It was early October in the Adirondacks. The maples were putting on their annual fashion show with the pines watching on the side.
Milo had chosen the place from photographs. A small cabin nestled beside a lake, though they could hardly see the lake. Photos are illusory, just like definitions of truth. The kitchen looked as though it had last been renovated when Jimmy Carter was president. The deck had two Adirondack chairs which Adrian immediately declared too obvious.
“You object to Adirondack chairs in the Adirondacks?”
“I object to thematic furniture.”
They had arrived Friday afternoon, again able to share some time together away from the city. By Saturday morning the sky was blue again and they set out on a trail that climbed behind the cabin toward a ridge.
For the first hour they talked about nothing in particular. Adrian told Milo about a colleague who had begun every faculty meeting that semester by saying, “Now more than ever.”
“More than ever what?” Milo asked.
“He never says!”
Milo laughed.
They hesitated a moment when they both heard the call of a loon.
“So how are you?” Adrian asked.
“Good.”
They continued up the trail, covered by fallen sugar and red maple leaves. Some were quite large. They both kicked the piles.
“I’ve been thinking about my sister,” Milo said.
Adrian waited.
“I told you she died back when we first met.”
“You did.”
“I told you how close we were.”
“Yes.”
“It’s been five years.”
Adrian nodded.
“I’ve been having these incredible memories of her. Vivid. But nothing important really. I mean nothing dramatic. Road trips we took. Her sitting in the passenger seat. Once in Colorado with her feet up on the dashboard. I can see the sun on her face. A dive bar in Grand Junction.
Adrian stepped over a root. “Do these memories come by themselves?”
“Mostly.”
“You don’t go looking for them?”
“No. Although lately I have.”
“Why?”
Milo thought about this.
“Because I like them.”
Adrian turned toward him.
“That sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”
“No.”
“I mean I like missing her.”
They came around a bend and the view suddenly opened. The entire valley became visible below them. The far hillside burned with light. A cloud passed slowly over the ridge and its shadow moved across the color.
Not a sentimental person, Adrian felt himself giddy, even high at the sight of the view. This was what he came for! He nearly spoke, but Milo had been talking about his sister.
“Wow,” Milo said. “Spectacular.”
They stood there.
Milo was struck by the intrusion of it. The hillside was aggressively present. The cold air on his cheeks. The light. For several days he had been living partly somewhere else, in hotel rooms and cars and kitchens twenty years gone, and now this immense quantity of new sense data was devouring him without permission. He felt ashamed that he was resenting it.
He had wanted the old feeling back. That pleasant but sometimes overwhelming feeling around those memories of his sister. Not happiness exactly. Certainly not sadness. Longing. Was it longing?
Her face in the sun. The peculiar way she held her mouth when she was skeptical. Her astrology. God, the astrology! She once told him an entire explanation for his personality based upon his moon being in Taurus.
He had told her he didn’t care where his moon was. But she did. Why?
He laughed.
“What?” Adrian said.
“I was thinking about her astrology.”
“Ah.”
“She thought I was the way I was because my moon was in Taurus.”
They began walking again.
After a few minutes Milo said in a confessing tone, “I tried to write some music with all the nostalgia and grief.”
Adrian looked at him.
“Labor Day. I had the day mostly to myself. These memories had been coming up, and I thought, all right, don’t just sit here having them. Do something with them. Transform them. There was this melody we both loved. We’d listened to it together a hundred times. I started building something around it.”
He stopped.
“And?”
“It felt like...” Milo exhaled. “I don’t know. I couldn’t continue.”
“Why?”
“The grief came up.”
They walked.
“I guess that’s what it was. Grief. But it was good too. That’s the strange part. I wanted it. Then I started feeling swallowed up again. Imagine wanting a bowl of ice cream, but the bowl of ice cream becomes so big that it threatens to drown you. I had this sense that if I kept going I might not . . I might not be able to come to the surface again. That I wouldn’t be able to get back into life.”
Adrian was quiet.
“That’s what scared me.”
“Not the grief.”
“No.”
They reached another view. After a while Adrian said, “Do you miss her, or do you miss remembering her?”
Milo stopped.
“That’s a horrible question.”
“Why?”
“It makes me sound narcissistic.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“It sounds like I’m enjoying my own grief.”
“Maybe you are.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t mean enjoying it as entertainment. Maybe remembering her is one of the ways you still have her.”
Milo started walking again. “That’s dangerously close to something a therapist would say.”
“I withdraw it.”
“No. Keep going!”
Adrian directed his hands into his jacket pockets. “You’re describing the memories as experiences. Not records.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t seem to be looking at an archive.”
“No.”
“Something is happening to you.”
“Yes. Memory isn’t weak perception,” Milo asserted.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know yet. Oh God. I don’t want this conversation to get swallowed up either. I brought this up because it’s also triggered some ideas about what memory is and what thought is. And I thought it would be fun to discuss it with you. One sees something. Later one remembers it. Is the memory just a faded copy of the original?”
“Hume.”
“Yes, Hume. But the thing is, this isn’t faded. It can be even more vivid than the original experience.”
“Your sister’s face is as clear as that hillside?”
“No. That’s what’s interesting. It’s not clear in that way at all.”
“Then what is vivid?”
Milo looked at him. “The feeling of these thoughts. The feeling around her and our time together.”
Adrian waited.
“I’ve been contemplating something. In the history of philosophy, the rationalists are always pitted against the empiricists. Reason against experience. And also thought against feeling. But I’m beginning to wonder whether those oppositions miss something fundamental.”
“Which is?”
“That thought itself is an experience.”
“Of course it is.”
“Of course? I thought as a rationalist you would object.”
“No. I experience myself thinking all the time.”
“That’s not quite what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean?”
Milo looked out across the hillside.
“I’m saying that thought has its own quality. Its own sensation, almost. Not necessarily a sensation coming through the eyes or ears. But something felt nonetheless. Thought triggers emotions. They are felt. And sometimes it can be more powerful than what we’re actually seeing.”
“Like your memories of your sister.”
“Yes. Exactly. Look at that hillside. It’s beautiful. The colors are extraordinary. But the experience I was having of my sister a few minutes ago was more intense. Not visually. In some other way.”
“Emotionally.”
“Yes. But I don’t want to separate the emotion from the thought so quickly.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not sure they’re separate.”
Adrian stopped walking. “Now that’s a different claim.”
“I know.”
“Your first claim was that thinking is something we experience. I don’t think anyone seriously disputes that. Your second claim is that the feeling might be part of the thought itself.”
“Right.”
“And you think that’s a problem for rationalism?”
“Not necessarily a problem. But perhaps a problem for how we ordinarily divide reason from experience.”
Adrian considered this. “I’m not sure the rationalists would object. Descartes certainly knew he was experiencing his thoughts.”
“Yes, but knowing that you’re thinking and attending to what thinking feels like are different things.”
“OK, let’s make this simple. When you think that two plus two is four, do you feel it? Or is it neutral? And I must say that a mathematical proof doesn’t become true because you have a wonderful feeling about it.”
“I didn’t say it did.”
“You’re getting close.”
“No, you’re doing that thing you do.”
“What thing?”
“Defending the objectivity of truth when nobody has attacked it.”
Adrian laughed. “It’s a reflex.”
“I know. But I’m not talking about what makes a proposition true. I’m talking about what it is like to think of this truth. Or a lie. We can feel it’s a lie. It disturbs us.”
They walked a little farther.
“And that’s what interests me about memory,” Milo continued. “My sister isn’t here. I know that. I’m not confused about reality. But something happens when I remember her. Something that isn’t simply looking at a picture in my head.”
“An emotion.”
“There you go again.”
“What?”
“Separating everything. First the thought, then the emotion attached to it. As though someone had taken a photograph and glued a feeling onto the back.”
Adrian smiled. “That’s a rather crude theory of mind.”
“It’s how we talk about it.”
“Sometimes.”
“But what if the feeling is inseparable from the remembering? What if the memory isn’t an image plus grief, but the whole experience of remembering her as someone I loved and lost?”
Adrian looked down the trail.
“I’m not saying all memories are like this,” said Milo. He looked back toward the hillside, now partly obscured by the trees.
“You know what’s strange? I can’t really see her face anymore. Not the way I could when she was alive. I have photographs, of course. But the face in my memory isn’t quite any of those photographs.”
“What is it?”
“It’s her.”
Adrian looked at him.
“I know that sounds ridiculous.”
“No.”
“It’s not a picture of her. It’s the feeling of her being there. The way I knew her. The way she was with me. Her ridiculous astrology. Her mouth when she was skeptical. All of it somehow present together.”
“And that’s what you were trying to put into the music?”
“Yes.”
Milo paused, relieved that Adrian slightly changed the direction of the dialogue. “Maybe that’s why I couldn’t finish it. I wasn’t trying to reproduce a melody. I was trying to reproduce an experience.”
“An experience you can no longer have.”
Milo thought for a moment.
“Not quite. An experience I can still have, but maybe can’t have for the first time again.”
Adrian said nothing. They walked on.
**********
By the time they returned to the cabin it was after four. Milo had brought a beef chuck roast. Adrian had brought vegetables and two bottles of wine, one of which Milo said was much too good for the roast and the other too good for drinking.
They opened both. Milo salted the beef while Adrian cut carrots, potatoes and onions.
“So how are you?” Milo asked.
Adrian looked away from the onion. “Why? Am I cutting it wrong?”
“Haha. No.”
“Well you certainly have been molesting the beef.”
“I was seasoning it.”
Adrian smiled. “I’ve been teaching a class on AI and mathematics.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“It’s actually fascinating. The students are using language models to explore proofs.”
“To prove things?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes to understand proofs. Sometimes to produce convincing nonsense.”
“Preparing them for careers in management?”
“Among other things.”
Milo slid the roasting pan into the oven with the beef, veggies and bad wine.
Adrian poured some of the good wine. “The interesting thing,” he said, “is watching someone understand something. There was a student last week. We’d been working through a proof and she couldn’t see it. Then suddenly she could.”
“How did you know?”
“Her face changed.”
“She smiled. Something happened. Recognition, maybe. Almost submission.”
“Submission?”
“Submission to the proof. She saw that it had to be true.”
Milo set the timer. “Are we getting mystical?”
“I’m trying very hard not to. But I guess I’ve been thinking about thought itself as well. Not memory, as you have.”
The cabin had become warm from the oven. Milo opened the door to the deck. “Come outside. This beef will be happy without us for at least a couple hours. Bring the wine.”
They sat breathing in the scent of pine and maple. And yesterday’s rain. The sun had dropped behind the ridge and the woods had changed character completely. The colors were still there but just shadows of their former selves. Adrian was telling Milo that the problem with calling thought a feeling was that thought appeared to have content independent of feeling.
“Two plus two is four whether I’m delighted by it or not.”
“You’re rarely delighted by anything.”
“Exactly. Mathematics survives.”
Milo was about to answer when something moved above the grass. He stopped.
“What?” Adrian asked.
Milo whispered some sound and pointed.
Twenty yards beyond the deck an old logging road crossed the property. At first Adrian saw nothing. Then he saw it. A fox. It moved slowly along the road, its body suspended just above the grass, its tail like a flag behind it.
Neither man spoke.
The fox stopped. Its head turned.
For a second it seemed to be looking directly at them. Then it continued down the road and disappeared behind the trees.
The woods seemed different now. Not objectively different. Milo knew that. The same trees were there. The same dying leaves. The same cold air. But the smell of pine had deepened. Or perhaps he was breathing more deeply. He could smell the roast.
“That was incredible,” said Milo. “Was that fox feeling its thoughts?”
Adrian laughed quietly. “It may have been working on a proof.”
“Maybe it had just understood one.”
“That would explain the face.”
They laughed. Adrian became quiet again.
“Probably some kind of thought.”
“But like ours?”
“No idea.”
“Did it have the experience we just had?”
“Of seeing us?”
“Yes.”
Adrian looked toward the logging road.
“It noticed us.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.”
“What did we just do that it didn’t?”
“Immediately begin talking about it.”
“Exactly.” Adrian took a drink. “Though perhaps that makes the fox superior.”
They sat for another minute. Over dinner they returned to the fox. Milo wondered whether language had changed perception itself.
“Changed eyesight?”
“No. Changed seeing.”
“Explain.”
“Suppose the fox and I look at the same maple.”
“All right.”
“We both see color. Shape. Movement.”
“Presumably.”
“But I see a maple.”
“The fox may recognize maple trees.”
“Fine. But I also see autumn. I see the Adirondacks. I see our weekend. I see climate. I see Canada down the road. I see a tree that will be bare in three weeks.”
“You’re seeing a great deal.”
“That’s my point. How much of that is actually perception?”
Adrian cut into the roast on his plate. “Very little, perhaps.”
“Then what is it?”
“Concept. Memory. Expectation. Language. Perhaps knowledge.”
Milo pointed his fork at him. “So the human perceptual world isn’t just richer because our senses are better.”
“Our senses may be worse.”
“Exactly. The fox probably smells things we can’t imagine.”
“Almost certainly.”
“But language lets us load perception.”
“Load?”
“Put more onto it.” Milo paused.
They ate.
“Maybe language doesn’t improve perception,” Adrian said. “Maybe it prevents perception from disappearing.”
Milo looked up. “Say more.”
“The fox sees us. Something happens. Then something else happens. A rabbit. A smell. Hunger. Whatever foxes do on Saturday nights.”
“A hot date?”
“Obviously. But we see the fox and now we can say fox.”
“So?”
“So we can carry it.”
Milo sat back. “Language gives experience handles?”
Adrian winced.
“What?”
“That’s awful.”
“It’s pretty good.”
“It’s the sort of sentence people underline in airport books.”
“Language gives experience handles,” Milo repeated.
“I hate you. But you’re right. We can carry the fox with us into dinner.”
“We can carry it twenty years.”
That stopped them. Milo looked toward the dark window. “Like my sister.”
“Perhaps.”
They were quiet for a while.
“But she had language too,” Milo said.
“Yes.”
“And we had language together.”
“Yes.”
“All those stupid conversations. Her astrology. Family jokes. Stories we’d told each other so many times neither of us knew anymore who had actually been there. Maybe language didn’t just preserve the memories afterward. Maybe it helped create the kind of relationship that could be remembered.”
Adrian nodded slowly. “Animals grieve.”
“Some certainly appear to.”
“So grief came before language. Language doesn’t create grief. It gives grief somewhere to go.”
Milo didn’t answer immediately. Then he said, “That’s a little airport book yourself.”
“I retract it.”
“No. I like it.”
They cleared the plates and then returned to the table drinking now the rest of the bad wine.
Milo said, “The strange thing about remembering her is that language is both incredibly powerful and completely inadequate.”
“Meaning?”
“I can tell you about her mouth.”
“You have.”
“I can tell you how she held it when she thought I was saying something stupid.”
“Which was often?”
“Constantly. But you still can’t see it.”
“No.”
“I can describe the sunlight on her face.”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t have it.”
“No.”
“And I don’t have it either.”
Adrian looked at him.
“Not really.”
Milo rubbed his thumb against the stem of the wineglass.
“That’s what’s missing from memory. This is happening now.”
“The fox?”
“Exactly. There was no distance between us and the fox. It was just there.”
“Phenomenologically there was probably some distance.”
“Please don’t say phenomenologically. Not when I’ve had this much wine.”
“You started this.”
“The fox was there. My sister isn’t.”
“Yes.”
“Memory can summon almost everything except that.”
“The now.”
“The now.”
After a while Adrian said, “What kind of piece were you writing?”
Milo’s expression changed. “Musically?”
“Yes.”
“Um, I don’t know. I was using these open voicings at first. Almost modal. But then I thought that was too spacious, too ECM.”
“ECM?”
“The label.”
“What label?”
“Never mind. Think Keith Jarrett, but not Keith Jarrett exactly, because there’s also this Bill Evans problem.”
“There is?”
“Always.”
Adrian drank the last of his wine hoping he might soon understand.
“And the melody itself wants to resolve conventionally, which is precisely what I don’t want, because the whole point is that the feeling doesn’t resolve. So I tried putting it over a pedal tone.”
“Of course.” Adrian thought how his current thoughts were all becoming overshadowed with fatigue. The tiredness had a way of making his thoughts less clear. So much for rationalism!
“But that gets static. Then I thought about moving the bass chromatically underneath it. You know, almost like Mingus, except not really Mingus because the emotional vocabulary is completely different. . . You’re getting tired my friend.”
“Huh?”
“You know . . . we could keep discussing the unity or difference of thought and feeling or we could just listen to Mozart.”