"I wanted to know who was the ‘I’. Without knowing that, Descartes’ proposition is imperfect."
I read about Aubrey Menen, first time, in Sahitya Varaphalam, a weekly column late Malayalam literary critic and academic M.Krishnan Nair wrote in Malayalam magazines.
Krishnan Nair introduced international literature and writers to Malayalam readers among whom include Neruda, Paz, Milan Kundera, Kazantzakis, Gide, Camus, Boris Pasternak and so on.
Krishnan Nair died in 2006. So this is way back.
I was fortunate enough to get a copy of Aubrey Menen's The Space Within the Heart of which the late critic recommended as a book one should not miss.
A slim volume divided into two parts Heart is an autobiography, a writer's search for himself, who felt himself bored in front of a Pope. He takes the reader on his personal quest to find who the 'I' is after the death of his mother. It is a study on being and dying.
For an idea what the quest is all about here is Menen in his own words:
"In Rome I remembered Descartes. He had been suddenly struck by a question very similar to mine. He wanted to know if he really existed, and he saw at once that it was going to be difficult thing to prove. He therefore shut himself up in a large Dutch stove, presumably (though he does not say) unlit, and emerged with the proposition ‘I think, therefore I am’. This was very good, so good that Catherine the Great summoned him to Moscow where, having proved he existed, he caught a cold and died.
All the same it was not good enough for me. ‘Thinking’ was all very well. I wanted to know who was the ‘I’. Without knowing that, Descartes’ proposition is imperfect. He did not explore the question himself, perhaps because of the fatal cold, perhaps because he saw with his clear mind that the answer would probably be very upsetting to religious and moral people, for whose good opinion he had great respect. In fact, the answer, as I intend to show, is the most disturbing thing a religious and moral person could ever hear."
A bachelor, Menen died of cancer. In his conclusion he says that it is Love that makes life worth living.
ENDS
