Delight Springs

Thursday, July 15, 2021

Roses and goodness

Iris Murdoch, I learn on her birthday, said something I can use in my talk at the conference in Ottawa tomorrow. We're about to head that way, checking out of our lovely little airb&b shotgun shack in the Westport neighborhood of Kansas City shortly and crossing the line about an hour into the Jayhawk state. 
She told The Paris Review: “Plato remarks in The Republic that bad characters are volatile and interesting, whereas good characters are dull and always the same. This certainly indicates a literary problem. It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don’t know much about goodness. Attractive bad characters in fiction may corrupt people, who think, so that’s OK. Inspiration from good characters may be rarer and harder, yet Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov and the grandmother in Proust’s novel exist.”

And Irwin Chance exists too, in The Brothers K. That's the 1993 novel by David James Duncan, loosely inspired by Dostoevsky's Karamazovs. And Irwin, also an epitome of unconditional love and benefaction and unremitting sympathy for suffering humanity, is loosely modeled on Alyosha. 

I think both characters are too good for this world, too committed to justice not to suffer profoundly and unjustly themselves in its pursuit.

But they're also both good role models, good aspirational targets. Aim for the stars, and keep your feet on the ground (as Casey Kasem used to say). That's another way of saying what Susan Neiman says, channeling Kant: Don't lose sight of what ought to be, while fully acknowledging what is.

Our dear friend Patricia, a Unity minister, was that kind of role model too. We were honored to participate last night in her memorial commemoration at Unity Village near here, with music and poetry and a scattering of ashes amongst the flowers. Her life of service and nurture and kindness inspire like the rose, reaching for the light but keeping rooted in the soil of this earth. That example has not sailed over our human horizon, though there was talk last night of a "transition" and a departure to another realm. For myself at least, she's still right here. Her goodness blooms like the rose.



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