Howard Jacobson: Forget what TS Eliot wrote, and switch off your feelings occasionally. It'll do you good

Not to feel, we fear, is not to be alive. We dread ennui or emotional blankness

I'm interested in something the American architect Peter Eisenmann has been saying. Eisenmann is the architect of Germany's first Holocaust memorial which opened last week in the centre of Berlin. The rights and wrongs of there being such a memorial in Berlin don't concern me today. Other than believing that the whole of Germany should be a Holocaust memorial, and in a sense already is, I have nothing I wish to say on the subject. One doesn't always feel like discussing the Holocaust. One doesn't always feel like having feelings. Which is why Mr Eisenmann's reflections interest me.

I'm interested in something the American architect Peter Eisenmann has been saying. Eisenmann is the architect of Germany's first Holocaust memorial which opened last week in the centre of Berlin. The rights and wrongs of there being such a memorial in Berlin don't concern me today. Other than believing that the whole of Germany should be a Holocaust memorial, and in a sense already is, I have nothing I wish to say on the subject. One doesn't always feel like discussing the Holocaust. One doesn't always feel like having feelings. Which is why Mr Eisenmann's reflections interest me.

On the question of the vandalism to which his memorial might be subject - whether the idle graffiti of Germans fed up with the subject, or the more purposeful destructiveness of neo-Nazis - Mr Eisenmann is unworried. "I want it to become part of everyday life in Berlin and it's a great place for skateboarding," he says. "Don't care if people scratch its surface; at least it will show that they feel something. That's what it's all about."

We in literature take it as axiomatic that the last person you ever listen to about a novel is the person who wrote it. "Never trust the artist, trust the tale," D H Lawrence wrote, which means you can't strictly trust him either. But most of us, Lawrentians or not, do believe that in the end only the work can do the talking. I suggest it should be the same with the visual arts. Never trust the architect, trust the architecture. Though I haven't seen Mr Eisenmann's memorial, I am certain that it is not remotely about - let alone "all about" - allowing people to "feel something" regardless of what it is they feel. A memorial is about memory; it does not exist as an opportunity, for example, for people to deny there is anything to remember.

In his unthinking way, Peter Eisenmann has dipped into the aesthetic relativism of our age. Everything is up for whatever interpretation we choose to put on it; every response is as valid as any other, and a feeling is a feeling no matter what's being felt. The statement "At least it will show that they feel something" assumes that feeling something is better than feeling nothing. I put it to you that the opposite is true: that feeling nothing is frequently preferable to feeling something. We dignify tragic events by a minute or two of silence, as though we know the redundancy not to say the banality of words. By the same logic we should, at decent intervals, fall feelingless.

A tough concept, this, for people who have been educated sentimentally. Not to feel, we fear, is not to be alive. We dread ennui or blankness as evidence that we are sick. If we aren't in love and having babies by the time we're 18 we think we're hollow shells. "There's something wrong with me. I feel all empty inside," we used to tell one another at school, either because we hadn't enjoyed our first kiss as much in the deed as the anticipation, or because we were studying T S Eliot and were of an age to believe we understood his poem The Hollow Men. "We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men... /Our dried voices, when / We whisper together / Are quiet and meaningless."

We loved all that. Our neighbours lived in little boxes; we were inhabitants of the dead land, and that was the way the world would end, not with a bang but a whimper.

We should be so lucky.

Our English teacher ought to have helped us out. "Rejoice, boys, that you aren't yet passion's slaves. Enjoy not feeling anything while you can. Emotional insouciance, too, is part of life."

And our history teacher should have been at pains to point out those ills which had proceeded, and in many instances were still proceeding, from the minds of men who felt too much - the "violent souls" who meant to impose a better life on us modelled on the turbulence of their feelings.

Which brings me to our recent elections and the frequently voiced concern that not enough of us, particularly not enough of the young, are voting. It is a terrible thing, we say, not to exercise our hard-won democratic rights. Some call those rights obligations. Not we may vote, but we must. And on the matter of who or what it is we vote for? Never mind. The whole point of democracy is that we vote full stop.

So is it better, then, to cast a vote for the British National Party than not to cast a vote at all?

It would seem that we fear apathy and indifference more than we fear folly. As long as we feel something, as long as we believe something, as long as we are not the hollow men.

Nothing hollow about those who voted against Oona King, and nothing hollow about their victory. Writing to this newspaper the other day, a reader made short shrift of the charge that Oona King had been dumped on racist grounds. She was voted out "because she did not listen to us on Iraq. If she had done her job and represented her constituents, she would still be our MP. Simple".

Is this, then, an MP's job - to take a sounding of the feelings of your constituents, and be sure to feel likewise, or that's bye-bye to your seat? And is it the job of the electorate, to expect blind submission to its wishes, and then to exact retrospective punishment when that submission is refused?

Idle questions. The people's kingdom's come, and their will be done. But I see nothing in this process, wherever one stands on Iraq or any other contentious issue, to be pleased about. It looks like the exercise of dogma to me, and what's dogma but feeling become doctrinal.

Better to feel nothing. If we can choose how the world will end, I put it to you that the whimper is preferable to the bang.