After the swim, I settle to read. It's a Ray Bradbury story. A man shows up at an old saloon in the wilds of Idaho, has a few beers with a hunter, and enters into cryptic conversation. He's a time traveller in search of Ernest Hemingway. When he finds the great man he will offer him an apposite death and a resting place in the snows of Kilimanjaro, beside the frozen carcass of a leopard-better than his true fate. Let him die in the plane crash that almost took his life seven years earlier, rather than sink in a swamp of booze and depression.
When I finish the cosy parable I am at once hoist into another story. My wife recounts a childhood memory. The seaside world reconstructs itself around her as she speaks and, in some other space, two children glide into view: her child self and a girl, floating like driftwood in the sea. If there was shock, it has fossilised. Dispassionately, she recalls the commotion and then the quiet procession from the beach, no one inclined to stay. My image of the dead girl disturbs and surprises me. She bobs in a flowing white garment, wreathed in seaweed like an infant Ophelia, watched over by swimsuited children with buckets and spades. Waves break indifferently. This scene presents itself with no effort on my part.
I return to my book. The captain of a spacecraft arrives at his Martian base. We see him at his desk, quaintly surrounded by "tapes and computation cards." He reads a message from his "telegram-bin." Science fiction authors are especially vulnerable to the mockery of time, but what's the point of the future if it's predictable? I lose interest in the story, and start to imagine the textures and sexual technique of a woman sunbathing close by. My snoozing superego opens a wary eye and nudges me. It's a fair cop.
Most of the time, like most people, I live in a world of make-believe. It's not just that I read fiction and watch films. There are many other occasions on which I disengage from online perception of the outer world and enter a private, inner space. In the course of an ordinary day I will conjure a thousand scenes from memory, recent and remote, rehearse a hundred imaginary conversations, and project dozens of fleeting sexual fantasies onto my mental movie screen. I am constantly reading other people's minds, simulating their feelings, decoding their attitudes and intentions. I project images of myself into near and distant futures, and often extrapolate to an uncertain, curiously thrilling, point of non-existence. Sometimes I just daydream.
But what sense does it mean to speak of "inner" and "outer"? In truth, there is no sharp distinction between reality and imagination. Or, rather, there is no clear dividing line between perceptions of the real, solid world "out there" and the shifting, insubstantial realm of mental life. They both draw on the same cognitive resources, which are built into the same brain circuits-visual imagery is coded in the synapses of the visual system, imagined sounds activate the auditory cortex. The real wonder is that we know the difference. And the vibrant, detailed picture of the world that seems to fill our waking hours is a sham. The perceptual psychologist Alva No? calls it the "grand illusion." Far from being uniform, panoramic, high-resolution, colour-rich and continuous-as the visual world appears to be-the information supplied to the brain from the eyes is actually sparse, disjointed and largely monochrome. The brain confabulates a world from two tiny, upside-down retinal images, which constantly change as the eyes saccade from one point to another three or four times every second-snapshot, blackout, snapshot, blackout. We see much less than we imagine, and imagine much more than we see.
Later, my wife and I drive to the moor for an evening stroll. Up on the tor the air is cool. We sit and watch a woman and her small son ascending the slope. The boy rushes ahead and passes us without acknowledgement, as if we are features of the landscape. He scrambles on to a rock. "What can you see?" his mother asks. "More sheep," he says, mundanely. But he has a keen imagination, this boy, something that sets him clean apart from his woolly, fartleberried friends. We catch up with the pair on the way down. They've been studying reflections in the tarn, perhaps, because now they're discussing mirrors. Your reflection is just like a picture, the woman tells him; there isn't really anybody there. He seems to accept the explanation, but wants to believe there is more. What if he runs round the back of the mirror really fast? The point is, he can see himself doing it. And there you have the problem of the soul, I think.
"A year to the day," my wife says as we head back to the car. Since her diagnosis, she means. It's been on my mind, too. Twelve months in the shadow of cancer. I see us back in the consulting room getting the news. The time traveller is there too, I realise. Thanks, but no thanks, I tell him.
