The Last Samurai

I said, Well why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?

She said, I won’t say it’s better for you to work it out for yourself, la formule est banale. Even when you see what’s wrong you won’t really be ready. You should not know your father when you have learnt to despise the people who have made these things. Perhaps it would be all right when you have learnt to pity them, or if there is some state of grace beyond pity when you have reached that state.

I said, Let me see the magazine again.

Then I read the whole article, but I couldn’t see anything wrong except that it was boring. I looked at the picture again but I couldn’t see what was wrong. I wanted to listen to the tape again but Sibylla said she could not stand to hear it again in one day.

I said, It’s not fair, nobody else has to wait until they’re old enough to know who their father is.

She said, We should not elevate the fortuitous to the desirable.

I said, How do you know I’m old enough to know YOU?

She said, What makes you think I think you are?

28 May

Sibylla has stopped mastering Japanese characters because she has too much work to do. I have mastered 243 thoroughly. Today she started typing and then she watched me working on my characters and then she sighed and got out a book. Later she put it down and I saw that it was the Autobiography of J. S. Mill. Rather surprisingly when she put it down she got out Mr. Richie’s book and she said, Can you read this? Mr. Richie’s book is in English so obviously I can read it. She said, Well read this for me. So I read a paragraph. It was about the villain in Sugata Sanshiro.

He is a man of the world—which Sugata is certainly not. He is well dressed, wears a moustache, is even slightly foppish. Also, he obviously knows what he is about. He is so good that he need never show his strength. He would not, one feels, ever resort to throwing people around as we know Sugata has done. And yet something is missing in him. Sugata may not know the “way of life” but at least he is learning. This man will never know it. He shows it in little ways. At one point, smoking a cigarette—the mark of a dandy in Meiji Japan—he does not bother to look for an ashtray. Instead, he disposes of his ash in an open flower, part of an arrangement on a nearby table.

Sibylla asked, What do you think it means?

I said, I think it means we should respect nature.

Sibylla asked, What?

I said, The villain puts ash in a flower whereas the hero is inspired by the natural beauty of the world around us.

Sibylla said, Hmmm.

I couldn’t think of what else it could mean and Sibylla didn’t say. After a while she went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and I went to look at the book by J. S. Mill. It was blood chilling!

J. S. Mill started to learn to read when he was two, just like me, but he started Greek when he was three. I only started when I was four. By the time he was seven he had read the whole of Herodotus, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Memorials of Socrates, some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, portions of Lucian and Isocrates’ ad Demonicum and ad Nicoclem, as well as the first six dialogues of Plato, from the Euthyphro to the Theaetetus!!!! He also read a lot of historians I have never even heard of. He didn’t start the Iliad and Odyssey until later whereas I have read both but they are the only thing I have read. I don’t think he did any Arabic or Hebrew but the things I have read in them are rather easy and anyway I have not read a lot.

The thing that is worrying me is that Mr. Mill was rather stupid and had a bad memory and he grew up 180 years ago. I thought that it was quite unusual for a boy my age to read Greek because a lot of people on the Circle Line were surprised that I was reading it but now I think that this is probably fallacious. Most of the people on the Circle Line did not say anything at all but I thought they would be surprised because the people who said something were surprised. This is stupid because if they were not surprised why would they say something? And now I am supposed to start school in three months.

2

a, b, c

6 September, 1993

Today we went to the school to talk to my teacher. Sibylla was very nervous about it. I think she was worried because she knew I would be behind. Every time I asked her she said not to worry about it. She has an old book called Six Theories of Child Development but it is not very specific.

When we reached the school we encountered an unexpected setback.

We went into the year one classroom and Sibylla introduced herself.

‘I’m Sibylla Newman, and this is Stephen,’ she explained to the teacher, though actually she hadn’t been able to find the birth certificate to make sure before we left.

‘I think you may be his teacher this year,’ she added. ‘I thought I should talk to you.’

The teacher’s name was Linda Thompson. ‘I’ll just check the print-out,’ she replied.

She took out a print-out and perused it.

‘I can’t seem to find Stephen,’ she reported at last!