The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [37]
Here, in a startling change from his usual writing voice, Carter addresses himself in the second person, as if he were looking in a mirror and his reflection yells back.
“You have capabilities which you may reasonably suppose are rather above ordinary,” the diary begins. “And how have you used them?” He then excoriates himself for having failed to keep his “invincible” resolutions of the previous year as well as for his immoral behavior—having a foul mouth, habitually lying, losing his temper. Carter is harder on himself than usual but also much more candid. “Your mind,” he writes, “[has been] polluted with constant visions of a sensual character,” especially at night. And this “loose kind of flirting” you’re engaging in with John Sawyer’s daughter Mary is “unworthy of a student.” You are “deceiving yourself and her, and her parents,” and, worst of all, have “no proper end in view.”
“Really? Mary Sawyer?” I murmured when first reading this. I thought you two just played chess together.
In spite of his suffering, I was euphoric. I felt as if my rapport with this man from another century had suddenly transformed, deepened. I had earned his trust, and now he was letting down his guard, completely.
Truth is, this had not just happened over the course of a few pages. By this point, I had already logged countless hours poring over hundreds of Carter’s daily entries. With Steve’s code-breaking help, I’d figured out when H.V.’s Hs meant Hewett or Hawkins or Harland; that he used the German character β to indicate a double s; and that nearly every written word ending in y ran right into the next word, without a break. I had gone with H.V. the first morning he swam in the Serpentine, the winding artificial lake in nearby Hyde Park, and on every single dip thereafter. I had ridden with the young doctor in the brougham to his first case as surgeon’s assistant. He had hardly said a word then. And I had endured, as had H.V., many a “dull m.” (dull morning). But at last, all that time spent in front of the microfilm projector at the library was paying off.
In one respect, though, I realized I had been misled. I’d gotten used to seeing his diary pages filling the view screen when, in fact, the photocopies showed both the true size of both diaries—a mere 18½ by 11½ centimeters, or about 7 by 4½ inches—and the scale of his handwriting. My word, the man had an ant’s penmanship! He could fit fifty lines on a single page.
Carter added to Reflections about every two weeks and would do so for the next four years. Unlike with his daily diary, though, these entries were never meant as an exercise in self-discipline. Rather, like the pages themselves, he was unbound here, writing long, ruminative passages that often read like memoirs. Religion definitely drives this narrative, but he never names his denomination (though it is clearly Christian), rises up to defend its tenets, or, for that matter, lashes out at the powerful Church of England. No, the lashing is always self-inflicted. In Reflections, Carter chronicles his efforts to reconcile his moral failings with his desire to lead a strict Christian life. While he continued to chart in his daily diary such details as his attendance at church (sometimes even three times on a Sunday), here he dug deeper, confiding about the battle raging within him between “sensuality—that great bane” and “religion—that important subject.”
By “religion” he really meant faith, an unshakable belief in God. But he really did treat faith as if it were a subject, a skill to acquire. He pursued it doggedly, as if competing for another academic prize. And this one, he really wanted to win. “’Tis just the same as with your ordinary studies,” he tells himself, “only even more perseverance is wanted.” At church, he would take notes during sermons, then write them out fully that evening. He would pore over the Christian tracts his mother sent him and reflect on her great purity of heart. Further, he took up a serious study of the Bible, “comparing texts with a view to getting precise knowledge.” And herein lay a crucial