1859: Alice Mallard, Simla
Letter to Jeanne d’Anatis, Sussex
Your last letter reached me by the Calcutta post, much delayed, though as fervent in tone and thoughtful in matter as ever. You remember that our discussion began, some months past, with my idle remark (scribbled, I fear, between household accounts and anxious glances at the monsoon sky) that perhaps thinking—our prized mark of distinction, the badge of reason and the supposed spine of the human soul—may not be so sovereign an organ of agency as we have flattered ourselves to believe. Your replies have been both affectionate and spirited, and I confess that your latest queries now trouble my sleep more than the hill wind that runs down from Jakhoo at night.
You ask where, in such a scheme, one might place the centre. Yet that word begins to vex me. A centre implies circumference, and who is to decide what spirals beyond perception’s own compass? I begin to suspect that to speak of a centre at all is already to mistake relation for dominion. Each living thing, indeed each moment of attention, may be a centre—and thus the word dissolves in its own abundance. Perhaps we ought to speak instead of focus: a gathering of vitality, a contraction of perception akin to a ray of light bending into brightness. Focus is transient; it drifts as a candle’s flame bends before the faintest breath. Yet in that instant of convergence, all else recedes—vanishes in the glow it casts. Thus the mind is no fixed seat but a mobile illumination.
Does that sound fanciful, dear cousin? I hope not. The air here encourages speculation of this kind. Perhaps it is the altitude; perhaps the eerie stillness before the afternoon rains; perhaps the perpetual proximity to insects, which perform their intricate reasonings without benefit of syllogism or prayer. I have sat for hours watching the ants trace geometry upon the veranda tiles—each seemingly blind to the greater shape, yet the whole forming a purpose that none separately could conceive. Might our own intelligence be so distributed?
You suggest, very bravely, that intelligence itself may be relational—that its measure is not housed in a skull but stretched between bodies, tools, climates, histories. It is a thought both radical and consoling. Out here one begins to feel how many forces contribute to an action we too easily call “ours.” Nothing I do is mine alone: the coolie who carries water, the pony that climbs the ridge, the air thinned by height, the quinine that steadies my hand—all participate in what I name as my will. Perhaps the true vanity of modern philosophy is not pride in mind, but the fiction that there exists an isolated mind at all.
Do you know, I am in constant correspondence with Mr. Barrow at the Botanical Gardens concerning the trees that alter their flowering since the rains grew erratic. He insists the plants have “adapted,” as if by deliberation, to the new schedule of storms. Yet how extraordinary that entire species may realign their internal seasons without what we would call reflection. They behave wisely without believing anything whatsoever. Is that not a rebuke to us, we proud reasoning creatures?
My ayah tells me the local villagers leave portions of milk by the roots of certain trees “to thank them for their shade.” I laughed at first, but she replied, most serenely, “The trees teach us to cool one another.” I could not refute her. Perhaps meaning itself emerges from maintenance, not mastery. The care of one being for another, the balance of each to its place, forms a kind of sense which needs no grammar. Our empire prides itself on dominion, yet the forest endures by reciprocity alone.
I have read much of late that deepens my unease with our old distinction between mind and mechanism. The telegraph lines increase daily, stretching like delicate tendrils down the passes. They hum faintly in the heat, and sometimes the wind sets them trembling, as though the mountains themselves whisper to Calcutta. Is this not a sort of distributed thought?—a net of pulses and delays, carrying intention without comprehension? I cannot help fancying the world itself has learnt to think, albeit without awareness of thinking.
You wrote that such notions risk dissolving the human into mere circumstance. Yet perhaps that dissolution is a liberation. If agency dwells in relation, then we are never alone, nor singly responsible; yet likewise never without consequence. Every gesture extends its fibres outward, tugging the vast web in unseen ways. I like to imagine the universe not as a hierarchy of minds, but as an orchestra of attentions—each note fleeting, yet beautiful in its echo.
Forgive my prolixity. It is growing warm again; the air smells faintly of dust and jasmine, and the servants prepare for Diwali. They have hung lamps along the veranda, hundreds of them, and when lit at dusk they tremble in patterns like living constellations. I wonder, as I watch them, whether each little flame believes itself alone, or whether together they sense the harmony of their shining.
And yet I return to your question: if thinking was never the privileged centre we assumed, what then remains of us? I do not know. Perhaps the answer is not loss but enlargement—the realisation that to think is only one form of belonging among many. I shall content myself, for the moment, with the hum of the wires, the vibration of wings in the air, the flicker of the lamps, and the sense that all these motions, together, embody a wisdom greater than our solitude.
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