NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 22, 2007
The cool rain
Prepare yourself, gentle reader. For I have an inkling that today’s column is going to be an exceptionally idle one.It is inspired by some young reader, whom I suspect of innocence, who asked me if there were no good news in the world. (She had found precious little in my columns, recently.) I had to explain, feebly, that when one is writing chiefly about politics, diplomacy, and war, no, there is seldom any good news -- now, and probably, through most if not all the past. Human history is, so far as I’ve been able to read, a long, grim tale. “An ugly thing,” as the late Hunter S. Thompson remarked, “a cruel and shallow money trench, ... a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs.” He was speaking of the television business, but it is not unrepresentative of the human enterprise at large. Yet there were and are good men: saints and (genuine) martyrs. And those who know there are such men (and know that this use of “men” includes women), are the next best thing. Some of them accomplish a little, for a while; but most, probably, die like dogs. Most of the good things we have we were born with -- our senses and the universe to which they are fine-tuned; the joy that is enfolded with our senses -- through no human design. And within that built-up part of nature where humans live, much good often appears. But it arrives like manna, in the face of our disbelief. At least, it seems to arrive -- I have long noticed and long thought about this -- not through any decisive human action, but organically, like freshets through cracks in the pavement. It arrives, generally, as the silver lining, among the unintended consequences of human acts. It comes as what my Church calls “grace” -- the way in which things correct themselves, after people have made a hash. For when everything has been done that can be done to create a monstrous and oppressive mess, nature contrives to make the result bearable. The mistakes finally fade, and the truth lives on. Or the good arrives through human agency, but by example rather than by prescription, in a beautiful human act. Seldom if ever an act with broad political implications. Only an act beautiful in itself, answerable to the moment in which it was conceived. Nor necessarily dramatic. For often as not, it is an act of patience, that drew no attention whatever to itself: as when an unknown person gives a total stranger “the time of day.” The late Mother Teresa of Calcutta paid persistent attention to this, in her own gentle critique of our heartless “welfare state.” The state will never love you, she observed, and people down on their luck have needs mysteriously beyond the power of any bureaucracy to detect. “Do not wait for leaders. Do it alone, person to person,” she said. ... And again, “Loneliness, and the feeling of being unwanted, is the most terrible poverty.” Yet also, in solitude, we are not alone. We fret. And truth be told, we have a lot to fret about. I had, just earlier, a number of specific frets upon which my mind was playing musically, when I looked out my high apartment window and saw a rainstorm approaching rapidly from the west. Glorious in its force, and in its power to conceal buildings and blocks as it swept my way. Also, inconvenient, because I was about to eat lunch on a balcony that would soon be awash. But in my amazement at this spectacle -- during which I unconsciously released my mental hold on everything I was fretting about -- I thought to shift a wooden chair by the balcony’s open door. And from that relatively dry position, a plate balanced on my lap and my feet resting on the sill of the door, I had my curry, and drank my mug of tea. And watched the rain come driving down, and felt the wonderful damp breeze that jibed a screen door against its vang, and shunted the dead air in the apartment until it exhaled in a clatter of lifting papers. (Let the breeze sort them!) It is to such a subject I instinctively turn, in pursuit of good news. Not by legislation, but like the weather, it comes. For in twenty years, what will I remember, except that curry, in that doorway? David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top