What about fragments of goodness? Your capital G Goodness is, well, rather daunting, if not downright terrifying.
The current Radio 4 interest, not to say, enthusiasm, for Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, has provoked me into re-reading it. Linda Grant (Start the Week 12.09.11) claimed she has read it four times, unlike War and Peace, which she has never managed to finish.
Chapter 8 (pages 80-93 in the Harvill edition) is a letter to Vityenka from his mother – a Jewish doctor – in a Ukrainian town overrun by the German army which immediately set in motion the Nazi policy of disappearing the other. Nazism is our paradigm of evil. Whenever we need to remind ourselves what evil is we look to them. Before she has even walked to the ghetto her non-Jewish neighbours are grabbing her rooms, her belongings. She has full awareness of what is going to happen to her. Forbidden the pavement the Jews walk in the road to the ghetto. She writes to her son:
‘I saw many faces I knew. Some nodded goodbye, others looked away. I don’t think any eyes in that crowd were indifferent; some were pitiless, some were inquisitive, and some were filled with tears.’
How do I stop myself from turning some ‘you’ into the enemy and forget that we are brothers/sisters; in other words, family with whom I have solidarity. Is it like taking a step and then realising that the step was wrong and withdrawing it? The necessity to slow down time, re-examine the situation . . . remembering kindness. A problem may arise when kindness demands courage.
If I imagine myself on the pavement, what do I do, what do I feel, what is revealed by my facial expressions, gestures, posture? Us bystanders are forever caught in a moral dilemma, almost a vacuum; caught between perpetrators and victims, barely able to breathe. Us bystanders have no idea as to the future because we are not engaged in making the future. We have no idea that in a relatively short period of time the Red Army will be streaming back across the lands they so recently vacated.
I am a bystander: sometimes indifferent, sometimes compassionate, sometimes angry, sometimes thankful that I’m not a victim, and please let me never find myself a perpetrator. At the same time there is the need to make a stand out there in the road, to rediscover the sense agency before retirement becomes the totality of my life.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.