David Peat

Pausing the Cosmos 205series of hypotheses and uncertainties, costumes, masks, and personaewith which we face the world. The more the world reflects these backto us in a confirming way, the more we act consistently.Deep within the rigid and formal teacher there may be a child cryingfor release. Within the seductive vamp, who is always breakinghearts, there may be a warm and loving mother. Who we are and howwe appear to the world is always filled with paradox. Being ourselves islike Cézanne painting a landscape—he who was always tentative, alwaysquestioning, never fully sure but always attempting to respondhonestly to his “little sensations” as he called them.Another clue to the extent to which we have the ability to create apersona comes from the way we “read” and thereby create a characterin a book. A traditional novel invites us to suspend our disbelief thatwe are reading a work of fiction and to imagine that we are followingwhat is actually happening to real persons. Characters have lives, andtheir past histories begin before the novel starts. Their various encountersare located in a real place and time. After the novel has ended thesecharacters go on living and their relationships continue to unfold. Victoriannovels generally contain a concluding chapter that ties up looseends, explaining how a particular character eventually married and hadchildren. Villains get their just deserts and, toward the end of theirlives, repent and make amends for the harm they have done. Somecharacters even continue to live on to appear in other books. In JeanRhys’s Wild Sargasso Sea, Mr. Rochester’s wife, from Charlotte Brontë’sJayne Eyre, has an existence in the Caribbean before she marries andmoves to England. The school bully, Flashman, of Tom Brown’sSchooldays, grows up to engage in a series of picaresque adventureswritten by George MacDonald Fraser.In one sense this is perfectly reasonable. Characters do come alivefor their authors. They take on independence to the point where theirauthor is constrained as to how far events involving that character canbe pushed. Authors can even be surprised by what their characters door say. Some characters insist on returning in subsequent stories ornovels. Anthony Burgess, who wrote several novels about a costive poetnamed Enderby, once experienced the temporary hallucination of seeinghis creation sitting on a lavatory and writing!