Summer 2013, Pembrokeshire
In the house next door, a man who I have never met is dying. He is known around here as ‘The Professor’. At the front of his house the riotous little garden of palm trees, clematis, roses and apple trees has grown out of control during his long illness. There seem to be no relatives, but every couple of days I catch sight of a young nurse negotiating the steep steps from the lane behind down to the house. Occasionally there’s a light on upstairs, and you can see what appear to be glass jars and funnels from an old medical laboratory in the window. There’s a winding path that runs between the little garden and the sea wall, so I often walk past the house on my way to the village. Each time I walk past the front door and windows I wonder if a face will appear, I ready myself for a wave or a smile, but there’s never a sign of movement. A neighbour tells me that she’s seen him, ‘poor man’, but then she stops herself. He knows he’s going to die soon, but he’s got strong religious faith and he seems remarkably calm. She described the way that he’s had the bed moved downstairs to the front room, so that he can hear the sea better. Behind the bed is a large wooden crucifix, she tells me, and in front a mirror – so that he can face himself and the cross together. Looking at his future, on this earth and beyond.
In a society that doesn’t quite know what to do with dying and death, here is this man not raging against his approaching end, but rather opening the door to it, welcoming it into the house, being with it, as he listens to the sound of the summer tides.
*
This thought takes me back about ten years, to a journey in France with J. I remember being in a 2CV, me in the passenger seat, and J. behind, we were being driven to Geneva by our friend Johann from his village in the mountains. He had a rather terrifying way of driving, with his face almost touching the steering wheel. As if he was fiercely concentrating on every foot of the road (perhaps a style learnt from his motorcycling, where such alert attention is critical all the time). The fierceness of his concentration made me concerned to ask him anything, in case it took his attention away from the road. We had been talking about a French philosopher, whose work and life had strongly affected both of us – Simone Weil. I had remembered a line of hers that stunned me when I first came across it, a line of such simplicity and such wonder: ‘La croyance à l’existence d’autres êtres humains comme tels est amour’ (‘The belief in the existence of other human beings – such a thing is love’). Yes, to truly believe in the existence of others! Not just when you wake in the night and see the breathing body next to you rise and fall. Not just when you hear your children playing in the other room. Not just when you ring your friends up, or see them. But the idea of the film of another person’s life continuing when you’re not there. As vividly as your own life …
And then Johann told us this story. He’d been visiting a Polish friend earlier that summer. His friend worked as a forester and they were walking one day in the woods near his house, and they came across a grave at the side of a track – a single grave on its own. There was a simple cross and some fresh flowers and that was all. Johann asked who was buried there. Nobody knows exactly, his forester friend explained, he was a German soldier who was killed in that place by partisans in the war. Johann looked shocked that, given the intense enmity between the Germans and the Poles, this soldier had been buried and his grave was still tended with flowers. His friend looked at him sharply, disturbed by Johann’s comment, and said simply:
‘But here a man died.’
*
Late summer is here. The dominant colour now is the burnt rust of dying bracken on the cliff paths. The steep banks that burst with the pinks of campion and the purples of toadflax earlier in the year are now a bleached green. The manic skittishness of swallows in the skies has been replaced by raggledy rooks and ravens, hurling themselves giddily into the gusting squalls coming off the sea. The pontoon is gone, now there is only one solitary wooden boat bobbing in the bay. The knots of summer visitors and children with shrimping nets are preparing to return home, and back to school.
Today Simone Weil is in my mind again. I am sure that Casalis must have known her work well. Those words he uses about Speer – asking him to open his mind and spirit to suffering – these are words that could have come directly from Weil. So much of her writing returns to the sense of human meaning that stems from understanding the suffering of others – ‘It was other people’s pain that moved her, not her own’, as one biographer says.1 For her, empathy was not an abstract question, or something to aspire to, it was simply a part of her daily existence – ‘no border could contain her empathy for the plight of others, from soldiers on the front lines to enemies subjected to harsh treaties’.
At the heart of Weil’s thought is the link between empathy and suffering. The highest human capacity, ‘almost a miracle’, as she puts it, is connecting to the being of others – being which is inseparable from suffering, and suffering which is inseparable from life. But this, she concedes, is extraordinarily difficult to do. It is hard enough for the person suffering to express what they are feeling, but it is virtually impossible for another to really hear those words, and understand the sufferer’s actual condition. So this, in turn, can create a terrible cycle:
To listen to someone is to put yourself in their place while they are speaking. To put yourself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction … is to annihilate yourself.fn1 It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child. Therefore the afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
But, despite the enormous challenges inherent in communication, Weil believed that it is in the continual attempt to connect with others that we experience our own humanity most fully. Though even then this experience is rarely more than fragmentary, and always a temporary condition. Like many of the most ethical people who have ever lived, she had little time for organised religion, for the conformity of churches and bishops. But she said this about the figure of Christ:
Compassion for the afflicted is an impossibility. When it is really found (as in the life of Christ) we have a more astounding miracle than walking on the water … or even raising the dead.
That is part of what moves me about Casalis and Speer in Spandau. This is why I keep returning to what happened between those two men in those years. The attempt to find compassion in that place. The attempt of that reserved, awkward, middle-aged man to be emotionally raw, to go to territories inside that he had never gone to. And Casalis’ compassion (literally ‘suffering with’ – from the Latin com + pati), and his choice to be with Speer in that place. Both of these men fallible, both of them cracked vessels. Mostly stumbling, occasionally glimpsing something that might be truth. Speer (before he met Casalis) one of the most utterly unempathetic men it would have been possible to meet, the icy, polar opposite of Simone Weil. Yet, in those years, something opens in him. The miracle that empathy might be able to be learnt, even at a late stage in life. An empathy with roots. Where other people’s suffering – even if only for a moment – becomes as real as your own.