The Kindness of Strangers

On the souls of others, the narcissism of too much solitude, and the opposite of "Eat, Pray, Love" in Carys Davies' second novella.

The Mission House, Carys Davies (2020)

Perhaps because reading is itself a solitary act, there’s a long history of isolation in literature. Fernando Pessoa tells us that “literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life”¹, and the reverse holds true as well: ignoring life is one way to read many more books. Schopenhauer, that philosophical misery-guts, believed a man “can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”² Jane Eyre, meanwhile, believes, “The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

In Carys Davies’ novel The Mission House, Hilary Byrd seeks out solitude in India not for self-respect but for reasons of self-indulgence. Retreating here is his way of avoiding the world. The fifty-one-year-old has left England behind, along with the sister who’s been his lifelong carer, the library job he once loved but came to revile, and the depression that wove itself through his lonely life. Here in southern India, he moves into the house of an absentee missionary, overseen by the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla. There’s also a black dog named Ooly, whose neediness is the off-putting to the obliviously self-serving Byrd, who’s desperate to escape the obligations that other people bring with their company.

This is part of how Davies so sensitively avoids any Eat, Pray, Love nonsense — by turning her attention with sharp and unforgiving precision on that narcissistic mindset. Byrd begins the story discomfited by the mere existence of other people. When he arrives at the mission house, he’s unsettled by the presence of the missionary’s clothes hanging on the back of the door, which he hides by leaving the door open against the wall. “The only irritating thing” about his new home is the dog — though Ooly irritates him simply by following Byrd to the bungalow “as if it expected to be allowed inside”.

Allowing others in is the opposite of what our self-centred traveller seeks in this new land. His description of the ideal library is, in fact, a description of his ideal life: “A silent sanctuary, a place of quiet repose and reading and peaceful contemplation and learning!” A place absent the interruptions of other people. The library in England that Byrd left behind had become awful because it was full of people being awful, from “the singing of babies and the hysterical shouting of the drunk” to the young woman who — on being asked “to please stop zipping and unzipping her backpack” — told Byrd to go fuck himself.

In contrast to all that he’s run away from, the mission house feels to Byrd “like a sanctuary away from everything in his life that frightened him or made him sad”. But it isn’t to last. His “cosy sort of refuge” is soon encroached upon when the Padre asks him to help Priscilla first with her English, then with sewing, then with cooking. Asked to give something of himself to another person, his refuge is in danger of being “stolen from him”. Sartre may not have meant it the way it’s commonly misunderstood, but Byrd certainly swallows the maxim and its misunderstanding whole in believing that “l’enfer, c’est les autres.”³

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When a gaggle of rickshaw drivers plead with him for business, Byrd follows some cold-hearted advice: “Do not make eye contact with the drivers of auto rickshaws ... Once you make eye contact, you are lost.” With his gaze fixed on the floor and refusing to meet these men as people, let alone as equals, a rickshaw driver named Jamshed is reduced to a voice saying, “I am begging you. Please.” And what does the driver get in return? This:

“But the cold unfriendly foreigner had stuck his giant nose in the air and his pointy elbow in Jamshed’s chest. He’d dragged his suitcase wheel over Jamshed’s unprotected foot and gone striding across the road, into the ocean of people on the other side, and vanished.”

This isn’t the last of this pairing, however. A few days later, Byrd takes a fall in town and cracks his cheek on the pavement. By some serendipity for Jamshed, the rickshaw driver happens to see the accident. He takes Byrd back to the Mission House and nurses him to health. This kindness from a stranger instigates the relationship that emerges between the men, one of the help and the helped.

Byrd has spent his life dependent on others and, at the same time, congenitally incapable of understanding how much he needs them. How else to account for the fact that this social and romantic man-child thinks the solution to his isolation is to be alone? He’s so afraid of the transgressions of outsiders that he becomes paranoid, fearing that “some thief from the town” might sneak into the mission house, or “the Padre’s smelly dog” might slip through an open window, “breaching [Byrd’s] defences at last”. As a consequence, he refuses to leave the windows of the mission house unlocked in case his solitude is violated, even though it means everything inside becomes damp and moulders. The metaphor speaks for itself.

When Byrd eventually reveals to Priscilla how much he fears the old dog, she laughs at him, and this outside gaze grants him a moment of transcendence from the bone cage of his being and the psychic straightjacket of his perception. He sees himself as if from the outside, witnessing the absurdity of his own character, and he looks anew at the Ooly the dog: “Byrd looked and it was true — Ooly did not seem like anything to be frightened of.” The cold unfriendly foreigner is, at last, leaving himself open, just a little.

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Once Byrd begins to leave the door to his soul ajar, he begins to heal and grow. He begins to shake off the stagnation of his self-centred existence back home. And the centring of that self is explicitly critiqued in the manner that Davies tells this story — through multiple viewpoints that often flesh out each of the other views, even while frequently contradicting those alternative angles on the world of The Mission House.

The chapters told from Jamshed’s point of view are often the most compelling. The rickshaw driver grapples with his life — with the choices and mistakes that led him to where he is, and the hopes and dreams for others, notably his nephew, that keep him going — and we witness this struggle through the free-indirect narration coloured by his wily, secretive mind and through his own attempts at writing in English.

Through these scenes, we see him follow a similar trajectory to Byrd’s. Jamshed sees the foreigner initially as a walking wad of money, “the promise, the chance, of a steady week’s work”. But as he ferries Byrd around town, we glimpse something unspoken motivating Jamshed to be of service to the other man. Davies never makes explicit what that things is, though I have my guesses. What is clear, however, is that Jamshed’s deepest wellspring of soul comes from the ways he can be counted on and can benefit other souls.

Perhaps this, The Mission House suggests, is what home really is: the sense of self derived from a sense of purpose, which itself comes out of our service to others. When Byrd describes himself as “a stranger in a foreign land, surrounded by alien goings-on”, he’s thinking of how he felt back in England at the library that no longer felt like home. It’s only here, in this actually foreign land, where he finds a place for himself and a purpose, among people whom he needs and — more importantly — who need him.

This is one of the most compelling ideas in The Mission House, one that rejects a common shortcoming in the “Westerner finds meaning in an exotic land” genre: that the inward gaze becomes, at some point, mere narcissism and actually hinders the growth that the perpetual navel-gaze is supposed to induce. We cannot retreat from the world for long if we truly want to flourish.

As Rabbi David Wolpe puts it: “Isolation is at best a temporary solution. The world is the stage of all drama. To be healthy, a soul has to care about other things beside itself and its source.”⁴ Serving others is so much less lonely than using others to service the self. “If all we attend to is our own cultivation,” writes Wolpe, “we are listening not to the call of the soul but the tyranny of the ego.”

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1. The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa (1982)

2. Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenhauer (2014)

3. “Hell is other people.”

4. Why Be Jewish? David Wolpe (1995)