Words&Dirt

“Our feelings of benevolence and sympathy are more easily aroused by specific human beings than by a large group in which no individuals stand out.  People who would be horrified by the idea of stealing an elderly neighbor’s welfare check have no qualms about cheating on their income tax; men who would never punch a child in the face can drop bombs on hundreds of children; our government––with our support––is more likely to spend millions of dollars attempting to rescue a trapped miner than it is to use the same amount to install traffic signals which would, over the years, save many more lives.  Even Mother Teresa, whose work for the destitute of Calcutta seems to exemplify so universal a love for all, has described her love for others as love for each of a succession of individuals, rather than ‘love of mankind, merely as such.’

If we were more rational, we would be different: we would use our resources to save as many lives as possible, irrespective of whether we do it by reducing the road toll or by saving specific, identifiable lives; and we would be no readier to kill children from great heights than face to face.  An ethic that relied solely on an appeal to impartial rationality would, however, be followed only by the impartially rational.  An ethic for humans beings must take them as they are, or as they have some chance of becoming.  If the manner of our evolution has made our feelings for our kin, and for those who have helped us, stronger than our feelings for our fellow humans in general, an ethic that asks each of us to work for the good of all will be cutting against the grain of human nature.  The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone’s advantage.”

––The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress, by Peter Singer, pg. 157

“Before going to bed himself he stands Nelson in front of the toilet, running the faucet and stroking the taut bare bottom until wee-wee springs from the child’s irritated sleep and jerkily prinkles into the bowl.  Then he wraps a diaper around Nelson’s middle and returns him to the crib and braces himself to leap the deep gulf between here and the moment when in the furry slant of the morning sun the boy will appear, resurrected, in sopping diapers, beside the big bed, patting his father’s face experimentally.  Sometimes he gets into the bed, and then the clammy cold cloth shocking Rabbit’s skin is like retouching a wet solid shore.  The time in between is of no use to Harry.  But the urgency of his wish to glide over it balks him.  He lies in bed, diagonally, so his feet do not hang over, and fights the tipping sensation inside him.  Like an unsteered boat, he keeps scraping against the same rocks: his mother’s ugly behavior, his father’s gaze of desertion, Ruth’s silence the last time he saw her, his mother’s oppressive not saying a word, what ails her?  He rolls over on his stomach and seems to look down into a bottomless sea, down and down, to where crusty crags gesture amid blind depths.  Good old Ruth in the swimming pool.  That poor jerk Harrison sweating it out Ivy-League stye the ass-crazy son of a bitch.  Margaret’s weak little dirty hand flipping over into Tothero’s mouth and Tothero lying there with his tongue floating around under twittering jellied eyes: No.  He doesn’t want to think about that.  He rolls over on his back in the hot dry bed and the tipping sensation returns severely.  Think of something pleasant.  Basketball and cider at the little school down at the end of the county Oriole High but it’s too far back he can’t remember more than the cider and the way the crowd sat up on the stage.  Ruth at the swimming pool; the way she lay in the water without weight, rounded by the water, slipping backwards through it, eyes shut and then out of the water with the towel, him looking up her legs at the secret hair and then her face lying beside him huge and burnished and mute.  No.  He must blot Tothero and Ruth out of his mind both remind him of death.  They make on one side this vacuum of death and on the other side the threat of Janice coming home grows: that’s what makes him feel tipped, lopsided.  Though he’s lying there alone he feel crowded, all these people troubling about him not so much their faces or words as their mute dense presences, pushing in the dark like crags under water and under everything like a faint high hum Eccles’ wife’s wink.  That wink.  What was it?  Just a little joke in the tangle at the door, the kid coming down in her underpants and maybe she conscious of him looking at her toenails, a little click of the eye saying On your way Good luck or was it a chink of light in a dark hall saying Come in?  Funny wise freckled piece he ought to have nailed her, that wink bothering him ever since, she wanted him to really nail her.  The shadow of her bra.  Tipped bumps, in a room full of light slips down the shorts over the child-skin thighs sassy butt two globes hanging of white in the light Freud in the white-painted parlor hung with watercolors of canals; come here you primitive father what a nice chest you have and here and here and here.  He rolls over and the dry sheet is the touch of her anxious hands, himself tapering tall up from his fur, ridges through which the thick vein strains, and he does what he must with a tight knowing hand to stop the high hum and make himself slack for sleep.  A woman’s sweet froth.  Nails her.  Passes through the diamond standing on his head and comes out on the other side wet.  How silly.  He feels sorry.  Queer where the wet is, nowhere near where you’d think, on the top sheet instead of the bottom.  He puts his cheek on a fresh patch of pillow.  He tips less, Lucy undone.  Her white lines drift off like unraveled string.  He must sleep; the thought of the far shore approaching makes a stubborn lump in his glide.  Think of things pleasant.  Out of all his remembered life the one place that comes forward where he can stand without the ground turning into faces he is treading on is that lot outside the diner in West Virginia after he went in and had a cup of coffee the night he drove down there.  He remembers the mountains around him like a ring of cutouts against the moon-bleached blue of the night sky.  He remembers the diner, with its golden windows like the windows of the trolley cars that used to run from Mt. Judge into Brewer when he was a kid, and the air, cold but alive with the beginnings of spring.  He hears the footsteps tapping behind him on the asphalt, and sees the couple running toward their car, hands linked.  One of the red-haired girls that sat inside with her hair hanging down like wiggly seaweed.  And it seems right here that he made the mistaken turning, that he should have followed, that they meant to lead him and he should have followed, and it seems to him in his disintegrating state that he did follow, that he is following, like a musical note that all the while it is being held seems to travel though it stays in the same place.  On this note he carries into sleep.”

––Rabbit, Run, by John Updike, pg. 197-9