The Lost Art of Gratitude

But there was no danger of the journals around her disappearing. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, the American Philosophical Quarterly, Ancient Philosophy: these were names which were set for the long run. And the titles were so familiar, although some of them she had never looked at and these reproached her now. The bound volumes of Ancient Philosophy were important to somebody, and one of them contained a slip of paper where a reader had bookmarked an article. She would understand the issues if she chose to open one of the volumes, but she knew that there were conversations within which she would never have the time to participate in. And that, of course, was the problem with any large collection of books, whether in a library or a bookshop: one might feel intimidated by the fact that there were simply too many to read and not know where to start.

Isabel sighed. At the end of the book stacks there was a window looking over the trees below. It was a bright morning, and the foliage was painted gold by the sun; I might be out there, she thought, sitting on the grass, gazing up at the sky, enjoying the warmth, rather than immured in here, with these dead voices and the sheer weight of old paper. For a moment she was tempted. She did not have to do this. She did not have to edit the Review and add to this great mountain of argumentative scholarship. Why did she? Did it change the world one iota? Did it make the faintest difference to anything? People acted as they did, made their decisions, treated one another well or badly according to the tides of their heart, and whatever little debates she hosted in her journal would have no effect on how they did any of this.

She put the thought out of her mind: it was simply wrong, as undermining doubts so often are. Everything, every human activity that went beyond the purely functional, could be challenged in this way: painting, music, drama. And yet all of these made a difference—a major difference in many cases. The readers of Isabel’s journal were affected by the conversation within its covers—if nothing else, the living room of their moral imagination became bigger. And this must surely have some bearing on the way they dealt with the world, even in the small transactions of life: awareness of the pain of others here, a word of comfort there. Of course, the admission of kindness to one’s life did not spring from any contemplation of the views of Hobbes (selfish Hobbes) and Hume (the good, generous Davey), but it did no harm to know about all that. And that was where philosophy really did count: it set out the major choices behind all those practical day-to-day questions of charity and understanding and simple decency; it was the weather, the backdrop against which those practical matters were debated.

The thought cheered her. All these volumes, passive and unmoving, rarely opened, it seemed; all of them were building blocks in the edifice of ideas that made for a humane and civilised society. And her own journal, shelved in this very room, was part of that. Well worth doing, whatever hours of sitting in the sun it precluded; books cost that. She remembered reading a poem that somebody had written about Walter Scott and his Herculean writing labours. What hours of love that great literary effort had deprived him of, the poet wrote. Yet Isabel thought that this observation might be misleading. Hours of love left little behind, unless the love was directed at mankind in general; Walter Scott’s years of exile at his desk created a voluminous legacy.

Her eye ran down the titles of the journals on the shelves, and she stopped. Reaching into a pocket, she extracted the slip of paper on which she had written the reference: the name of the journal, the volume year and the page number. And the author’s name, of course: Dove, Christopher.