Moral Saints

One of the great civilizing forces in any society is the ability not talk ill of the dead and, more generally, to let things go, to not have the final word-but I can't help myself in this case. There was a kind of ruthless fanaticism about Thatcher that probably sprang from her class origins. This is a pretty common experience: those who suddenly make it into the higher circles (of politics, religion, or whatever)often exhibit a zeal to prove that they've moved beyond being defined by their roots. To be one of the gang, nay, even better, to be the pack leader...

'Her legacy is of public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed, which together shackle far more of the human spirit than they ever set free.'
---The Guardian.

~~~

In an interview A. Part revealed that he had come up against a dead end. What to do in such moments, what resources can one turn to? In our own lives I suspect it is memory of love or of loved ones, the sense of peace that one found in a particular place; for others still it is a matter of hope or, if their faith is stronger, patiently waiting for grace to weave its way into our lives...Part says that he met a sweeper who told him:

you must love every note.

I think this could be lived by a saint or realized in the intense concentration of an artist, but it does seem too extreme or far-fetched for most of us. 

~~~

A friend is writing a biography of one of Pakistan's leading businessmen. The man has seen it all, from pre-partition days to meeting world leaders and then, eventually, setting up the university where I currently work. As my friend interviews him he says with some pride that he has never wasted a moment in his life. To me that sounds as if he's wasted his life. 

~~~

'In an orchard there should be enough to eat, enough to lay up, enough to be stolen, and enough to rot upon the ground.'

A life dedicated to one's own narrowly defined self-interests appears, to most of us, to be an impoverished or shallow one. But, equally, the moral life doesn't appeal much to us either. It's not that it just comes across as unrealistic-who could live such a life-but, rather, that we're ambivalent as to the worthiness of such a life-who would want to live such a life? A life of constant sacrifice, of not attending to one's own material interests and well-being or of consistently giving precedence to the perspective of others over one's own, does strike us, I think, as strangely odd. 

It is not clear that the pursuit of self-interest, meaning and an ethical life can always be reconciled, even if they do, in places, overlap with one another. 

Peak moments: why do fiction and films have such a hold on us? Could it be that nothing happens and then, suddenly, in a turn of phrase something clicks, some order comes into play, and there's a brief condensed moment of understanding? Is it that our own lives are much more like that than the image of any sustained attention to various areas of our lives? Not everything can be said or known, large parts of our lives go on without fitting into any pattern, without coming to the surface, as it were. I do not know who I am. That is the problem,of course, but it doesn't follow that knowing isn't replete with its own difficulties and problems. 

...