The Unremarked Days

Before you were old enough to choose anything, a great deal was chosen for you. The language you think in, the things that move you to laughter or to anger, the work you have been taught to honour, the company you have been taught to keep and the words you have been taught to avoid, the prayers said over your cradle if any were said and the way the table was set in the house you grew up in — all of these were chosen for you long before you see or use them, and they have been furnishing the rooms of your mind ever since. Some of what you have been given is precious beyond reckoning. Some of it is mistaken. Some of it is harming you, or harming others through you, in ways you have not yet found the words to describe. The work of becoming a person worth being is in large part the work of learning to describe them, and to do something honest with that description.

This book is about that work.

It is not a book that will tell you what to think. Books that do that are easy to write and useless to anyone past the first reading. You are owed something more demanding. What you will find here, instead, is a way of looking — at yourself, at the people around you, at the country you have been formed in and at the larger world whose shape is being decided in your lifetime. There are ways of looking that can obscure and ways that illuminate. The illumination of what you have and what you alone can choose to do with it is what the book is for. Once you can focus the light, you will see things you have not been seeing, and you will see them in your own life rather than in mine.

This means you will have to work. The book is short enough to be read in a few sittings, but it is not the kind of book that lets you read it lightly and move on. Each chapter will open a room which you need to furnish with what you have lived through and memories you have accumulated, what you have witnessed from afar, what you have done and what you have not yet brought yourself to do. I will not supply the cases for you. Your kitchen table is yours; I have never sat at it. Your friendship that failed the test is yours; I never knew the friend. Your workplace, the master you have been watching there, the colleague who said in the meeting what no one else would say, or the meeting in which no one said it — these are yours. The book is built so that you can walk into it and find that the rooms in your mind are large enough to hold what you have been carrying.

There is one exception. Late in the book a particular case is worked at length, with the eight people in an annex and the five who hid them there, because the question that case puts cannot be put without it. That chapter is the one chapter the book carries fully furnished. Everything before it is preparation for the answer you will discover for yourself there. The answer you will give there is about the kind of person you will have been becoming across the unremarked days. The book trusts you to recognise this when you reach it.

I must also say a word here about the harder things. Some of what this book has to say about the present moment is uncomfortable. The country you live in, whichever country it is, has been doing things in your lifetime that will need to be answered for. The institutions you have been formed by have been failing in ways the book will name. The people who have been telling you what to think have been, in many cases, deceived themselves about what they were telling you. The book will not flinch from these things and it will ask you not to flinch either. You may find that you disagree with what the book says about a particular case. That is welcome, and the book is built to be argued with rather than submitted to. What the book asks is that you argue with it carefully, against what it is actually saying rather than what is easiest to dismiss, and that you do the same with anyone who tells you anything important from now on.

This book is for the person at the threshold — the person who has not yet decided what kind of person they will become, and who has begun to suspect that the question matters more than the world around them is admitting. You may be fifteen as you read this, or twenty, or fifty. The threshold is not an age; it is a position, and it is reached and lost and reached again across a life. If you have arrived at it now, the book is for you. If you arrived at it years ago and have been making the slow walk that began there, the book is also for you, and the recognition of yourself in its pages will be your own. If you are reading this because someone who loves you has asked you to, you may take the gift seriously without taking offence at having received it; the friend who gave you the book is doing what the book itself will, in time, ask you to do for someone else.

The book makes a few promises that are worth stating plainly. It will not flatter you. It will not pretend that the questions it raises have easier answers than they have. It will not tell you that the work is easy or that the harvest is in your lifetime. It will also not tell you that the work is impossible, or that the harvest never comes. What it will tell you is that the work is real, that the work has been done before, that the work can be done again, and that the doing of it is the only honest answer to having received what you have received.

The road begins on the next page. Before it does, I will say only this: you are not alone in having noticed that something is not right. The will and capacity to notice is the first thing this book trusts in you.

Everything that follows is what to do with it.