Parks - Out of My Head

Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He lives in Milan. He is the acclaimed author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, In Extremis, A Season with Verona, Teach Us to Sit Still and Italian Ways. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the John Florio Prize and the Italo Calvino Prize.

Tongues of Flame

Loving Roger

Home Thoughts

Family Planning

Goodness

Cara Massimina

Mimis Ghost

Shear

Europa

Destiny

Judge Savage

Rapids

Cleaver

Dreams of Rivers and Seas

Sex is Forbidden (first published as The Server)

Painting Death

Thomas and Mary

In Extremis

Italian Neighbours

An Italian Education

Adultery & Other Diversions

Translating Style

Hell and Back

A Season with Verona

The Fighter

Teach Us to Sit Still

Italian Ways

Where Im Reading From

To Riccardo and Eleonora

I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to Jakob Kllhofer and Jutta Wagner at the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut in Heidelberg for their generosity in inviting me to the city in 2015 and making it possible for me to meet the scientists and thinkers whose work has enriched this book. Thanks also to those thinkers themselves Sabina Pauen, Thomas Fuchs and Hannah Monyer for giving me their time, sharing their ideas, having patience with my ignorance, but above all for the gift of their intellectual vitality, which was so encouraging and stimulating. I am very much in their debt.

Intellect to Senses: Ostensibly there is colour, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void.

Senses to Intellect: Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.

Democritus, fourth century BC

My old familiar opinions keep coming back, and against my will they capture my belief. It is as though they had a right to a place in my belief-system as a result of long occupation and the law of custom.

Ren Descartes, 1641

I am what is around me.

Wallace Stevens, 1917

I open my eyes and there is the wall.

No, thats not right.

I open my eyes and there are the wall, the wardrobe, the bedside table, the lamp, the tissues, the sheets, the blankets, the smell, the person next to me, the sound of the alarm. Multiplicity. I cant have one item without the rest.

But thats not quite right either.

I open my eyes and there are a part of the wardrobe the side nearest to me, with a grey satiny wood surface and a few surrounding patches of the wall which has a silver grey wallpaper with some stains around the bedside table, perhaps splashes of tea. The sheets are glimpsed, parts of the sheets, but also felt; the blanket has its weight, or rather mass, which I perceive as weight, thanks to gravity. I know the person beside me by the warmth and the breathing, but I havent seen her yet. Also theres a window, though thats behind me surely. Yet Im aware of it, or think I am, without seeing or touching it. I mean, I know its there. I think I know. Its the light through the window, surely, that Im seeing on the wardrobe and the wall. What else?

I close my eyes. Now the smell comes to the fore. What is it? Me, my partner, the room, the sheets, the carpet. Its warm. Or the breath making the smell is warm. Or my body. Theres a strong feeling of my body that I wouldnt know how to describe at all. Eyes closed, waiting for the alarm to sound again, it is not exactly dark but not exactly light. More a kind of waiting to be dark or light when I open my eyes. For the moment Im not seeing anything. But Im not seeing nothing either. Perhaps Im seeing the inside of my eyelids.

Would they be inside my head or outside?

My partner says, Amore, in a sleepy voice. And she asks, Are you cold? I say no Im not cold. If anything Im hot. Shes cold, she says.

I can feel a tug of bedclothes on my body. That makes sense: partner pulling the bedclothes. She has an issue with bedclothes. Awareness of my and my partners history. Jokes about bedclothes. I could say something, but dont.

Suddenly Im walking along a road by the edge of a wood. I turn to go in between the trees and see a stream at the bottom of a shallow valley, it seems a good place to swim

The alarm sounds again. Its set for ten-minute intervals. I must have fallen asleep. So that was a dream and this is reality. The wood, the stream. In the dream I didnt know it was a dream, but nor would I have been able to say what came before the wood and the stream; I had no memory of the bedroom and the alarm; in the dream I was really in the moment; but now, back with the bedroom and the jingling alarm, I have a memory, or simply awareness, of the wood and the stream and there is some kind of continuity, a sort of me-ness that links them. In the one situation I can compare the experiences, in the other, I cant. Is that how I know this is reality and that is dream?

In any event, I feel I do know.

Again I open my eyes and see a whole that is made up of bits of all the separate things I see, none of which I see whole, as it were. I mean I see bits of the wardrobe and I could try to imagine the whole wardrobe as something you might walk round in an IKEA showroom, or I can imagine a two-dimensional photo or a drawing of the wardrobe, taken or done in such a way as to suggest three dimensions I could even draw such a thing myself, come to think of it but at the same time there are large areas of the wardrobe I will never see, where it backs onto the wall, for example, or underneath where it touches the floor. So when I say I see the wardrobe I mean I see that bit of it that is towards my eye and not blocked by the bedclothes. In fact when I use all these words, bedclothes, wardrobe, wall, lamp, I mean I see only the part of them that I see, though the word seems to refer to the whole thing, the idea of the whole thing. Words are Platonic maybe. They permit Platonism. Word wardrobe = idea of wardrobe, not the bit of wardrobe I actually see.

Language is tricky.

I close my eyes but cant conjure up any clear image of an entire Platonic wardrobe, or absolute wardrobe, free from any contact with walls and floors. It all seems a lot of effort.

The alarm sounds again. These ten minutes went faster than the first.

Does that make sense?

When the alarm sounds my eyes open automatically. I dont seem to have much choice. It must be the famous conditioned reflex. Waking, you open your eyes and thats that. Once again I see bits of lots of things or the parts of those things that are facing me and now I realise