I have three memories of the last time Monika and I were together on Ameland. The first is linked to the photo on the beach – ‘Armin is crazy’. The second has to do with the shorteared owl. We’re lying in the spring sun, out of the wind in a pocket of inland dune. Bo is sleeping between us. Monika is chewing on a blade of grass. She has grass in her hair. She’s leaning on one elbow, her head resting on her hand. She says, ‘What does it mean to you to be the father of my child?’
It was a typical Monika question. ‘What do you mean when you say: I love you?’ ‘What did it feel like the first time you held Bo in your arms?’ ‘What does “being faithful” mean to you?’ For Monika, nothing was to be taken for granted – at least, nothing that had to do with love. Through her, I found out what’s most killing for love: the rut.
I think about it. Then I reply, ‘That our lives can’t be separated any more. That you can no longer say: my life ends here and yours begins there.’
‘Do you feel that limits you?’
‘Not at all. That the highest goal in life is individual self-realization is a sales pitch from the psychotherapists and pseudogurus. The highest goal is to put an end, once and for all, to exclusivist thinking.’
‘Excuse me? What’s that: “exclusivist thinking”?’
‘It’s the kind of thinking that draws distinctions and isolates. The kind of thinking that serves as an excellent tool for verifying fact, but which has unfortunately been elevated to a goal in itself. The kind of thinking that forms the greatest obstacle to achieving wisdom.’
‘You’re shitting through your teeth again, Armin. Could you put that in terms a mere mortal might understand?’
‘You’re the one who asked,’ I splutter. But I’ve tried that line on her many times before, and she’s never fallen for it yet. Not this time, either.
‘You know how much I hate all those abstractions. All I asked was whether you minded that Bo meant our lives could no longer be separated. That’s a very simple question, isn’t it?’
During our first two years together, conversations like this had often led to heated arguments. I took her criticism as out-and-out aggression, and didn’t know what I’d done to deserve it. She, in turn, found my abstractions insulting, as though I was consciously trying to belittle her by inflating the simplest questions into philosophical issues. But that afternoon on Ameland, in the early spring sun, we recognized the dangers and both added some water to the wine.
She shooed away an insect that was zooming around her head and said, ‘What exactly are you trying to say?’
And I said, ‘In order to understand how the body works, it can be very useful to dissect it and study the parts piece by piece. In order to better understand genius and insanity, it can be very helpful to draw a distinction between body and mind. And of course our insight into lightning, rainbows and solar eclipses increased when we stopped seeing them as manifestations of divine emotion. In that sense, it can be quite useful to think in exclusive terms. In terms of either one thing or the other. But the bothersome thing about exclusivist thinking is that, in the long run, it starts seeing itself as the only correct way of thinking – that, after all, is why it’s exclusive. And that leads to intellectual paralysis, and even to outright stupidity.’
‘For example?’
‘For example, take the discussions about what determines who we are: our genes or our environment. Full-blown academic battles have been fought over issues like that, even though it should be clear to everyone from the start that both factors play a part and, what’s more, even influence each other. You run into senseless, all-or-nothing debates like that all the time. About market versus planned economies. About homeopathy versus allopathy. About masculinity versus femininity. About man as calculating egotist versus man as a social creature. About good versus evil.’
‘And now back to you and me and Bo.’
She smiles when she says it, the chimpanzee code for ‘I mean well’.
I say, ‘According to the proponents of exclusivist thinking, people lose their individuality when they bond with others. But I believe that love actually allows people to become more themselves by fusing with another person. Through Bo, you and I are inextricably linked for the rest of our lives. But through that link, I feel freer than I ever did before. The opposite of exclusivist thinking, I believe, lies in the true acceptance of the paradoxical. The key to every bit of wisdom is a paradox.’
And at that very moment a short-eared owl comes in fast and low over the surrounding hedge of buckthorn, swerves and tips its wing when it sees us, and disappears as silently as it came.
‘Pure coincidence,’ I say, ‘but, of course, not without portent.’
And Monika says, ‘Pfffff!’ and laughs stridently. And I crawl across Bo and push her down in the grass and kiss her until she’s quiet.
The third memory has to do with the evening that followed that day. For years I’ve only dared to think back on that when Ellen was very close. Because Ellen understands. That I had to think about that evening there in that café in Hollum, with Ellen so far away, should have been a warning to me.