A single second

 Back in my early twenties, when I still suffered from a paralyzing fear of flying each time I boarded a plane, I received some excellent advice: whenever the flight gets turbulent, just shut your eyes and count the bumps. I tried the exercise and soon added a twist of my own. Whenever the fasten-seat-belt sign lit up, I would close my eyes and concentrate on the next bump that went by. Then, after it had passed, I would try to score it on a scale of one to ten as to how intense it was. Curiously enough, this device worked. I soon stopped dreading turbulence on a flight, and found that I could weather any patch of "rough air" without losing control of my emotions. 

The trick works because it forces one to focus on the bumps that actually were, rather than the hypothetical bumps that may never be. Once one is concentrating on the individual bumps that actually happened, one realizes that each was entirely survivable. More than that, most of them were not actually that intense and scary. Score enough of them in your head, and you start to realize that one rarely gets above two or three on one's internal scale of terror. Why, then, was I so afraid before? It wasn't because of the actual bumps. It was because, once the bumps started, I began to imagine all the other, vastly more horrifying ones that might follow: leaps and plunges through thousands of feet of empty air. 

Much of the terror of flying therefore has little if anything to do with one's real experiences on a plane, on even the most uncomfortably turbulent flights. It is rooted much more in what one dreads might be coming. And so, if one can find a way to keep one's attention riveted to what has actually happened, rather than the speculative and unknowable future, then the fear itself vanishes—or at least is greatly attenuated. 

Something similar is reportedly true of intense physical pain; though I have less personal experience to draw upon there. An instructor of mine in divinity school, who had worked with people in the cancer ward leading meditations as a strategy for pain management, said that one of the main goals of the therapy was to help people keep their attention focused on the present experience of pain, moment to moment. This was because much of the subjective feeling of pain is rooted in our anxiety for the pain to come. If we can stop treating each stab of pain as a harbinger of even more intense torments in the future, but instead assess it in itself, then we could find that each one is tolerable.

Taken together, the insight amounts to something like this: a single moment of pain or fear, however intense it may be, is always endurable, for it lasts only a moment. And human life, meanwhile, is nothing but a passage of moments. And so, if one could reduce one's awareness to only the memory of each instant as it passes, then almost anything could be endured—any fear-provoking turbulence or body-racking torment. 

Obviously, there are limits to such a principle. One shouldn't be forced to rely on it in the first place. But one imagines that, landed in a bad enough situation, it is the sort of strategy for mitigating pain and fear that might be essential to help one survive and preserve one's sanity. 

It appears that this is precisely the insight that helped one American journalist, for instance, survive his brutal and politically-motivated confinement at the hands of Myanmar's military junta, after they seized power in February 2021. The editor of Frontier Myanmar, Danny Fenster, became a target for the junta after the coup, along with the rest of the country's erstwhile free press, innumerable Burmese human rights and pro-democracy activists, and anyone who contested or opposed the junta's return to power. 

Fenster, who was among those detained arbitrarily, described one of his mental strategies for surviving the ordeal. A profile in the New Yorker notes that he read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest while in prison, "with a pen in his hand, scribbling notes in the margins whenever he found parallels with Buddhist philosophy and its message that suffering is bearable because it lasts just an instant. 'It’s only when you think about the future, and how long it will be, that it becomes intolerable,' Fenster recalled thinking." (Notably, to the point of our caveat earlier, the journalist then observes that this strategy had its limits, and was only really effective at warding off the despair for the first few weeks of Fenster's confinement.)

I can't actually recall deriving this same lesson from Infinite Jest when I read it. It's a long book; it's more than likely I just missed it. But I find a very similar observation about the endurability of each discrete moment—taken only as a moment—in one of Samuel Beckett's novels. At one point in the text the unnamed narrator says, "little by little the old problem would raise its horrid head, how to live, with their kind of life, for a single second[.]" And earlier on in the same novel, the same disembodied voice provides a quasi-Buddhist answer similar to the insight we have described above: "It was one second they should have schooled me to endure, after that I would have held out for all eternity, whistling a merry tune."

In other words, if one finds that one could survive a second, then one could survive any second, and one could could thereby survive anything, since life is only a collection of innumerable seconds. Or, as the New Yorker profile put it: "suffering is bearable because it lasts just an instant." 

Beckett's observation appears in The Unnamable—perhaps the most difficult and certainly the most abstract of his increasingly avant-garde "Trilogy" of novels (the preceding volumes in the series being Molloy and Malone Dies). If none of the three books is a "novel" is the classical sense, the first at least has named characters and proceeds along two recognizable narrative strands. The plot that develops is surreal and lacks conventional resolution, to be sure, but it is still relatively linear. 

In Malone Dies, these elements of conventional narrative break down even further. There is still a protagonist of sorts—the titular Malone—who lies abed in hospital and writes a narrative starring another character named Sapo, later rechristened Macmann. But he periodically starts and stops this story-within-the-story to describe his life as a paralytic—enumerating his meagre possessions and addressing his despair whenever he drops one of them, for example. 

By the time we get to The Unnamable, even these bare elements of the conventional prose narrative have been discarded. There is still a kind of narrator—a disembodied voice that hovers in a void—and at the very beginning at least Malone's corpse comes to orbit around it. The voice has shreds of what may or may not be personal memories, and occasionally two other mysterious characters, "Mahood" and "the Worm," are briefly referenced. But otherwise, the voice spends most of its time denying that it is a voice, or that it is a self (for a time it stops speaking in the first person, and refers to itself only in the third, only to switch back again by the end of the tale and confess, with Cartesian insight, that the "I" is inescapable). 

For all their resolute avant-gardism and abstraction, Beckett's novels resist being pretentious or dull because of the author's earthy and often grotesque humor, his Rabelaisian laughter at the baser bodily functions, as well as his periodic flashes of dead-accurate social satire. All these elements recur even in the most severely geometric and rigorously Modernist final volume, The Unnamable, and help to render it readable, even if it offers fewer overt delights than the first two volumes in the trilogy. If Molloy and Malone Dies retain interest as narratives, the fascination of The Unnamable derives more from one's wonderment at whether Beckett can really keep this up—a "novel" without character or incident—for a full 130 pages.

I spell all of this out because it seems to me that Beckett's artistic method in these works—his steady deconstruction of the novel, his refinement away of all its elements into nothingness—has a parallel with the Buddhist insight we described above—and which we found echoed in his work. It also shows the limits and, perhaps, the dangers of that insight. 

In this quest to refine elements away and reduce artwork to pure form, of course, Beckett is not alone. The history of art has often been characterized as an oscillation between Romanticism and Classicism—the first (to oversimplify matters considerably) with a fundamental impulse to add, and the second with an impulse to subtract. Beckett's novel is plainly at the subtractive pole of the development, and in this regard, it partakes of a similar spirit to postwar abstract expressionism in painting, with its emphasis on "flatness."

There are of course intrinsic limits to how far one can go in either an additive or a subtractive direction. The Unnamable is probably at the outermost limits of how far a "novel" could proceed in the effort to divest itself of its conventional elements and remain a prose work at all. Go any further, and one would have to either stop using words in any human language, or cease writing altogether. And indeed, Beckett's disembodied narrator countenances both possibilities. "Would it not be better if I were simply to keep on saying babababa[?]" it asks at one point. And in the novel's closing passages, it collapses into utter emptiness, and all attempts at speech finally cease. "It will be the silence," the voice says "[...] it will be the silence[.]"

The previous times that the subtractive tendency in art proceeded this far, it ended in silence in an even more literal way. In his great book on the lost generation, Exile's Return, the literary critic Malcolm Cowley describes how the Symbolist and Decadent movements set an antithesis between art and life, and in their war against the latter—their quest to purge art of all elements of "life" and human interest and reduce it to pure form—they ultimately ended with nothing at all. The logical end point of this progression, in Cowley's telling—and of which he was sharply critical—was with Paul Valéry's famous period of silence, in which he simply ceased writing altogether.

The Buddhist impulse that we have discussed above—the quest to refine consciousness down to a series of discrete moments—is a similar exercise in deconstruction, and ends in a similar place. Beckett's effort in The Unnamable ends in the annihilation not only of the novel, but of the self entirely (the disembodied voice resists saying "I" and seeks to deny its own subjectivity). Deconstructed and refined down far enough, in short, the novel implodes into particles, and ultimately ceases to be. So it is with the self, under Buddhist meditation. If experience and subjectivity can be reduced into discrete elements, each lasting only an instant, then selfhood, suffering, and everything else that depends on succession can be seen to be an illusion, and thereby eliminated. 

Buddhism itself is quite frank about all of this: it aims at the annihilation of the self and of all subjectivity. The rest of us, though, who retain some attachment to our selfhood, even at the cost of suffering, will perhaps only wish to carry the experiment so far. When we are going through times of great pain or fear—whether airplane turbulence or something much more sinister, like an indefinite prison sentence—the subtractive impulse will have an obvious appeal. In the remaining domains of life, however, we are apt to be Romantics and postmodernists. Our inclination will be always be to add.