Getting well again
I am sorry to hear (from Moira) that you have contracted the virus. Get well soon! (All may never be well, but some things do get better. It is true that some things also get worse, for the sake of balance, but let’s hope it will be worse for someone else. Yes, forget charity. Let’s hope that.)
Leslie* came by last night to take me for a walk. We went through the oval of the park alongside which I sometimes sit [link to Marksman?], down to the pond-called-a-lake and back. We left at twilight and came back in the dark. A warm night, just enough damp in the air to stick pleasantly to your skin and make your lips taste like salt.
He likes to keep track of “earthly matters,” Les does, the rise and fall of the pandemic and the dollar, the weapons of the wars between liberals and libertarians, between conservatives and crazies, between Slavs — cold wars and hot wars, wars with lives at stake and only reputations, prejudiced masked as ideas. He mutters about this battle and that, then suggests that humans would be better off if there were regular days of worldwide fasting, if all went out into the streets or the fields and lashed themselves and wept, “however crocodile the tears,” he said. Better to feign repentance than not to repent at all.
I don’t as what has brought this particular jeremiad on. It's better to enjoy the distinctly British rhythm of the muttering, matching my steps to its.
When he stops (muttering) — when we arrive at the lake and pause to look over the water — I mention, because he’s mentioned the pandemic, that you have been sick with it. “Oh?” he says. “Not seriously, I hope.” “I don't think so.” “Well, I wish him well.” “Yes.” “Tell him so,” he said. So I have.
Few of us, in my (admittedly little) experience, are as fragile as we think we are; all of us are prone to melodrama. Then, few of us are as resilient as we think we are; we fail to see how this scratch and that dent and this bit of gravel in that quart of fluid have weakened the structure. Finally, like an old car, we will fall apart. Overnight! We’ll be driven home from a till-the-wee-hours-party; and the next morning, we won’t start to go to work. And I am not sure, whatever the manuals say, that how well we have been maintained makes a great difference.
But what do I know, compared with Les, or you, a girl who read poems and plays and ignored philosophy and religion?
Again I say, Get well soon!
Trudy
Dear Trudy,
Thanks for your letter and your get-well wishes. I’m looking at a cardinal on the window sill: he is only himself, red and lovely. As a bird of the air, he is guarded by God, and so he lets the minute’s own troubles be sufficient for the minute. He drops to the ground. And out of sight.
One of the values of good social satire is that it lets us see self-righteousness for the pious fraud that it is. Even the enormously intelligent characters Aldous Huxley invents — I am reading Time Must Have a Stop — are only batting empty words around; that the words are bigger — and the rallies longer — doesn’t mean that more than hot air is being moved from place to place, just more of it. No-place is being moved from place to place, portentously.
Long ago, I learned at meetings that whatever I said was “wise” only as far as it furthered another’s cause. All this is to say that when, as in sickness, one begins to take oneself seriously . . . well, don’t.
I would be comforted if I still believed that the Apocalyticist was right and this is a comedy. But I am afraid that he is as big a blowhard as your friend Dame Julian. Thumb your nose at them if you see them. Blow them from me a long, juicy raspberry.
Please, Ted
_______________
* Leslie Becket, one T as in Thomas, not two as in Sam. See here, here, and here. Also here.
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