The Unremarked Days

There is a table somewhere in the years of your childhood. It may have stood in one house or in several; it may have been the table in the kitchen where you ate most evenings, or the table in some other house where you were sometimes welcomed and sometimes not. Whatever it was, the tables at which you sat regularly, or the absence of one, is part of you now in a way you do not quite remember it being embedded in your sense of who you are.

Whether it was wood or Formica, whether it sat four or twelve, whether the meals at it were elaborate or hurried, the table is part of you now in a way you do not quite remember being instructed in. The way it was set, where you sat and who you sat next to. The dish you reach for first. The conversations that were welcome and the ones that were not. The hour at which the family gathered, if the family gathered at an hour at all. The grace, or the absence of grace. None of this was explained to you. You absorbed it across the years that you were not yet old enough to be in the kitchen by yourself, and by the time you were old enough to think of the table as anything but the simple fact of your home, it was already inside you — settling into the shape against which every other table you will sit at, for the rest of your life, will be unconsciously measured.

The table is one piece of furniture among a great many that were carried into the rooms of your mind before you were old enough to ask who was doing the carrying. The language you think in is another. You did not choose it; you were chosen by it, in the months and years when your mouth was working its way into the sounds it would make for the rest of your days. The intonations of the voices that comforted you are in you. The cadences of the anger and the patience of the people who raised you, whoever they were. The accent of the place you were small in, even if you have spent the years since trying to lose it. The proverbs your grandmother said over the cooking — you find yourself saying them now, sometimes, in the same voice she used, and you cannot quite remember the first time you heard them.

The affections are furniture too. What moves you to tenderness, and what moves you to anger. The small loyalties you cannot give a reason for. The small dislikes that come up in you unbidden, against certain kinds of habits in others or certain kinds of places, that you may not even agree with when you examine them but that arrive in you before your examination can begin. The work you have been taught to honour: the doctor, perhaps, or the engineer, or the soldier, or the farmer, or the priest. The work you have been taught to feel a quiet condescension toward, even if no one ever said the word aloud. The company you have been taught to keep, and the company you have been taught to avoid. The kind of person you have been taught to admire and the kind you have been taught not to trust. None of this was served to you on a tray with a label. It came in the way everything comes into a small child — as the air of the place they are in, as simply what the world is.

The bend of your judgement was laid down in the same way. You did not decide what your reasoning would slope toward; you were shaped, across the years before you were old enough to be present at your own shaping, into the kind of mind that finds certain conclusions natural and other conclusions strange. You do not arrive at most of your judgements; you depart from them. They are the place your reasoning begins, and the reasoning that follows is, much of the time, the working out of what the beginning already contained.

I want to say something about how this happened, because I think you may have been carrying the wrong picture of it. The picture you have probably been given is one in which inheritance is the explicit teaching — the things your parents told you, the things you were taught in school, the doctrines of your religion if you had one and the laws of the country you were born into. This explicit teaching is part of the inheritance, and an important part. But it is the smallest part by a great margin, and it is not the part that has done the deepest work on you. What has done the deepest work on you is the air you were breathing all those years — the things that were not taught because they did not need to be taught, the things that were so much taken for granted by the people around you that no one thought to make them explicit. What was permissible to laugh at. Whose seriousness was respected and whose was not. Which questions were welcome and which were quietly steered away from. How a man held himself when he was angry. How a woman held herself when she was tired. How money was talked about, if it was talked about at all. How death was talked about. These you absorbed without anyone teaching you anything. They are in you now in a way no curriculum could have put them.

And alongside the air there was the evidence of your own eyes. You watched the people around you. You watched what they did when they thought no one was looking, and you watched what they did when they knew they were being watched. And you noticed, even before you could have described what you were noticing, the places where the two were not the same. You watched who was rewarded and who was not, who was promoted in the small economies of the household or the schoolyard and who was set aside, and you drew, from the pattern of who was rewarded and who was not, conclusions about how the world worked that no one ever sat you down to explain. By the time you were old enough to be told the world’s official story about itself, you had already been gathering the unofficial story for years, and the two stories did not always match.

I am going to spend a chapter, before long, on what to do when these different ways of receiving fall into disagreement with one another, because that is one of the great structural problems of becoming a person. For now, I want only to make the point that they exist — that what has come down to you came down in more than one way, and lodged in you at more than one depth, and that no honest account of your formation can pretend you were only ever told things and only ever assented to them or rejected them as a deliberate mind would. You were not a mind first and then a person. You were a person first, with the formation that being a person in that household, that schoolroom, that street, that country lays down, and the mind you have now is the mind that formation made possible.

Most of what you carry came from people you never met, and through people you barely thought about. The advice that old people in your life gave you when you were small — where did they learn them? Most likely from the old people who were around when they were small, who had learned them from those who came before. The motions the hands of those who fed you made when they spoke — where did those motions come from? The bend of judgement that made certain kinds of work seem dignified to them and certain kinds seem beneath them— what did that come down through? The line backward is longer than you can see. By the time anything reaches you, it has passed through generations of people who shaped it in passing, kept what they wanted to keep, set aside what they wanted to set aside, added what they had to add, and handed on what was left. Some of what you carry is older than your country. Some of it is older than your religion. Some are so old that no one alive remembers when it began, and yet it is still doing its work in you, recognisable, faithful to itself, and alive and animated in your faithful imitation of it.

This is the structural condition of being human. You did not begin from nothing; nobody does. The picture of a sovereign individual who chooses their commitments from a neutral starting place is a picture of nothing that has ever existed. Every person is a node in a chain that began before them and will continue after them, and the chain is what they have been receiving, often without realising they have received anything. To grow up is not to escape the chain — that is not possible — but to discover that one is a product of it and can only exist in it.

The inheritance is, in any honest accounting, mixed. Some of what you have received is precious beyond reckoning. The capacity to love particular people, which is far from automatic and is largely the gift of having been loved well by someone in your childhood. The capacity to do honest work, which is the mark of every adult you watched do honest work when no one was making them. The capacity to keep your word, which is the bequest of every promise you saw kept and every betrayal you saw refused. The capacity to be moved by what should move you, which is a habit acquired from having lived among people whose responses to the world were calibrated in ways you absorbed. These you should not undervalue. You did not earn them. They came to you because someone, somewhere along the chain, did the work that put them within reach, and you grew up close enough to that work to be reached by it. For some readers, the inheritance has been thinner than this paragraph describes, or has come from a smaller number of hands than the chain implies. That is also part of what is to be honestly looked at, and the rest of this book has been written with that reader in mind too.

Some of what you have received is mistaken. Every household has its blind spots. Every street has its small dishonesties. Every country has its myths about itself that do not stand up to the evidence. Some of what your people have believed about themselves and about other peoples is wrong. Some of what they have believed about how the world works is wrong. Some of what they have taught you to feel without articulating is wrong. Discovering this is one of the harder tasks of growing up, and one of the most necessary, because the mistaken parts of the inheritance will go on doing their work in you if you do not bring them up where they can be examined. They will steer your judgements without your knowing they are doing the steering. They will narrow what you can imagine doing, who you can imagine being close to, what you can recognise as a problem and what you cannot. The mistaken parts of the inheritance are not corrected by being denounced; they are corrected by being seen for what they are and replaced, in the slow work of years, with something more truthful.

Some of what you have received is doing active harm. This is harder to say. There are things in every inheritance that ought never to have been transmitted — small cruelties, large lies, habits of mind that have made the people who carried them less able to live with themselves and less able to live with others. Some of these have been transmitted to you. You may be carrying them now without knowing it; you may be teaching them, unawares, to children you have or will have; you may be enacting them daily on people you have not yet learned to see. To take honest stock of what one has inherited is, eventually, to come up against this. It is not a pleasant realization at all. It is also not a realization anyone is exempt from, and to be exempt from it is only to have refused to make it, not to have actually escaped what one carries.

You are not the end of the chain. Whatever you carry, you will pass on something to those who come after you, and what you pass on will be some mixture of what was given to you and what you have done with what was given to you. You may pass on the inheritance more or less unaltered, in which case the precious will go forward and the mistaken will go forward and the harming will go forward, all in the proportions they reached you in. You may pass on a thinner version of the inheritance, having cut out parts of it without quite replacing them, in which case those who come after you will be living among ruins they did not make. You may pass on a thicker version, having added what was missing in what you received, in which case those who come after you will be the beneficiaries of work that was done in their name before they could thank you for it. Most people pass on a mixture of all three. The question is not whether you will hand something on; you will. The question is what.

I want to leave you, at the end of this first chapter, with a small task that I will not check on. Sometime in the next day or two, when you are doing something ordinary — eating a meal or walking somewhere familiar or sitting in a room you sit in often — let your mind go to a specific thing about yourself that you did not choose. It can be small. The way you greet a stranger for example or the food you crave when you are tired. The phrase you use for goodbye or the reflex that makes you offer your seat or not offer your seat. The small loyalty or the small dislike. And then, just for a moment, let yourself trace it backward. Where did this come from? Whose voice was it first? Whose hands were doing this motion before yours did? You will not find the whole answer because the chain runs longer than you can see. But you will catch some sense of how much of you came from somewhere you cannot quite reach, and how many hands you have never met have been working in you and through you the whole time.

That sense — that you are made of more than you remember being given — is the place this book begins.

Everything that follows is what to do with what you find when you start to look.