My antipathy to epiphany.

Epiphanies were all the rage yesterday. I epiphanate, you epiphanise, let’s all get epiphanist together.

Even Emma, our eminently grounded, reliably sensible, dependably down to earth editor-in-chief, contributed to the serial epiphany craze. Last time I counted Emma had notched up five epiphanies before lunch. I know Buddhist monks who would kill for that kind of enlightenment. That’s Olympic level epiphany hurdling. Hope she’s pacing herself though. Exercising the epiphany muscle that strenuously requires a properly supervised warm down. Maybe even a deep bath of ice cubes. And a dope test. I’m suspecting there were epiphany enhancing substances involved.

Twitter seems to encourage this sort of thing. There are people in my time line who specialise in accumulating revelation after revelation, who fill their 140 characters with second hand, off the peg, pre-digested gobbets of contrived life insight.

There’s one in particular I’m fascinated by. She’s up in the morning and at her keyboard hours before I have even knocked the alarm clock off the bedside table and groped the carpet for my glasses. She never seems to go to bed at night. Every time I logon her name is never more than a few minutes from a mention. Her Twitter stream is a torrent of apercu, revelation, and epiphany. I feel veritably water-boarded with wisdom whenever she’s around. Imagine having to live with the weight of such understanding. If only Jorge Luis Borges were around to write a short story . . . bugger, this epiphany bug is catching!

Not long ago I had a brief dalliance with a person of the insightful persuasion. We couldn’t go to the pub without her remarking each and every time she drained half of Kronenberg how she was put in mind of a certain quote from Kierkegaard. If we went to Starbucks and I asked if they had a soya milk option she took this as an invitation for a half hour disquisition upon the unbearable burden of choice. Queuing at the multiplex was merely a trigger for an extempore effusion upon the death of reading culture. An empty packet of Walkers Prawn Cocktail was an excuse to waffle on about the yawning futility of existence, the cavernous emptiness at the heart of being. She couldn’t even eat a jammy dodger without quoting the Bhagvad Gita. Going out was hell.

And staying in was purgatory. Profundity at the best of times is a bit of a passion killer. At the wrong moment a pithy revelation can be quite deflating.

A weekend of this and I was contemplating throwing lighter fuel on my library and setting light to my books while she was reading. A few days later I was working on a plan to break into the Big Brother house just to get my inanity balance restored. I’d had enough epiphanies for a lifetime. I assumed I had accumulated a heck of a lot of bad karma to work off, I can’t think of any other reason I was so horribly tormented.

Ultimately I blame James Joyce for all this epiphany malarkey. Yes, I know Dubliners is great, but can any of you book clubbers out there read the last line of “Araby” and seriously tell me that it doesn’t spoil the story? Or that you believe it? I somehow doubt it.

I’m with Chekhov on the epiphany question. Chekhov was a real writer – you won’t find any bloody elves in Chekhov, which is about my one criteria for being a serious writer, no elves! – and in his stories people do indeed have the odd epiphany. They think the insight will change their lives, make them better people, or make them truer to their real selves. They are usually wrong. Either the epiphany was misunderstood, in which case it buggers up their lives, or the epiphany doesn’t stick and they wake up the day after doing the same old stupid things. Read Chekhov’s “A Gentleman Friend”, he’s spot on.

And that’s an epiphany you can count on.