Larissa MacFarquhar

I made a Twitter account. I don’t care if anyone follows me. I don’t intend to follow anyone except for Kelly Oxford. I just wanna practice saying things in 140 characters or less.

For example: “When the moon is full, the tide is high.”

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From Boston Review, an interview with Larissa MacFarquhar, who writes about people who give to the needy as much as they’re able. They give effort … money … kidneys … etc.

[Boston Review:] How did you become interested in extreme cases of moral virtue?

[LM:] I’ve been interested in them for a long time, but one of the things I read that got me thinking in a more systematic way was the philosopher Susan Wolf’s essay “Moral Saints” [PDF]. She argues that our conceptions of perfect moral virtue (what she calls saintliness) and of a well-lived life are irreconcilable, so one of them has to go. She is basically anti-saint — she concludes that it’s our view of morality that has to go. I tend towards the other conclusion, but her essay was very useful in framing the question. It seemed to me, though, that you couldn’t think about the problem only in the abstract. If you want to consider the cost of making certain ethical decisions, you have to see how they play out in actual lives. So that’s why I decided to write about people who have a very demanding sense of moral duty and live their lives accordingly.

LM is trying to write about real-life “moral saints” who aren’t “kooks.” This fascinates me, because most moral saints I can think of are, in fact, a little kooky. But even if LM’s subjects were, too, I’m not sure how damning that’d be.

I think that if you’re doing something that’s hard to do and good to do, and that makes you feel proud, I just don’t see why that’s so terrible. One kidney donor told me that his donation made him feel better about himself — that it was one really good thing he’d done in his life, which he had otherwise made a pretty complete mess of. Some psychologists think you shouldn’t donate in order to feel better about yourself, but it strikes me as an excellent reason!

Feeling proud isn’t the same as feeling less awful about yourself. But whichever motive the guy had, I think LM is right to view it with some admiration, and with compassion.

Hope

“Dracula’s Lament.”

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Last week’s sermon was about hope. All it amounted to was: We need to keep on hoping!

I was like: But how?

Here are a few suggestions.

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When he became a father, one of my friends wrote:

It’s amazing how much babies live in the moment. If she’s hungry or her diaper is dirty then her world is ending. She has no perspective that says this will probably be fixed in a little while so I’ll just hang on. I suppose that would be a frightening way to live. If I was hungry and couldn’t conceive of a future where I wasn’t I’d probably cry too.

I don’t remember how I felt when I was a baby. But yes, when I was a young child, I often had the feeling that my friend attributes to his daughter. I wasn’t carefree.

Adults can despair for a similar reason. They, too, can become unable to conceive of a future in which their needs are met. For adults, though, this is because of too much experience.

Failing to have one’s needs met, year after year, makes it more difficult to imagine how they can be met. Experiencing disappointment, again and again, makes it exhausting or painful to continue thinking of possibilities for meeting those needs.

For humans, this is an impediment to hoping, because what we can hope for depends on what seems possible to us.

(Notice that the same point applies to the world’s needs. Your own needs are mere tributaries. Even if you learn to navigate the tributaries – and the rivers they pour into – you must eventually confront the ocean.)

So for adults deterred by hurt, being hopeful often requires having the courage to allow wounds to be reopened. (Here a theological virtue depends upon a cardinal one.) And for adults worn down by disappointment, being hopeful often requires endurance in the midst of exhaustion.

It’s natural to lack courage. It’s natural to lack endurance. If you lack those things, don’t be too hard on yourself. By all means, enjoy some shelter and rest. But don’t stop at that:

(a) Keep in mind that, from the eternal perspective, we are babies. Our experience is not conclusive. There truly are blessings of which we can’t conceive. As far as you’re able (and if this is even coherent), don’t just hope for what’s imaginable to you.

(b) Ask God for courage and endurance to keep trying to imagine what’s imaginable, so that needs can be met even in this life.

(c) Train yourself in courage and in endurance. Training won’t be enough. But it will help, as long as it isn’t taken as a replacement for (a) and (b).

(d) Soothe others’ wounds, bear others’ burdens, protect them from the full destructiveness of exhaustion and hurt. And sometimes, or maybe just once, you will be in a position to give a person what he or she desperately needs. Then that person will be saved from despair. That person will be lucky (or blessed).

It won’t suffice, spiritually, for that person. But it’ll help, as long as it isn’t taken as a replacement for (a) and (b).

All too often, we’re tempted to think that cultivating hopefulness is primarily a matter of willing ourselves to believe that things will turn out all right. But we can do more than this. We can cultivate hopefulness by removing hindrances to the imagination. We can do this for ourselves by becoming braver, stronger. And we can do it for others by helping to ease their weariness and pain.

April fragments

The best free Bembo clone I’ve found.

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What with recent rain, it seemed appropriate to watch The Ghost Writer. Much parodying: “Hatherton” is a parody of Halliburton; Pierce Brosnan is a parody of Tony Blair, of Ronald Reagan, of Bill Clinton, of George W. Bush, etc., etc.; Tom Wilkinson is a parody of Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton. There are jokes about Roman Polanski’s other movies and personal life. … But as I was saying, I watched The Ghost Writer because of the weather. The actors were always coming out of a downpour or enduring a drizzle, which made me feel cozy.

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Kenny’s gf Lara has moved to Indiana to be with him. They’ll be married at the end of June. Last night we went to the mall to try on dress shoes, and then on Lara’s lark we went into J Crew. For the first time ever, I felt ashamed to be underdressed. Note to self: avoid J Crew.

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Pickup soccer has been resumed, thank goodness.

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Speaking of being picked up, last week, at the bus station, I was standing on the patch of grass with the cigarette butts, minding my own business, when a black SUV with tinted windows crept up. The driver lowered his window; I stared (bad habit). The driver (middle-aged) said: “Want a ride?” I said: “No.” He drove away. At first I was like, doesn’t he realize I’m waiting for the bus? Then I was like, whoa.

Roger Ebert, R.I.P.

Since 2000, when I moved to the U.S., I’ve read more words by Roger Ebert than by anyone else. Much of what he wrote is online, gratis. Just yesterday I was reading some of his reviews from the 1970s and ’80s.

He wasn’t the first movie critic whom I read extensively — that was Pauline Kael, who was more ruthless and precise. Ebert was more prolific and more humane. He was glad to review stuff that was unambitious, and, more important, he appreciated what was morally interesting about a lot of that stuff. (Example: Blue Crush.) In general, he judged the unambitious stuff more insightfully than he judged the ambitious stuff.

Not that he didn’t appreciate the ambitious stuff. His “Great Movies” series was useful to me when I was beginning to learn about ambitious movies. Some of those reviews explain subtext. (Examples: The Big Heat … Walkabout.) Others recount production history. (Example: Beat the Devil (a not-so-ambitious movie).)

He wrote warmhearted profiles of some great actors: Robert Mitchum … John Wayne.

Near the end, when he could no longer speak, he wrote some lovely personal reflections. Two of my favorites happen to be about not drinking and not eating: abstinence by prudential necessity and by incapacity. Doing without the drink and the food wasn’t so difficult for Ebert. What he really missed was the companionship.