The Lost Art of Gratitude

to a poetry reading on this side of the square, in the School of Scottish Studies; it was given by a Gaelic poet, who read in both his own language and English. Isabel had been unable to understand his Gaelic, but had followed it on a crib sheet thoughtfully provided by the organisers; it had sounded like the wind and waves breaking on the shore; the words of a language that suited its landscape. And then, in English, he had read a poem about the death of his mother, whose breath, he said, had run out, like the tide draining out of a sea loch; now he ached, he confessed, for the star that had been extinguished. To be the mother of a poet, she thought, must be a fine thing.

She went into the library, which, as a former member of the philosophy department—although a low-paid and junior one—she was still entitled to use. It was unusually quiet, as the undergraduate students were away for the summer, leaving the library to those studying for higher degrees, the pursuers of masters’ degrees and doctorates. She saw one of the librarians whom she knew slightly, a young man from the Isle of Skye who always looked vaguely apologetic, as if the service that they were offering was somehow unsatisfactory. She imagined his saying, We don’t have that book, I’m so sorry, but there are other books, you know, and we might have those … But that was not what he said as he scurried past Isabel on some errand. Instead he said, “Dr. Henderson has gone. Did you know that? He was such a nice man.” Isabel, who had no idea who Dr. Henderson was, expressed regret. What a shame. And it was, she said to herself; if this librarian considered him a nice man, then that was what he probably was. And he would be regretted, as nice men were when they left. But gone where?

“Where?” she asked.

The librarian frowned. “Where?”

“Where has he gone?”

The librarian looked askance at her; surely she knew. “He died. He was run over.”

Isabel gasped. “I’m so sorry.”

The librarian gave her a slightly reproving look and excused himself to continue his errand. That misunderstanding was not my fault, Isabel told herself. One does not say of a person who has been run over that he has gone. Gone before, perhaps, if one is both religious and euphemistic—not to say distinctly old-fashioned—but one did not simply say gone.

She made her way up to what she called the philosophy floor, where the philosophical journals were shelved. There were very few people around at this level of the library, and she experienced the somewhat disconcerting feeling that can accompany being alone, or almost alone, in a large room. Here it was intensified by the long rows of books, marching off to the vanishing point. Books are not mute, she thought; they have things to whisper, and here in this open-plan library there are no walls to mute their whispers.

She made her way slowly down one of the passages between the stacks. There were so many journals, and these groaning shelves housed only those with a physical existence. Behind them, somewhere in the ether, were the electronic journals that never ended up on paper—a whole virtual world in which the exchanges of opinion were every bit as real as those that resided in print. And yet that virtual world seemed so shadowy by comparison with these squat volumes, and perilous too: Isabel had browsed a philosophical bibliography recently and come across a reference to a journal called Injustice Studies. The title had intrigued her, and all the more so because the list’s compiler had written underneath the title: “Seems to have disappeared.” She imagined the editor of Injustice Studies complaining: It’s so unfair, it really is. Our journal was really important, and then …

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.

She bent down. The journal in question was stored on the bottom shelf, and its volumes as a consequence were dustier. She ran her finger along the spines, and stopped at the year she had written down. She eased the book from its shelf, a tight fit, and then took it to one of the tables at the window. From the dim semi-darkness of the book stacks to the light of the window table—the contrast was sharp, and she shut her eyes for a moment. But then she turned and looked out through the great sheet of glass, out to the rooftops of Marchmont across the Meadows; and beyond that, just visible in the distance, the inner slopes of the Pentlands. She had climbed there with Jamie on a bright day in January when the hills had been covered in snow right down to the burns below. The