CHANGING MY MIND E-Book

Julian Barnes

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 62

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'We always believe that changing our mind is an improvement, bringing a greater truthfulness to our dealings with the world and other people. It puts an end to vacillation, uncertainty, weak-mindedness. It seems to make us stronger and more mature. Well, we would think that, wouldn't we?' In this engaging and erudite essay, critically acclaimed writer Julian Barnes explores what is involved when we change our minds: about words, about politics, about books; about memories, age and time.

Leseprobe

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Notting Hill Editions is an independent British publisher. The company was founded by Tom Kremer (1930–2017), champion of innovation and the man responsible for popularising the Rubik’s Cube.

After a successful business career in toy invention Tom decided, at the age of eighty, to fulfil his passion for literature. In a fast-moving digital world Tom’s aim was to revive the art of the essay, and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be cherished.

Hailed as ‘the shape of things to come’, the family-run press brings to print the most surprising thinkers of past and present. In an era of information-overload, these collectible pocket-size books distil ideas that linger in the mind. ii

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CHANGING MY MIND

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Julian Barnes

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– Contents –

– Title Page –– Memories –– Words –– Politics –– Books –– Age and Time –– About the Author –– Copyright –

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– Memories –

It sounds a simple business. ‘I changed my mind.’ Subject, verb, object – a clear, clean action, without correcting or diminishing adjectives or adverbs. ‘No, I’m not doing that – I changed my mind’ is usually an irrefutable statement. It implies the presence of strong arguments which can be provided if necessary. The economist John Maynard Keynes, charged with inconsistency, famously replied, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind.’ So, he – and we – are happily and confidently in charge of this whole operation. The world may sadly incline to inconsistency, but not us.

And yet the phrase covers a great variety of mental activities, some seemingly rational and logical, others elemental and instinctive. There may be a simmering-away beneath the level of consciousness until the bursting realisation comes that, yes, you have changed your mind completely on this subject, that person, this theory, that world view. The Dadaist Francis Picabia once put it like this: 2‘Our heads are round so that our thoughts can change direction.’ And I think this feels as close to a true accounting of our mental processes as does Maynard Keynes’s statement.

When I was growing up, adults of my parents’ generation used to say, ‘Changing her mind is a woman’s privilege.’ This was, according to your male point of view, either a charming or an infuriating characteristic. It was regarded as something essentially female, or feminine, sometimes mere whimsicality, sometimes deeply emotional and intuitively intelligent – again, intuition was back then a female speciality – and related to the very nature of the woman in question. So perhaps you could say men were Keynesian, and women Picabian.

You rarely hear that phrase about a woman’s privilege nowadays, and to many it sounds doubtless merely sexist and patronising. On the other hand, if you approach the matter from a philosophical or neuroscientific point of view, it looks a little different. ‘I changed my mind.’ Subject, verb, object, a simple transaction under our control. But where is this ‘I’ that is changing this ‘mind’, like some rider controlling a horse with their knees, or the driver of a tank guiding its progress? Certainly not very visible to the eye of the philosopher or 3brain scientist. This ‘I’ we feel so confident about isn’t something beyond and separate from the mind, controlling it, but rather something inside the mind, and arising from it. In the words of one neuroscientist, ‘there is no self-stuff’ locatable within the brain. Far from being a horse-rider or tank-commander, we are at the wheel of a driverless car of the near future. To the outside observer, there is a car, and a steering wheel, with someone sitting in front of it. And this is true – except that on this particular model the driver cannot switch from automatic to manual, because manual does not exist.

So if things are this way round – if it’s the brain, the mind that gives birth to what we think of as ‘I’, then the phrase ‘I changed my mind’ doesn’t make much sense. You might as well say, ‘My mind changed me.’ And if we see things this way round, then changing one’s mind is something we don’t necessarily understand ourselves. In which case, it’s not just a woman’s privilege, but a human privilege. Though perhaps ‘privilege’ isn’t quite the right word – better to say, characteristic, or oddity.

Sometimes in my life, I’ve been a logical Keynesian about the whole business, sometimes a Dadaist Picabian. But generally, in either case, I’ve 4been confident that I was right to change my mind. This is another characteristic of the process. We never think, Oh, I’ve changed my mind and have now adopted a weaker or less plausible view than the one I held before, or a sillier or more sentimental view. We always believe that changing our mind is an improvement, bringing a greater truthfulness, or a greater sense of realism, to our dealings with the world and other people. It puts an end to vacillation, uncertainty, weak-mindedness. It seems to make us stronger and more mature; we have put away yet another childish thing. Well, we would think that, wouldn’t we?

I remember the story of an Oxford undergraduate of literary aspirations visiting Garsington Manor in the 1920s where the artistic hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell presided. She asked him, ‘Do you prefer spring or autumn, young man?’ He replied spring. Her riposte was that when he got older he would probably prefer autumn. In the late 1970s I interviewed the novelist William Gerhardie, who was almost exactly half a century older than me. I was young and callow, he was extremely aged, indeed bed-ridden. He asked me if I believed in the afterlife. I said that I didn’t. ‘Well, you might when you get to my age,’ he replied with a chuckle. 5I admired him for the remark, while not believing that I would ever change my mind to that degree.

But we all expect, indeed approve of, some changes over the years. We change our minds about many things, from matters of mere taste – the colours we prefer, the clothes we wear – to aesthetic matters – the music, the books we like – to adherence to social groups – the football team or political party we support – to the highest verities – the person we love, the God we revere, the significance or insignificance of our place in the seemingly empty or mysteriously full universe. We make these decisions – or these decisions make us – constantly, though they are often camouflaged by the momentousness of the acts that provoke them. Love, parenthood, the death of those close to us: such matters reorient our lives, and often make us change our minds. Is it merely that the facts have changed? No, it’s more that areas of fact and feeling hitherto unknown to us have suddenly become clear, that the emotional landscape has altered. And in a great swirl of emotion, our minds change. So I think, on the whole, I have become a Picabian rather than a Keynesian.

Consider the question of memory. This is often a key factor in changing our mind: we need to forget what we believed before, or at least forget with 6