The reason is . . .

Jacques Callot: Les Grandes Misère de la Guerre’

February 3, 2009

The reason is . . .

The day begins well, sunny and mild.  I think I may play a few holes of golf in the late afternoon in memoriam John Updike.  He hasn’t added one word to the world’s store this week, but the world – though you might imagine it would be – is no lighter for it.  The day begins sunny and mild, but by three it’s cold and cloudy and by five it’s snowing.  By the time I take the dog for his walk, there’s an inch and a half on the ground.  Its beauty is skin deep.  Beneath the white the grass is gray, the ground is soft and wet.  By the time we’re home my shoes are leaking, my socks are wet, my feet are pods of sweating ice.  I shovel and sweep the walks only so they’ll be slipperier by morning.

This is the way life slips by these days.  Walking from here to there, talking on the phone, meeting people.  Nice people for the most part but not particularly good.  None of us is either wise enough or wide enough to be truly good.  Those that try to be – to get above niceness – go about it the wrong way, because good isn’t above niceness, it’s  in another direction.

          I’ve been reading Susan Neiman’s Moral Clarity.  Her world is much wider than mine, she is much wiser than I; but she still doesn’t understand good.  Her examples of goodness are of  nice - and talented, of course.  They’re very bright and they’re thinking hard; but they can’t break through by thinking.  Good is not nice or bright or talented or reasonable.

                             Dulness best solves

                             The tease and doubt of shelling,

                             And Chance’s strange arithmetic         [Wilfred Owen, “Insensibility”]*

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*Read the full poem at poemtree.com.

This is only the first section of the poem.  To read it in its entirety, click here.

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