Derren Brown - A Book of Secrets: Finding Solace in a Stubborn World

Tricks of the Mind

Portraits

Confessions of a Conjuror

Happy

Meet the People with Love

A Little Happier

Derren Brown

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A BOOK OF SECRETS

Finding Solace in a Stubborn World

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First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Bantam Press

Copyright Derren Brown 2021

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design by R. Shailer/TW

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

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ISBN: 978-1-473-57492-2

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For Dad

Let everything happen to you:

Beauty and terror.

Just keep going.

No feeling is final.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours

I believe if theres any kind of God it wouldnt be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If theres any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, its almost impossible to succeed, but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.

Richard Linklater, Before Sunrise

How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?

Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

I was punched repeatedly in the head by Andy Hunt and James Ward when I was fifteen. They beat me up during a Duke of Edinburghs Award trip to the Brecon hills, while I cowered in my Daffy Duck sleeping bag, trying to protect my face. I spent the next three decades despising them both. And then, recently, I heard that the adult Andy had suffered a brain haemorrhage, and after a lengthy ensuing depression, tried to kill himself by cycling into an oncoming truck. Andy had somehow failed in the attempt and instead only caused further damage to his brain. When I was told this story, thirty-three years of loathing dissolved instantaneously in my blood. Here was a bully, now bullied by fate, and a lingering childhood narrative had proved to be desperately and naively out of touch with merciless reality.

Between the ages of fifteen and forty-eight, the name Andy Hunt had functioned for me as private rhyming slang. He and his cohort had sniffed out the jasmine-tinged redolence of the nascent poofter, and such was my capacity for shame in those days that I didnt entirely blame them for taking a swipe. But I had no doubt that they were nasty, and nothing since had served to assuage my conviction. However, Fortune had so greatly overstepped the mark in redressing the balance that the hatred I had been carrying with me felt grossly inordinate.

Arent our worst moments generally characterized by behaviours that spring from a certainty in our judgements that turns out to be naive? The violent disgust and superiority felt by a powerful kid towards an effete one, and the weaker boys ensuing thirty-three-year hatred of his tormentor, were both made monstrous by personal narratives that scorned any mitigating facts or nuance, such as how events might have later developed when we werent looking. Conviction is all, and we suffer from an abundance of it when we need to feel strong. Not, note, when we actually feel strong. Those times are usually typified by a generosity of the soul. But when we must gather ourselves in the face of something mighty, or against whatever scares or repels us, we eagerly cling to whatever available fiction is most fortifying.

I have, for as long as I remember, been shy to voice such certainty of judgement in company. Unless Im with someone I fancy or am quickened by a second Old Fashioned, I am commonly paralysed by an awareness that I only know my small share of the story. Perhaps for this reason Ive never beaten anyone up, but neither has it made me noble or humble. It is allied to the difficulties I sometimes experience when I find myself among others, especially those headstrong types who make no effort to meet one halfway. I note with disappointment my overeagerness to please, and a somewhat diffident, avoidant personality. Part considered Stoic and part mere spineless dodger of conflict, I am skilled at circumnavigating stress, but company often reduces me to something deferential, courteous and boring. So I see the traps in what follows through the next couple of chapters, which is my attempt to advocate a greater appreciation of nuance and ambiguity. Perhaps, as a popular teenage punchee, it is no more than a defence of a particular weakness to which I am constitutionally disposed. But perhaps all philosophies are.

I began writing this book in New York in 2019 and finished it back home nearly two years later, following a house move, a fiftieth birthday, the death of a loved one, and a global plague. Life, it turns out, can be difficult. But I presume that most of my experience of it is in essence unremarkable. Thus I hope that many of you feel the same types of unease, or will at least find some use for the thoughts I offer here. Ill draw on the lessons I have gleaned from my own ruminations, as well as the lunacy of those two years, and the great ideas of others to whom my work has led me. Partly with a view to making life a little easier, partly in an effort to worry less about difficulty. And to unearth new pathways to empathy.

The eagerness for certainty, then, is the starting point of our journey. Our destination, by contrast, is a little murky: a place between places that has never been adequately named. Some call it the Considered Life, but that strikes a note of lofty contemplation Im not sure does it justice. Wisdom is too grandiose, and I cannot offer myself as a guide to such a venerated terminus when this morning I spent ten minutes looking for AirPods that were in my ears. Perhaps, as with all great journeys, the travelling itself is the whole point, and the anticipated destination might be no more than a place to take your coat off and rest. So wherever you arrive, if along the way youve found an easier relationship with some of lifes obstructions and new opportunities for compassion towards both yourself and others, of course then you know youre at the right place.

Excessive conviction is a trap our natures have set for all of us, and its scarlet distension is usually evident on both sides of any dispute. When I wrangle with my partner over who has more neglected the pile of Thursdays plates with their yellowed and bumpy terrain of stiffened Port Salut, and whether the more contemptible crime is omitting to load the dishwasher or forgetting to