An Odd Passage
Consider this odd passage in The Human Stain by Philip Roth: Reflecting on the deaths of Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley, Nathan Zuckerman (who, like Roth, is nowhere else given to philosophical obscurities) writes, “Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts.” No further explanation is offered by the narrator. The next paragraph details the discovery that Les Farley, Faunia’s psychotic ex-husband, is spying on Coleman.
It is probable that, if they noticed it at all, most of Roth’s innumerable readers would have glossed over this perplexing statement. Some may have paused, reread it, paused again, then told themselves that, like a Buddhist koan or one of the aporiae of Zeno, it is simply not meant to be understood. Others, after the second or third reading, may have dismissed it irritably as a tiresome paradox or a piece of nonsense mysticism—in other words, admitted defeat and moved on. All this is, perhaps, reasonable enough, and I myself passed through each of these stages before deciding that it was far more reasonable to assume that Roth had a definite, and explicable, idea in mind when he wrote those fourteen words and therefore to stubbornly work at determining what it was—no matter how many hours it took me. “Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts.” I memorised the exasperating passage and, for three days, turned it over and over in my mind until at last it made sense. Here is my explanation. The absolute transience of all things in the universe suffices to demonstrate their absolute equality. If we assume, as Zuckerman appears to, that a temporary existence is equivalent to no existence at all when viewed under the aspect of eternity, it follows that the only thing in the universe that really exists is change itself. (Nothing lasts.) But it is also obvious that change could have no existence without the things subject to it and that all things are therefore the medium of change and partake in its permanence. (Nothing passes.) We can summarize this by saying: All things owe their participation in permanence to the fact that they are subject to change and have no substantive permanence of their own. Nothing passes because nothing lasts. In my opinion, Zuckerman's statement is an apalling obfuscation of a simple philosophical idea, which Heraclitus expressed by saying, "Nothing is permanent except change." And it brings me to an unexpected realization: Writers who carefully avoid a wordy, literary, or learned prose style and insist on a folksy and down-to-earth one sometimes do so at the expense of clarity and ease of understanding. |