We talk about cats, Portuguese wines and philosophy. Jane works as the head of European Human Rights at the UK Ministry of Justice. Today, Jane and I are sitting in a quiet café on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury, a road that inspired parts of Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room (1922). These days I’m in a constant state of grief I feel as if I’m grieving for my own death, even if I seem to be around to witness it. I still understand it academically, but I can barely remember what it feels like. This is, I think, the very act of ‘living’, which I bear witness to in others, all day, every day. It comes with a sense of expectation, a feeling of being an agent in changing and plotting a course through the world. If I quieten my mind, I can almost taste the colour and richness of life as I knew it before, says Jane. But it’s quite another to meet someone face-to-face who is living with the condition that you’re using to ground this or that theory or interpretation. It is one thing to study a phenomenon in the lab, or from a philosopher’s armchair perspective. I met Jane, a British woman in her mid-30s, about a year ago, when she gave a moving talk to a packed audience at an interdisciplinary workshop I’d organised in London. This is now Jane Charlton’s experience of her day-to-day life.
People can be trapped outside themselves, unable to inhabit their own experiences, feelings and thoughts – like Mach, if he were unable to reconnect to himself after spying the shabby pedagogue in the mirror. But in some unlucky cases, the protective mechanism gets ‘stuck’. Luckily, with care and patience, the airbag can usually be wrapped up after the traumatic event, and we find ourselves back in our bodies and our lives. These states of mind seem to function as an experiential airbag, allowing us to deal with life-threatening dangers which would otherwise be overwhelming. If you’ve been through trauma, or narrowly escaped a nasty accident, you might recall how a sense of unreality can wash over you, how you suddenly disconnect from yourself, or feel as if you’re floating in the air and watching from above. Psychologists estimate that around three-quarters of us will experience similar symptoms of self-detachment at some point in our lives. In the next instant, Mach realises the shabby pedagogue is none other than himself, staring out from a mirror positioned at the back of the bus.įor a few moments, Mach had become a stranger to himself. As he stares down the aisle, he sees a person at the other end, a character he dismisses as a ‘shabby pedagogue’. One day in the late 19th century, the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach gets on a bus.
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