: ‘You should come and visit Maxime this weekend. He misses you.’
‘Uh huh,’ replied Laurence. ‘I can visit him if he wants to see me, although I get the impression from him that he does not often want to see me.’
‘Laurence! You know that is not true. He loves to spend time with you.’

Laurence did not argue with her for fear of seeming cold-hearted, but he knew – and she knew – that what she was saying was not true. Even while he and Lucille were still together, Laurence had never been close to his son, and after the divorce, he had only drifted further and further from the boy. Now, Maxime was thirteen years old, and when Laurence saw him, he almost felt as if he could recognise him no longer. Their conversations were so full of silence that they barely warranted the name of conversations. Right from the start, Maxime had displayed only his mother’s features; at thirteen, with his dark hair and grey, glinting eyes, he was beginning to look like a young, male replica of her. Laurence remembered having tried to teach the boy German as a child, but he never showed even the slightest interest; his mother, on the contrary, succeeded in teaching him to speak perfect French, and the two barely ever spoke in English when they were together. Naturally, Laurence’s French was perfect, too, yet neither Lucille nor Maxime would ever speak a word of the language with him.

‘I’ll come on Sunday,’ Laurence had said. ‘I’ll take Maxime out for some lunch. Perhaps he’d like to go to that Italian restaurant near the museum?’ Even Maxime, Laurence had thought, would not readily refuse a delicious bowl of pasta.

When Laurence finally hung up the phone, he had heard a faint mew coming from the kitchen. He had walked over to see René sitting patiently beside the table, licking his chops. Laurence had smiled. ‘Good morning, René,’ he had chuckled. ‘I know exactly what you want.’ And he had poured some cat food into René’s bowl (an expensive brand which he had ordered from some obscure online shop, knowing that it was René’s favourite) and watched as the ageing cat eagerly limped over to it and began to devour the pellets, trying to eat rapidly despite his worn teeth.

Although he felt ridiculous admitting it, Laurence felt that René was more like his own child than Maxime was. They had been given the cat shortly after they had got married by Lucille’s slightly eccentric brother, Guillaume, who had arrived at their house one day, unannounced, with a scrawny kitten in his arms. After Lucille had invited him in and given him some tea, Guillaume had explained that the kitten had belonged to an old man who had been taken into a nursing home a few weeks ago. No one had thought of the poor kitten when the old man went away, and so Guillaume had found it wandering the streets, cold and hungry. He had taken it in and given it hot milk and some meat, but he truly had no idea how to take care of a cat, and besides, his landlord forbade him to keep pets. Lucille had been reluctant, but Laurence, taking immediate pity on the poor young creature, agreed to take the kitten in.

He had named the kitten René after René Descartes in an act of deliberate irony; the French philosopher himself, believing that animals did not have souls, is rumoured to have thrown cats out of windows in an effort to demonstrate that they were incapable of feeling. Laurence always thought that René had been somehow able to sense that no one in the family had wanted to take him in apart from him, for René seemed to make a point of displaying absolute indifference to Lucille and Maxime whilst barely leaving Laurence’s side whenever he was around. When he looked over his academic publications over the years, Laurence could not name a single one which had not been written with René curled up snugly on his lap, or sitting peacefully on his desk, watching Laurence’s fingers dart around on the keyboard. When Lucille and Laurence had separated, the question of who ought to keep the cat barely needed to be raised: he had always belonged to Laurence and would continue to do so.

As he ruminated on the bench, the thought struck Laurence that the cat, who now, at fifteen years old, was a frail creature with wiry hair who spent most of his days curled up in a basket, had always been a symbol of irony and chaos. His life had begun in chaos: he had found himself not once but twice in the care of people who were incapable of looking after him before finally being taken in by a household in which only one member really wanted him. His name had been chosen for its irony, and now Lucille used him as a way of ironically prefacing every conversation she had with her ex-husband. Even Laurence’s love of René was somewhat ironic; there was a strange, sad irony in the way he loved the ageing cat in place of the family he had lost. René, of course, was oblivious to all such questions of irony and chaos. Part of the beauty of being a cat is the ability to be indifferent to anything one chooses, and René had chosen to be indifferent to everything except Laurence.

Indifference could be charming in a cat, but Laurence always found it reprehensible in a student. One tutorial he had given a few years ago always refused to leave his mind. He had asked a student named Ivan to analyse a translation of a Shakespeare sonnet by Rilke. Ivan’s voice still lingered in his head to this day:
‘Why should I be interested in this? It is a translation; the sonnet has been written already, and no translation can be better than the original.’
Usually, when a student complained about a text he had set, Laurence was always ready with a thousand reasons as to why the text was brilliant after all. But this time, Laurence found that he had no way to respond. Ivan was staring blankly at him, arms folded, as if daring him to prove him wrong. Why should I be interested in this? – how could he answer that question? If Ivan had told him the translations were terrible, Laurence would have been ready with a hundred reasons why they were, in fact, wonderful. But as to the question why he should be interested in them at all rather than being indifferent to them, Laurence found himself at a loss. The best he could come up with, in the end, was, ‘Well, a translation is a window on to another world. It shows us how poems that are so well-known to us might become unfamiliar and strange when transposed into another language.’ But he knew that this did not really answer Ivan’s question: why should all these things matter?

Indifference. It was the emotion that seemed to best describe the passers-by Laurence observed from his spot on the bench. They were consumed entirely by their own little worlds, oblivious to anything but their own consciousness. And in a way, it described the city, too, which glowed proudly in the sun, unaware of the frantic morning hustle of its inhabitants. With indifference comes hopelessness, Laurence thought, but perhaps also a kind of freedom. The chaos that had arisen in his life had freed him from unity; he no longer had to worry about constructing the perfect life for himself, since he knew that perfect lives fall apart. And indifference freed him of the need to be noticed, to matter. He stood up from the bench, feeling a lightness in his body, and started once again towards the college.

As he approached the gates of the college, Laurence checked his watch. 9.50am. He ought to hurry up, he thought. But he simply could not go in; something in his heart would not let him go. It had been one too many times, one too many lectures. And although instinct was telling him to go and give the lecture, he asked himself the question he never dared to ask: why was it that he had such an instinct? Was it the unenthusiastic students who yawned through his lessons and sometimes did not even turn up? Was it the fear of being caught not working hard enough to earn his measly salary? Or was it just the force of habit, that pattern of repetition which, over so many years, had given the illusion of structure to his life? Whatever it was, it had controlled his actions one too many times, and in that moment, Laurence decided that he would not let it win. He would take the morning off. He would go into the café across the road for a coffee. He would read Friedrich Schlegel for himself instead of attempting to teach it to students to whom it would probably not appeal, and he would get lost in the intricate beauty of the words, just like he used to. He would slow down time, just for one morning, and he would allow his mind to rest, to be still.

Laurence turned swiftly away from the college, the briefcase with the notes for the lecture he would never give tucked delicately under his arm. As he strode towards the café across the road, he assumed a fast and determined gait, not bothering to look carefully around him as he usually did before crossing the road. In a heartbeat, Laurence felt the powerful impact of a bicycle slamming into his legs, and he was promptly pushed over into the road. The car he fell in front of slammed on the breaks, but not before it had collided forcefully with him. As the passers-by who had once seemed so indifferent suddenly flocked to his limp body, which was covered in blood and splintered bone, Laurence looked out at the city for a final time, his vision a dying haze. Everyone’s faces blurred into each other’s – everyone’s, that was, apart from one. There, on the outskirts of the crowd that had formed around Laurence, stood a man who looked just like him. He had the same haircut, the same slim build, the same face; even his tweed suit was the same as Laurence’s, and Laurence could just about make out that he had a briefcase tucked under his arm. His expression was one of hesitant concern; he hung back from the centre of the action whilst still determined not to ignore what was happening, moving his head curiously to one side. As his breaths began to grow scarce and his eyes became dim, Laurence felt, once again, a strange stillness in his soul, but this time, it was accompanied by a sense of hope, an ineffable feeling of being born again.

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