The Worst Day of My Life Was the Day I Learned to Read
The celebrated filmmaker Errol Morris delivered this speech on receiving the Hitchens Prize.
Editor’s note: The seventh annual Hitchens Prize was awarded to the filmmaker Errol Morris at a dinner on April 10 in New York City. The award is given by the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation in association with The Atlantic, where Christopher Hitchens was a contributing editor. The Atlantic is joined by Air Mail. The award was given originally in association with Vanity Fair, whose editor then, Graydon Carter, is now Air Mail’s co-editor, and where Hitchens was also a columnist and contributing editor. The prize celebrates writers whose work exemplifies “a commitment to free expression and inquiry, a range and depth of intellect, and a willingness to pursue the truth without regard to personal or professional consequence.” Here is the text of the remarks Errol Morris made after receiving the award.
Most people have a candidate for the worst day of their life. Here’s mine: the day I learned to read. No one tells you that you will be trapped. There will be no provision to learn to unread. People will expect things of you. And worse, you’ll start to expect things of yourself. Reading is like Ariadne’s thread: It gives the presumption of a way out of a labyrinth. Of course, it’s nothing of the sort. Reading may lead nowhere. Reading might just lead to more reading. Not necessarily anything good. Or bad. No resolution. No escape.
I have no memory of my father’s death. I was 2 years old. My mother tells me that I raced up and down the front stairs of our home screaming. I learned to read when I was 5. The Five Chinese Brothers was one of my first books. Five stories of failed executions. None of the brothers did anything wrong, but one is held to be culpable for a capital crime. How do you chop off the head of a Chinese Brother with an iron neck? How do you burn to death a Chinese Brother who is noncombustible? How do you suffocate a Chinese Brother who can hold his breath indefinitely? And so on. I must have thought that reading could help me find a way around death. Maybe that was the true meaning. A version of Ariadne’s thread.
The Five Chinese Brothers may not have started my obsession with capital punishment, but it didn’t hurt. I would read the newspaper—on Long Island it was Newsday—awaiting the execution of Caryl Chessman in the gas chamber at San Quentin. Chessman had been sentenced to death under a soon-to-be-abandoned law for rape. It was a cause célèbre: He hadn’t killed anybody. I was bitterly opposed to capital punishment. Maybe I thought that’s what had happened to my father. The day of Chessman’s execution was May 2, 1960. A Monday. I was in sixth grade. I wanted to be watching the clock at the exact moment Chessman died. I was worried about the complexities of changing time zones and the inconsistent application of daylight saving time. As the hour neared 1 p.m., I counted down his final seconds. It annoyed my teacher. I subsequently learned (alas, through reading, I presume) that a stay of execution had been ordered, but the court secretary misdialed the prison’s phone number. So perhaps there was no reason Chessman had to be executed that day, if at all. Too bad he couldn’t change places with the Chinese Brother who could hold his breath indefinitely.
But this is in honor of Christopher Hitchens—or at least this award I’m being given is. I don’t always like reading Hitchens, but reading Hitchens invariably leads to more reading. More reading of Hitchens and more reading of others. Let me give you some examples. At the end of God Is Not Great, Chapter 19, “The Need for a New Enlightenment,” Hitchens quotes this passage from the German Enlightenment philosopher and aesthetician Gotthold Lessing.
The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent, and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand.
What a quote. I wished I had written it. Lessing is right. Truth is a quest. An endless procession through a labyrinth of evidence to a deeper understanding of what really is out there in the world. And yet, truth itself is something that we can’t know for certain—except, perhaps, under controlled or limited circumstances.
Hitchens doesn’t really address Lessing’s passage. “In point of fact,” Hitchens writes, “we do not have the option of ‘choosing’ absolute truth, or faith. We only have the right to say, of those who do claim to know the truth of revelation, that they are deceiving themselves and attempting to deceive—or to intimidate—others.” The argument feels slippery. Lessing is stating his case for the pursuit of truth; Hitchens is saying that those who claim to know the truth are charlatans. But I just don’t like the argument. I particularly don’t like it when atheism becomes a religion. Which it essentially does for Hitchens. I, like Lessing, prefer more open-ended investigations.
Many of us are trying to investigate the world around us. When we think of an investigation, we think of finding out something that we didn’t know or confirming something that we might have believed without being sure whether it was true or false. But are we lying to ourselves? Is it a myth? We interview other people, talk to other people, interact with other people so we can secure our preexisting beliefs rather than finding out anything different or discovering things that might challenge those beliefs. In short, we live in a hopelessly solipsistic world.
So why have I conducted so many, many interviews in the course of my investigations? In interviews, you hear things that are absurd. They open a door into an almost unimaginable world of self-deception and perversity. I encountered some of my favorite examples of this while making The Thin Blue Line, investigating whether Randall Adams, who was on death row for the killing of the Dallas police officer Robert Wood, was actually responsible for it. I keep thinking of Marshall Touchton, one of the homicide cops in Dallas, reviewing his interrogation of Adams: “We didn’t want him to tell us what he thought; we wanted him to tell us what we knew.” Good Lord.
Shortly before he died, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Henry Kissinger. The investor Ray Dalio wanted me to make a movie on the occasion of Kissinger’s 100th birthday. So I got on a Zoom call with Kissinger. What was so striking about the conversation was our discussion about Robert S. McNamara and the movie that I had made with him, The Fog of War. Clearly the takeaway from that movie—for others as well as for myself—was that McNamara was involved in a dialogue with himself (maybe with others, but primarily with himself) about the meaning of what he had done. I had imagined that if McNamara was going to be apologizing for anything, it would be Vietnam. But he took me back to something I had no idea he was involved with: the firebombing of Tokyo.
Kissinger’s reaction to The Fog of War, not an uncommon one, was to see McNamara as involved in performative hand-wringing, unwarranted apologetics, illegitimate expressions of remorse. I believe that in the case of Robert S. McNamara, guilt and shame played an important part in his life. It’s the main reason why I liked him, why I still consider him to be my favorite war criminal. There was an element of decency. And by decency I mean an element of guilt or shame for his own actions. Does it redeem him? Ultimately, no, it does not. But it still makes me respect him for his willingness to face up to what he had done.
To me, what’s interesting about Henry Kissinger is not whether he committed war crimes. Of course he did. I suppose it’s worth arguing the point. Then again, after Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Chile, Vietnam, East Timor—the list is argument enough for me. Do I really need to know more? What interests me is the internal reasoning, the mens rea behind it all. What in God’s name is going on inside Kissinger’s head? How does he see himself? Does guilt, does shame, play any part in it?
What I learned from speaking with him was that he felt his government position was excuse enough for anything he might have done. If he had any personal guilt, it wasn’t something he thought fit to share. “My argument with him,” Kissinger told me, referring to McNamara’s apologies for the Vietnam War, “was that when you have engaged in an effort that killed 30,000 Americans, you can’t then say you were totally wrong. Somebody else has to do that.”
His criticism of my film, or of Robert McNamara’s performance in my film, gives me a better idea of Kissinger than I could glean from reading The Trial of Henry Kissinger or any of the half dozen other biographies of the man I studied before speaking with him. It uncovers something important about his internal reality. The internal reality is, in fact, often ignored. You can go through the standard litany of Kissinger’s misdeeds without ever finding it. But it almost inevitably manifests itself in an interview. The prison of solipsism may be an ineluctable part of the human condition. But there may be a way out.
Among his many books, Christopher Hitchens wrote one about George Orwell: Why Orwell Matters. I find it easier to explain why Orwell matters to me. Take perhaps my favorite essay of all time, “Shooting an Elephant.” Orwell is reflecting on his time as a colonial police officer in Burma. He was hated by locals, utterly alienated, and in a perplexing and upsetting position, since he was both an intellectual opponent of imperialism and its officer on the ground.
“Early one morning,” Orwell writes “the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it?” After a bit of searching, Orwell finds himself with a placid elephant before him and an excited crowd behind him. “And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with my rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.” In the end, Orwell tells us, he shot the elephant solely to avoid looking like a fool.
In my recent film about John le Carré, I called him an exquisite poet of self-hatred. The same could be said of George Orwell. It’s one of the reasons I love his writing. “Shooting an Elephant” could be seen as just an account of a colonial mishap, or as an anti-imperialist fable. But at its heart there’s a personal issue: What were the reasons, the real reasons for why the elephant was shot? Was it because it killed a man? Was it because it presented an ongoing danger to society? Or, as Orwell suggests, did it provide a danger to Orwell’s self-image? Orwell is interrogating himself, and for much the same reason that I interview others: to break out of solipsism and pursue a truth we don’t really know, even if it’s a truth about ourselves.