edwin
I had been seeing Edwin for two hours every Sunday for three weeks before he finally decided he could talk to me, and even then it was not until I had finished my last chapter of the day. We sat by the window in his room overlooking the gardens of the place, I with my glass of water and he always with his cold cup of tea and single uneaten digestive biscuit. I would read to him and he would nod sometimes, or hold up a hand when he wanted me to stop, but until that day he never spoke a word to me.
‘Why are you here?’ he asked. His voice was higher and clearer than I’d expected from such a little old man. For a moment I had no idea what to say. Ought I to be honest?
‘I’m a volunteer.’ I said, then, feeling braver: ‘It’s for my community service.’
‘So you’re not really a volunteer. You had to come here.’
‘But I chose to do this. Reading to the elderly. They said I had a good voice for it.’
‘Do you read many books at home?’
‘Yes. I suppose so.’
‘You suppose so.’
‘Yes. I like to think I read enough.’
‘That means you really think you don’t read enough. And so you have some ambition related to reading. You want to be a writer. Am I correct?’
I shrugged and nodded simultaneously. I was very keen to diminish publicly the intensity of my feeling for what I believed to be my chief calling in life.
‘Do you believe you have talent?’
I had never been asked this before. Of course I wanted to say I did, but instead I said: ‘I don’t think I’m best placed to judge that.’
‘Well. You must think you have talent or you wouldn’t bother. What do you understand by talent?’
‘I suppose it means to be gifted with a natural ability for something which others find difficult to understand.’
‘“Which others find difficult to understand,” you say. Now that is very interesting to me.’ He sat in silence for a while before he began again. ‘Do you feel that a talented person has a significantly greater appreciation of life than an untalented person?’ he said, speaking very slowly, his voice taking on the rhythm of a odd-shaped stone tumbling erratically down a long hillside. ‘And by a “greater appreciation of life” I do not mean they are necessarily more content regarding their situation. They are not happier than the rest of us. They simply see more of it all. Do you believe that to be the case?’
I tried to guess what he wanted me to say. I have always found it prudent to tell the elderly what they most want to hear. ‘Yes,’ I said eventually, ‘I think that’s right. The truly talented take something from the world which the rest of us can’t see, and put it into a more-or-less accessible form we call art. That’s the purpose of art. To make you see.’
Edwin said nothing for a while. I thought he seemed satisfied. Then he said: ‘Why are you here?’
‘I’m on community service.’
‘I heard that. But why are you on community service? Or rather, what dreadful thing did you do that requires you to spend your Sunday afternoons reading Charles Dickens to a constipated old fogey?’
‘Copyright infringement.’
‘What?’
‘Copyright infringement. I’m a pirate. I downloaded a file containing about a thousand cracked ebooks from a torrent site. Which wouldn’t have been so bad, but I then wrote about how easy it was to do on my blog. One of the authors I downloaded strayed across it, and their publisher threw the book at me. As it were.’
‘I shan’t pretend to understand most of what you just said. You stole books?’
‘I don’t believe what I did was stealing. I copied them illegally.’
‘Because you can’t afford to buy them?’
‘No.’
‘Then why?’
‘Because I could. Because they were there.’
‘You are a reader. You want to write. Do you feel this theft was an investment, of sorts?’
‘I suppose so. I think reading is enriching, personally. I think information wants to be free.’
‘Do you think it will make you a better writer?’
‘Yes. Yes, reading makes you a better writer.’
‘What about talent? Is that more important?’
I considered this for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I said. ‘You could read all the books in the world and still be a terrible writer if you didn’t have talent.’
‘Because the talented person has something most do not have. They see more of it all. And their duty is, as you said, to make us see. Do I understand you?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘What is it you see, then, that I do not?’
He looked at me quite seriously.
‘I couldn’t just say it out loud,’ I said. ‘I suppose I would have to put it into art, wouldn’t I? I’d have to write it down.’
‘And once you have written it down, how would you know it is something I have not felt? How would you know that your experience was exceptional, as far as the majority of the human race is concerned?’
‘I couldn’t know that.’
‘This notion of talent,’ he said, quite calmly, ‘is nothing but a sham. It is a lie that presumes control. You think yourself more capable than I am because you perceive something else. But it is not more or less than I perceive. It is only something else. You have not felt a thing which I have not felt. Nobody has felt a thing which others have not felt – ’
‘But that’s not all there is to it. There are talents which are indisputable. A child who learns to play the piano without tuition, or to draw or paint from scratch – that is a gift, isn’t it?’
‘And what do you suppose they make of their gifts?’ he snapped. ‘All being for the best in the best of all worlds, they would nurture their abilities to exceed the expectations of their audience. They would lift their admirers above the morass of humanity with their greater appreciation of life. Ability necessarily confers responsibility. Don’t you agree?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps not.’
‘What if one has talent in one sense – in that indisputable sense of easily mastering some great skill – but not in the sense of possessing an elevated perception, or even anything resembling artistic ambition? What then?’
‘I suppose they wouldn’t make anything of it.’
‘No. They would not be able. But if they played on at their instrument regardless – could there not be something in that? Something which is great regardless of ambition, or perception, or elevation? Something that is merely a craft taken to a higher level? What I am trying to say is that this idea you have – that the artist must somehow bring a light to the common unfeeling masses – is a lie. It’s a dangerous fiction. He can never escape the masses. He is never more than one of them. Enclosed on all sides. Crushed to death. Eaten alive by his audience. No writer ever met a better fate.’
I was unsure of how to reply to this. Happily, the nurse had already arrived to take away Edwin’s cold cup of tea, and to give me the silent smile that said our time was up. As I was led away from the room, the light, the chairs and the old man, I asked her about him.
‘Oh, Edward? Has he been saying his name’s Edwin again? I don’t know where he got that idea from. He’s one of our youngest patients. He’ll be fifty-three in June. I’m not surprised you thought he was older. I think it was all the screens myself. They’re what did for his face, the poor man. The light from the screens. He used to be in computers, you know. One of those internet startups. Lost all his money. I’m sure he’s been telling you about his blogging again. I’m sorry if he was being difficult. He has a very selective memory these days.’
