Readings

From an essay entitled ‘God and Me’ by Geoff Dyer in the Spring 2006 issue of Granta.

Over the centuries there has been a pretty stable consensus about which qualities are worth cultivating: goodness, kindness, honesty, reliability, consideration, compassion, generosity. At various times certain additional qualities get thrown into the mix; previously excluded qualities get called up (by Nietzsche, by various political ideologies) or promoted or relegated. But the core list has remained fairly impervious to historical change. (Don't we love Nietzsche partly because his life adds up to a kind of tragic parable, for the way that, having excoriated the notion of pity, he ends up throwing his arms around the neck of a horse that is being beaten — and then goes completely mad?) All the evidence is in — and has been in for centuries. And yet we still find it difficult to demonstrate our faith in the qualities we admire. We admire generosity of all kinds — and yet we succumb to meanness and pettiness. Given that we find it difficult to live up to our own standards, it's best, surely, to keep our expectations low. In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Rebecca West lowers the bar until it is almost on the ground. Even to summarize her position as a preference for the delightful over the horrid is to put it in too Manichaean a way. Her preference is simply for the agreeable over the disagreeable. The problem, though, is that:

only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.