BY STEWART SLATER
Modelled on Jay Nordlinger’s “Impromptus” in National Review, I’ve written another ‘Reflections’ piece which is a series of paragraphs on various ideas:
- A Saturday morning in Rome. Not personally, but vicariously, the Pope’s funeral dominating the airwaves. Like all such events, it featured many who count themselves great (their descendants may disagree) and more who count themselves good (their contemporaries may disagree). The Anglican Communion was represented by Stephen Cottrell who told Sky’s viewers the experience had been “humbling”. Going on to remind them that he was an Archbishop in the Church of England and had, therefore, been given a very good seat gave this viewer the impression it had not been all that humbling.
- It is not incumbent on us to agree with others’ self-image. Nor is it incumbent on them to agree with ours.
- A non-believer, the event was less engaging than intermittently interesting. As for Francis himself, my view is an agreeably Catholic fusion of Ancient and Modern – “de mortuis nihil nisi bonum” and “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Like all of us, the late Pontiff was a complicated man not that one would have known it from the coverage. Funerals are, I think, every bit as much about forgetting as they are about remembering. But if we only remember the good, do we really remember the person? (A pallor descends across my older relatives…)
- Few things are more annoying than something of which we approve being done by someone of whom we disapprove.
- Not a new problem. The Roman historian Tacitus faced it with a previous pontifex, Tiberius. How, he wondered, had the stolid, dour servant of the Empire (Gordon Brown in a toga) become the debauched, paranoid Emperor of his later years (Gary Glitter in (and out of) a toga)? The answer, he concluded, was that “good” Tiberius had been an act, a façade put up on his innate and ineradicable corruption to get him into power (Iago in a toga). Perhaps. Maybe he just changed. People do that. Power, famously, corrupts and we never actually know what we can do until we have the opportunity to do it. Or perhaps he didn’t change at all. Other historians are more “team Tiberius” …
- Depraved retirements were not unknown back then, the dictator Sulla having managed to raise even Roman eyebrows with his activities. Falling out with the Senate, he marched on the city, defeated its army, and after what we may delicately term a round of permanent job cuts, restored the constitution and the political class along more congenial grounds. At which point he left office, living out his days on his estate. Thought to be the only man in history to have fought for supreme power, won it, and then just given it up, the vice of his retirement came after one of his city’s last acts of Republican virtue. People have hidden depths just as much as hidden shallows.
- Alexander too was complicated, equally as capable of charm and generosity (he treated his defeated foe’s family as his own) as he was of running his best friend through with a spear (he did, to be fair, regret this). I saw a painting recently of him refusing water in the desert (miffed at a mutiny in India he punished the army by taking the hard route back to Babylon. Supplies having run out, salvation fortuitously appeared in the form of an oasis found by his scouts. Offered the first skin, he poured it on the ground declaring that he would drink when the army had. Yay, Alexander). Which modern leader would do the same? Trump would gulp it down and declare it “The best water” (before slapping his name on it and selling it). Starmer might need a Supreme Court judgement before deciding. Or perhaps they would have done like Alexander. Unlike Newton’s universe, people are not perfectly predictable.
- On a smaller scale, we too are prisoners of our opportunities, knowing what we have done, not necessarily what we might do, knowing who we were, having to guess at who we are. A wandering mind during the Papal funeral (as I said, I found it intermittently interesting – generally the bits in ancient languages which allowed me to flaunt my Classics degree…) alighted on the lace of the Cardinals’ vestments and the realisation that, having never worn it, I had no idea what doing so felt like. It is, in the language of the social sciences, an exclusively “female-coded” fabric. That is, I confess, fine by me – not everything that can be known needs to be known. To live is to choose. If you have taken the plunge (some of you, I am sure, have), well, as Francis himself said, who am I to judge?
- Psychologists tell us we are like mahouts driving elephants, in control until we are not. Our awareness is, I think, like a sheet of ice floating on a deep, generally inaccessible pool. A few years back, having experienced some gastric distress for longer than was, in retrospect, wise, my GP grudgingly booked me in for a scan – his demeanour strongly suggesting he expected the consultation to be my last. A few weeks later a nice lady discovered that my gallbladder had grown a new bit. Gallbladders, apparently, do this, particularly when attached to people like me. Nothing to worry about. Out of there like a shot I was. As the euphoria wore off however, I realised that this was my first experience of having a gallbladder. I had long assumed I had one. Humans, I understand, generally do. But I had never been aware of it until it went wrong. I had never felt it. Ditto my spleen, liver and indeed, pretty much everything south of my rib cage. If I don’t experience large swathes of my body, can I really know myself? We are fated to be a mystery even to ourselves.
- Time to give this column a funeral of its own (the exact location of its afterlife I leave to you, dear reader). For our closing quote, we turn to the late, deeply lamented author Philip Kerr (tribute here). “It’s perfectly possible to be a hero on a Monday and a coward on a Wednesday.”
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.