novels engage my sympathies and make me desire things. When I look at the
‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’， I don’t ‘want’ anything from it. The pleasure is in seeing it as it is. But when I read books, I do experience desire: I want Isabel Archer to be happy, I want things to work out for Anna and Vronsky, I even want Jesus to be pardoned instead of Barabbas. Again it might be that I am a narrow-minded and rather vapid reader, sentimentally wishing the best for everyone （except Barabbas）; but if I wished the opposite, that Isabel should make a bad marriage, that Anna should throw herself under the train, it would just be a variation on the same experience. The point is that my sympathies are engaged, I’m no longer disinterested.
Have you talked to Simon about any of this? I think you could rely on him to present a more coherent view of the thing than I can, because his worldview has a consistency mine lacks. In Catholic doctrine, as far as my understanding goes, beauty, truth and goodness are properties of being which are one with God. God kind of literally ‘is’
beauty （and also truth, which maybe is what Keats meant, I’m not sure）。 Humankind strives to possess and understand these properties as a way of turning toward God and understanding his nature; therefore whatever is beautiful leads us toward contemplation of the divine. As critics we may quibble about what is and isn’t beautiful, because we are only human and God’s will isn’t perfectly accessible to us, but we can all agree on the surpassing importance of beauty itself. It’s all very nice and self-contained, isn’t it?
I could riff on it a little to explain my sympathetic engagement with the great novels.
For example, God made us the way we are, as complex human beings with desires and impulses, and compassionate attachment to purely fictional people – from whom we obviously can’t expect to derive any material satisfaction or advantage – is a way of understanding the deep complexities of the human condition, and thus the complexities
of God’s love for us. I can even go further: in his life and death, Jesus emphasised the necessity of loving others without regard to our own self-interest. In a way, when we love fictional characters, knowing that they can never love us in return, is that not a method of practising in miniature the kind of personally disinterested love to which Jesus calls us? I mean that sympathetic engagement is a form of desire with an object but without a subject, a way of wanting without wanting; desiring for others not what I want for myself but the way I want for myself.
I suppose the point I’m making is that there’s no end of fun to be had once you get into the Christian mindset. For you and me it’s harder, because we can’t seem to shake the conviction that nothing matters, life is random, our sincerest feelings are reducible to chemical reactions, and no objective moral law structures the universe. It’s possible to live with those convictions, of course, but not really possible, I don’t think, to believe the things that you and I say we believe. That some experiences of beauty are serious and others trivial. Or that some things are right and others wrong. To what standard are we appealing? Before what judge do we argue our case? I’m not trying to tear you down, by the way – I occupy what I suspect is exactly your position. I can’t believe that the difference between right and wrong is simply a matter of taste or preference; but I also can’t bring myself to believe in absolute morality, which is to say, in God. This leaves me in a philosophical nowhere place, lacking the courage of my convictions on both sides. I can’t have the satisfaction of feeling that I serve God by doing right, and yet the idea of doing wrong disgusts me. Even more to the point, I find my own work morally and politically worthless, and yet it’s what I do with my life, the only thing I want to do.
When I was younger, I think what I wanted was to travel the world, to lead a glamorous life, to be celebrated for my work, to marry a great intellectual, to reject everything I had been raised with, to cut myself off from the narrow world. I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness. Maybe if I had understood that, as I think I do now, at least a little bit, I would never have written those books, I would never have become this person. I don’t know. I know that I couldn’t write them again, or feel the way I felt about myself at that time. It was important to me then to prove that I was a special person. And in my attempt to prove it, I made it true. Only afterwards, when I had received the money and acclaim which I believed I deserved, did I understand that it was not possible for anyone to deserve these things, and by then it was too late. I had already become the person I had once longed to be, and now energetically despised. I don’t say this to slight my work. But why should anyone be rich and famous while other people live in desperate poverty?