The Last Jews in Baghdad: Remembering a Lost Homeland

Chapter 11. Distorted Visions

Chapter 11 Distorted visions One day early in 1971, making my usual round of the bookshops, I picked upwhat I would say was almost a personal book—a book which, by virtue of its time, its quality, and its contents amounts to a faithful record of my intellectual and mental development during a crucial decade of my life. The book was The CollectedEssays ,Journalism,andLettersofGeorgeOrwell,allinfourmanageable and now low-priced paperback volumes. Reading the book, or even browsing in it here and there, was quite an experience. Throughout the 1940s in Baghdad I had followed Orwell’s writings and the development of his political thinking—all the way from his Left Book Club volumes, his columns in Tribune, his contributions to Horizon, Polemic, Partisan Review, and other little magazines up to his Animal Farm and 1984. ThefourthandlastvolumeofCollectedEssaysisadornedwithaquotationfromoneofOrwell ’sessays:‘‘Onlybyresurrectingourownmemories can we realize how incrediblydistorted is the child’s vision of theworld.’’ But can we, really? And is a child’s vision of the world so incredibly distorted ? Howabout the other wayaround? ‘‘Only by resurrecting ourown memories can we realize how incrediblydistorted is our grown-upvision of the world.’’ But perhaps it amounts to saying the same thing—namely that the child’s vision of theworld is itself a reflection of ourown ‘‘incredibly distorted’’ vision of it. Speaking of myown personal experience, I think I can quite safely say that by all prevailing standards my vision of the world has always tended tobe‘‘distorted’’—increepingoldagenolessthaninchildhoodandadolescence . In this context, by ‘‘distorted’’ I mean unrealistic, impractical, rather naïve, and somewhat romantic. It seems to me, in fact, that there is a certain type of human being who simply refuses to grow up—men and women who just seem to cling to what their whole life experience shows to be a mistaken and at any rate unrealistic view of the world they live in. And they do this, moreover, at great cost to themselves and considerable pain and inconvenience to those who are close to or dependent on them. 112 the last jews in baghdad Ifchildrenareasinnocentastheyareusuallydepictedbytheirelders— which I rather tend to doubt—then I guess I am speaking about innocence —unchanging, persistent innocence and the trust in people that always comes with it. Until this day, at the ripe age of seventy and over, I am often chastised by my wife for being so trusting and enthusiastic about people and for so hastily forming new friendships—not because she herself is not sufficiently social and sociable but allegedly because I don’t do it with the moderation called for. Where the difficulty starts is when, usuallyaftera long time of patiently ignoring and tolerating behaviorand gestures which to her mind should have been sufficient reason for avoiding these acquaintances or at least keeping them at arm’s length, I tend to arrive at those conclusions too late and all of a sudden, with all the embarrassment and the awkwardness that accompany such discoveries. Nor do I seem to learn from experience—and I often quote with approval a saying in Latin from the diary section of Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless inGazatotheeffectthattheonlythingwelearnfromexperienceisthatwe donotlearnfromexperience.ButIdonotinanywayregretthischaracter trait of mine, despite the pain and the disappointments—and my usual answertomywife’scriticismsisthatitispreferabletobeinnocentornaive or trusting and often proved wrong than to be suspicious or calculating or mistrusting and equally often right. Sowhat is it that shapes a man’s outlook, his attitudes, his worldview? Tolstoyinoneof hisshortstoriesdepictshishero,IvanVasilyevich,asarguing that it is all ‘‘a matterof chance.’’ ‘‘Soyou contend,’’ he tells a group of friends, ‘‘that a man cannot judge independently of what is good and what is bad, that it is all a matter of environment—that man is a creature of environment. But I contend it is all a matter of chance.’’ The way I see it, the difficulty with this kind of theory is that even chance happenings donothappentoonebymerechance.Thetitleof Tolstoy’sstoryis‘‘After the Ball,’’ and what happens to Ivan Vasilyevich at that point as ‘‘a matter of chance’’ could not have happened to a less fortunate, nonaristocratic Russian living in the middle of the nineteenth century and attending no balls of that kind. Are we, then, born with the attitudes and the passions we have and which dominate us all our lives, motivating our actions, determining our reactions, and in short making us what we really are? In a brief prologue to his Autobiography, Bertrand Russell speaks of three passions which he said had governed his life—passions he describes as being...