(Aside, before getting into the gist of today’s post: You’re welcome, whiskey river.)

[Image: “City Utilities Cabinet, San Luis Obispo, California (June, 2022),” by John E. Simpson.]

How the minds and everyday interactions of latter-day college students work is unknown to me. But in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a sort of breezy cynicism was everywhere in the air I breathed, an infusion wrought by pop-culture trends like young, irreverent standup comedians and literary parodies like the Harvard Lampoon‘s Bored of the Rings. We laughed at everything, or so it seemed — and sometimes we laughed too heartily, or too long, or both.

Back then, I had a friend who ultimately broke me of that habit— well, not so much broke me of the habit, as demonstrated the hollowness of the attitude, the pose which lay behind it. Billy, I’ll call him. He was cynical about everything, to the point of scorn, even about those things which carried genuine emotional weight for one or the other of us. Talking to Billy was exhausting, because you could never surface to breathe the clean air of actual friendship: you couldn’t discuss a class you found really stimulating, you couldn’t talk about how to approach a girl you were interested in, you could never broach a subject like homesickness or worry about your future. It was, as I said, exhausting.

I don’t know what Billy would make nowadays of these Friday posts of mine, but I’m pretty sure how he would have responded to them back then. The ones more philosophical — airy — than others would have induced laughter; the ones grounded in real life, dismissed as mopery and nonsense…

Anyway, when I read the following over at whiskey river this week, I thought, oddly, of Billy:

(…) what surely, without the greatest absurdity cannot be disputed, that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent. Let these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be insufficient to move even a hand or finger of our body; they must still direct the determinations of our mind, and where every thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous.

(David Hume [source])

Billy, I think, was something of a purist: a, well, a priss. If a thing — an experience, an aspiration, a strategy, a practice — was not “good enough,” then it deserved no consideration at all. The attitude has been adopted by cultural cynics of our own time who counsel folding our tents in the face of human-wrought disasters and evil. It’s not good enough, they say, to soften the blow; if we can’t block or divert the blow, if it’s too late to escape entirely, well, then, we should just wait for it to come. Why not give up? Maybe we should even accelerate the end: we should kill ourselves, or go full-bore hedonism and dance ourselves into our graves…

But like the saying goes: the perfect is the enemy of the good. If a course of action can save ten thousand lives, despite an inescapable loss of billions, then I say let’s make saving those ten thousand lives possible. And on a much smaller everyday scale, let’s maybe ease off on the angry-warrior attitude, remembering Lincoln’s timeless juxtaposition: malice toward none, charity for all.

Over the last couple of weeks, I read the first two books of a planned trilogy by author T.L. Huchu. (Book #3 won’t be published until next year.) The series’ overall title is Edinburgh Nights, and the action indeed takes place in a near-future, dark, but not quite post-apocalyptic version of that city. The 14-year-old narrator and protagonist, Ropa Moyo, is a professional ghostalker and aspiring magician: she is hired by the souls of the dead to bear messages back and forth to their survivors — this enables them to tidy up loose ends, and get on with their journey to the next place (wherever and whatever that might be). A typical bit of dialogue goes like this, as an inarticulate dead soul approaches Ropa with a message:

‘Okay, I can deliver a message from you to anyone you want within the city limits, although at the moment I’m not doing the town centre, sorry. Terms and conditions — there’s a three-tier charge for this service, banded in a low flat fee, a middle flat fee, and a high flat fee, plus twenty percent VAT. The band you fall into depends on the length, complexity and content of the message. If you cannot pay the bill, the fee will be reverse-charged to the recipient with a small surcharge. Please note: this service does not transmit vulgar, obscene, criminal or otherwise objectionable messages, but a fee may still be incurred if we decide to pass on a redacted version of the message. Do you understand?’

‘Booga.’

‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

The voice is flippant and engaging, convincingly mid-teenaged, but at the same time no-nonsense about things that matter. That’s pretty much Ropa throughout the book, whether dealing with the dead, the living, or for that matter with the reader: she’s a smartass, with genuinely serious things on her mind.

The climactic action towards the end of Book 2, Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, takes place in an Edinburgh graveyard several centuries old. The souls of the dead here are especially restless, and — because anyone with whom they have unfinished business is also long dead — have not been able to complete their passage to the afterlife. Having dispensed with an immediate danger, Ropa confronts these spirits (in a passage, of course, not from whiskey river):

All around me, the grey shadows of men in shackles wearing hideous dress. These are the Covenanters, men who were persecuted for their faith. I realize they’ve carried the sort of pain that won’t allow them to move on.

I recall the words my grandmother once used and tell them, ‘Go now, my friends. You have no business in this realm anymore. I set you free from your pain and just rage. I bestow on you warmth and love to take to the halls of your ancestors. When you reach their vast lands, where the grass is tall and the cattle are fat, where the sun rises twice a day, once from the east and once from the west, they will weigh your hearts against a feather and find them lighter. Be on your way now. All is well.’

(T.L. Huchu [source])

I don’t know with what words someone will address my spirit, at the last; as final blessings go, this one is not perfect. But it would be quite good enough for me: Weigh my heart against a feather, and find it lighter. Yes, please.