I remember none of this and in fact for several weeks previously my memory is still fragmentary.

The ambulance first took me to the Rockyview and then to the Foothills Hospital where they proceeded to split my chest open and successfully repaired my bisected aorta with a combination of vinyl and thread and stents. Unfortunately, the blood flow to my brain was interrupted and I suffered a stroke. Thus the operation was a success but the patient emerged crippled and blind.

After days in the ICU and weeks in hospital I was finally transferred on May 22nd to the Fanning Centre for stroke rehabilitation.

I spent 4 1/2 months at the Fanning, learning to walk again with a cane, relearning to speak, learning to dress myself with one hand and in short, learning how to live with several disabilities, now called by a term borrowed from fiscal theory, deficits.

I learned several other things besides. Not least of which was tolerance extending to both patients and staff. I was very fortunate in having many close friends who were a constant support. One of whom, Margaret Kósa, I subsequently, on the day following my departure, married.

I am happily married to Margaret, an Organist, Choir Director, and Piano Teacher and am working again on my third novel. I am having to dictate it and have Margaret transcribe it because my vision is so impaired that I can no longer see to type or to read a computer screen or even to read a book. Thus I have to fall back on fifty one years of constant reading (my first adult novel was Hammond Innes’ ‘The Wreck of the Mary Deare’ read at the age of nine in Geelong, Australia, although many would consider H. G. Wells’ novella, ‘The Time Machine’, read a year later, to be my first real adult book). It is enough. Despite my new deficits (some would say I have long suffered from others), I am, strangely happy. I would thank God for this, if I believed in him, or her. A nurse at the Fanning Centre, a nurse I believe from the South Sudan, said that I was blessed. When I asked her why, she said, “Because when I wash your privates with cold water (the Fanning turned off their boilers at night to save money) most of my patients yell abuse, you only laugh.” So, despite my unbelief, I have him, or her, to thank for something.

One of Margaret’s favourite songs is “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”. I never hear this without thinking it may have a personal application.

A border collie blows her other, and last, CCL.

On Saturday, October 15th, 2011, while running on the flat near the bank of the Bow River in the company of her owner and her friends, Brian Unger and Sheila Robinson, Eva (the EDB) blew out her left hind knee.  This was exactly 7 1/2 months after blowing her right hind knee–she had managed to make a complete recovery.

There followed, a week and two days later, the usual surgery performed by the usual veterinary surgeon, Dr. Bruce Rodger, and the usual clinic: Marda Loop.  According to Dr. Rodger the surgery went well, and certainly Eva seems to be recovering well, better in fact–so far–than the first time.  I hope to have the staples out by late next week, and to start doggy physical therapy shortly after.  She turns 12 in January, but I’m hoping that by the spring she’ll be either back to normal or very close to it.  This will be the last surgery she ever goes through.  If it gives her, and me, another 2 or 3 years of outdoor activity, and love, it will be worth it.

The EDB 90% recovered.

From March 2nd to July 31st–five months for a near-total recovery: the EDB is back again.

Five months of doggy physical therapy.  It was worth it.  It’s good to have her back.  Her improvement was so slow, so incremental, that at first I had doubts.  It took weeks to see noticeable improvement.  But now she’s largely back.  What’s still lacking?  Although she walks and runs normally, her trotting gait does not yet exhibit her previous flair.  And her stamina is reduced.  How much of the latter is due to age–now 11 1/2–I don’t know.

Would I give her the operation again, if, as is statistically likely, in one to three more years the other hind leg goes?  I doubt it.  The operation set her back at least two weeks, possibly four.  There’s a chance that she would recover without an operation–incredibly, there seems to be no serious, published study as to the effectiveness of the CCL operation, versus no operation at all.  I would think twice before putting a dog, near the end of her life span, again through that trauma.

But why worry about that, today?  Better to take her down to the river, as I’m about to do now, and throw a stick a stick into the Bow.  Better to enjoy with her the summer day, and remember St. Matthew’s advice: ‘Sufficient unto to the day is the evil thereof’.

How much is too much?

A few nights ago I watched ‘Chloe’, the latest Atom Egoyan film.  It’s a thriller about a wife who suspects her husband of infidelity, and who hires a prostitute to test his fidelity.  There’s a significant amount of sex in the film, most of it verbally described by the actress Amanda Seyfried.  Her acting is so good, the verbal description is more disturbing than a straightforward image.  Wanting to learn more about the film, I looked it up on Wikipedia.  There I discovered that it belongs to a previously unknown (to me) sub-genre, the erotic thriller.

Why, in the 21st century, do we have a sub-genre for a thriller with sex as a strong plot and character device?  My British publisher’s assistant editor, a young literary man recently down from Oxford or Cambridge, complained when reading the manuscript of my political thriller The End of the Monsoon that it contained too much sex.  My first reaction was: how is that possible?

What’s the history of sex and the thriller?  Does it mirror popular literature in general?  Has popular writing become sexier, or more sexless?

Eric Ambler was one of the most important thriller writers from the 1930s to the ’50s; I’ve read most of his novels and I cannot recall a single sex scene.  I think this was typical of popular, mainline fiction.  A good example of the period is Nevil Shute’s treatment of sex in his No Highway (’48).  The story of the narrator’s courtship is limited to half a paragraph:

‘In the fourth year of the war she was sent to Boscombe Down to work in the drawing office; she had her desk and drawing board just outside my little glass cubicle, so that every time I looked up from my calculations I saw her auburn head bent over her tracing, which didn’t help the calculations.  I stood it for a year, high-minded, thinking that one shouldn’t make passes at the girls in the office.  Then we started to behave very badly, and got engaged.’

The exceptions must have stood out: D.H. Lawrence; Henry Miller; during my undergraduate days, a feminist take by Erica Jong.  Were there exceptions in the political thriller genre?  I’m unaware of them.  Ludlum certainly was not known for his sex scenes.

Has it begun to change?  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo uses graphically sadistic, violent, incestuous and murderous sex scenes, partly to establish character motivation, but partly also to place the story’s villains beyond the pale.  The result is a new high (or low) in violent sex within the political thriller.  I found it offensive.  In The End of the Monsoon I tried to use sex to show how a relationship could develop from carnality to love.  The relationship may not start admirably, it may not proceed typically, but I’m certain it is common.  The sex scenes show character development and help move the plot forward.  They add what Maugham called verisimilitude.  They are neither euphemistic nor underwritten, nor sadistic, violent and incestuous.  They are realistic.

Notes from an eyewitness

Theses, monographs and books have been written about orchestral and instrumental performance practice in the Baroque, Classical, and even the Romantic eras.  Indeed, the entire authentic performance and authentic instrument movement, the ‘period performance’ movement, is an attempt to recreate performances of the past.  This movement exploded into academic and musical popularity in the ’60s and early ’70s, and resulted in a great deal of textual research and, on the whole, progress in the authentic recreation of historical instruments.

The recreation of performance practice, however, was disappointing.  Thousands of recordings were made by ‘academically informed’ conductors and soloists.  Too many were thin, metronomic, and dry as dust.  After three decades a reaction set in.  The younger generation pointed out that few historical documents existed on performance practice and those that did, including autograph scores, were usually ambiguous.

Recent research has turned to early recordings, on the theory that performance practice from the first decades of the last century must have reflected 19th century practice . . . which in turn might have included some survivals of 18th century practice.  Unfortunately, electrical recording did not come in until 1926, and acoustical records from the previous three decades are dim and distorted.  Nevertheless, the early electricals were examined.  The latest scholarly opinion suggests that late 19th century and early 20th century performance practice was probably flexible in tempo and interpretatively free by modern standards.

But in an effort to find out exactly how something was generally played, say, during the classical period, might we be chasing a chimera?  Isn’t it possible that there existed a wide variety of performance practice in every period?

Elizabeth Mittler-Laudy is 101 years old and living independently in Toronto.  In the ’30s she was a professional violinist in Holland.  In 1940 in Banyuls-sur-Mer, while in flight from the Nazis, she performed publicly with Wanda Landowska.  I recently asked her to describe performance practice during that period, and particularly her experience performing with Landowska.  Here is her reply:

Concerning (her) tempo there were slight variations within the flow of the music.  It was just her deep feeling for the score that told her when to apply this and how much.  At the time it seemed completely natural to me and I took it as just the way Bach should be
played.

In Holland I had played in a special Bach orchestra with a conductor who believed in a strict, almost metronomical beat, hardly slowing down at the last bars.  To me it was very unsatisfying.  I played a number of St Matthew Passions under different conductors and I found that the tempos and the general approach was a bit different with each one.  It is difficult to point to a general accepted style used in the thirties.  I believe that it mostly depended on the conductor or the soloist.

While thinking about Wanda Landowska it came to me that I once differed with her about the last bars in Bach’s Concerto for two Violins.  She wanted them to be drawn out considerably.  The word she used was “majestueusement”.  I thought it was just a bit too
much, but who was I to question her judgment?

Landowska continued to perform for another 18 years on both the harpsichord and the piano.  Her early recordings on the harpsichord can show great liberty in tempo and ornament; her late recording, below, of Haydn’s F Minor Variations, done in her own home in Lakeville, Connecticut, on her own Steinway, in 1957, shows by comparison a classical restraint.  When playing Mozart and Haydn, she attempted to reproduce on the modern piano the sonority and dynamic range available to the fortepiano.  I think she did a pretty good job.

Note: this entry on performance practice was inspired by reading The Krupp Secret, a privately printed memoir by Elizabeth Mittler-Laudy.

and karma as inspiration for The End of the Monsoon

It was in a bookstore in the old Hong Kong airport in the mid ’90s that I picked up the first book I read by Aung San Suu Kyi.  I have it still.  It is called The Voice of Hope, and is a collection of conversations she had with Alan Clements. 

Suu Kyi has put Burma on the map, and when I needed a prisoner of conscience for the plot of The End of the Monsoon (I was living in Cambodia), I naturally thought of her.  In the end I invented a politically active, British-educated Burmese monk, but I had her writings in mind when I tried to develop, in my novel’s final chapters, a little of his character.

I also had in mind my late wife’s beliefs.  She was a western Canadian Buddhist, intellectual, spiritual, also skeptical, with an emphasis on intention and works.  I’m certain Suu Kyi’s writings resonated with her.  Although Suu Kyi is Burmese, her thoughts below on the importance of metta, of a questioning attitude, on right intention and on works represent to me the refined western approach to Buddhism of which I am familiar.

Excerpts from chapter 10 of The Voice of Hope:

Suu Kyi:  …as time went on, like a lot of others who’ve been incarcerated, we have discovered the value of loving-kindness.  We’ve found that it’s one’s own feeling of hostility that generates fear.  I never felt frightened when I was surrounded by all those hostile troops.  That is because I never felt hostility towards them.  As Burmese Buddhists, we put a great emphasis on metta.  It’s the same idea as in the biblical quotation: ‘Perfect love casts out fear’.  While I cannot claim to have discovered ‘perfect love’, I think it’s a fact that you are not frightened of people whom you do not hate.  Of course, I did get angry occasionally with some of the things they did, but anger as a passing emotion is quite different from the feeling of sustained hatred or hostility.

Clements:  What is the core quality at the centre of your movement?

Suu Kyi:  Inner strength.  It’s the spiritual steadiness that comes from the belief that what you are doing is right, even if it doesn’t bring you immediate concrete benefits.  It’s the fact that you are doing something that helps to shore up your spiritual powers.  It’s very powerful.

Suu Kyi:  …complacency is very dangerous.  What we want to do is to free people from feeling complacent.  Actually, with a lot of people it’s not a sense of complacency either.  I think that many people just accept things out of either fear or inertia.  This readiness to accept without question has to be removed.  And it’s very un-Buddhist.  After all, the Buddha did not accept the status quo without questioning it.

Clements:  Yes, he radically questioned.  It’s the basis of his teachings.

Suu Kyi:  Yes, absolutely.  In Buddhism, you know the four ingredients of success or victory: chanda–desire, or will; citta–the right attitude; viriya or perseverance; and panna–wisdom.  We feel that you have got to cultivate these four qualities in order to succeed.  And the step prior even to these four steps, is questioning.  From that you discover your real desires.  Then you have got to develop chanda.  Chanda is not really desire.  How would you describe it?

Clements:  Chanda is normally translated as the ‘wish to do’ or intention.  Every action begins with it.  Where there is a will there is a way.

Suu Kyi:  Yes.  You must develop the intention to do something about the situation.  From there you’ve got to develop the right attitude and then persevere with wisdom.  Only then will there be success in your endeavour.  Of course, the five basic moral precepts are essential, to keep you from straying as it were.  With these we will get where we want to.  We don’t need anything else.

Clements:  So what you’re doing is fostering a sense of individual courage to question, to analyse….

Suu Kyi:  And to act.  I remind the people that karma is actually doing.  It’s not just sitting back.  Some people think of karma as destiny or fate and that there’s nothing they can do about it.  It’s simply what is going to happen because of their past deeds.  This is the way in which karma is often interpreted in Burma.  But karma is not that at all.  It’s doing, it’s action.  So you are creating your own karma all the time.  Buddhism is a very dynamic philosophy and it’s a great pity that some people forget that aspect of our religion.

of her recording of the Goldberg Variations

Landowska’s first recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which was not only the first recorded on a harpsichord but the very first recording of the piece ever made, is variously listed as made in 1931, 1933 and 1935; I’m going with the earlier date.  I first listened to it on an LP about 1980.  It made an indelible impression.  She was trained in the classical and romantic repertory, and I’ve read that she played Chopin on the piano all her life, but clearly her heart–or at least a significant part of her heart–was with Bach.  She was also a serious musicologist and researcher with the interest and the languages and the cultural background to do original research, and the luck to be active at a time when you could still collect original manuscripts and instruments–before the the looting of Leipzig, the fire bombing of Bremen and the destruction of Berlin and much of western Europe.

Many reviewers describe her Bach as romantic, at least one as Gothic.  For me, her Bach lives.  There is something amateurish about many of the ‘informed’, ‘historical’, performances of the past forty years.  They sound like an academic’s attempt to recreate something long dead.  They are marked by a musical version of textual criticism, a scholarly activity well-suited to the Bible and the Koran and other literary texts, but ill-suited to musical performance practice.  An Urtext is the starting point, not the end point of a performance.  Landowska’s performances on the other hand have real blood flowing in them: the red blood of an informed, authentic, performance artist.

It is true that the recorded sound of her ‘revival’ Pleyel harpsichord is surprising to the modern ear.  But then, so is the sound of an authentically constructed modern clavichord.  Most musical sounds from the past sound strange at first to us today; we have to learn them anew, as we learn a foreign language.  (This is true even of ‘contemporary’ music: try to keep from cringing upon first hearing Ginger Rogers sing ‘In the Money’, in ‘Gold Diggers of 1933′.)  And, strangely, the latest scholarship is catching up with Landowska: her instrument’s 16 foot register, so denigrated as ‘unauthentic’ for four decades, is now admitted to have been more common in the 18th century than previously thought, and in fact to have been used by Bach; it is now being provided to new, large harpsichords.

How, financially, was the Goldberg even recorded on Landowska’s Pleyel harpsichord, in Paris, at the height of the worldwide depression in 1931?  It’s an interesting story.  The record companies were suffering like everyone else.  Walter Legge, at HMV, came up with the idea of collecting subscriptions for important recordings, and then actually making them once the amount collected made the project feasible and profitable for the company.  His idea was a success, and many of the records made endure as classics today.

Below is the first recording ever made of the 25th variation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht

Why does this song of Brahms’, from a poem by Heine, mean so much to me?  Why has it meant so much for so many years?  Even as I write, the song playing in the background grips my heart.

Most nineteenth century German Lied is about love–or unrequited love, or death.  This song may be about all three.  It’s hard at first to tell.  It’s a triumph of suggestion, of atmosphere.  Here’s the German text, followed by an English translation:

Der Tod das ist die kühle Nacht,
Das Leben ist der schwüle Tag.
Es dunkelt schon, mich schläfert,
Der Tag hat mich müde gemacht.

Über mein Bett erhebt sich ein Baum,
Drin singt die junge Nachtigall;
Sie singt von lauter Liebe,
Ich hör es sogar im Traum.

The translation:

Death is the cool night,
Life is the sultry day.
It grows dark, I’m sleepy,
The day has made me weary.

Above my bed a tree arches up,
In it sings the young nightingale.
It sings of love alone,
I hear it even in my dreams.

And now for the question: what exactly does the nightingale sing of?  What is, ‘lauter Liebe’?  What did it mean, in historic, cultural, poetic context, when Heine wrote the poem about 1825 and when Brahms set it to music one or two decades later?  Did it mean, in English, ‘love alone’, or ‘only love’, or ‘sheer love’, or perhaps ‘pure love’?

What did it mean to Elena Gerhardt, the singer whose performance is available below?

Gerhardt was born in 1883 near Leipzig; Brahms died in 1897 in Vienna.  Gerhardt gave her first Lieder recital in 1902 at the age of twenty and was an instant success. 

For the next 32 years she was on an almost constant world concert tour.  “Wer machte dich so krank” and “Alte Laute” were recorded in Berlin on September 24, 1929. She was accompanied by Coenraad V. Bos on the piano. 

She married as she turned 49 and she and her husband settled in London a few years before the Second World War. 

In 1939, a few days shy of 56 years old, she recorded the song in London at the Abbey Road studio no. 3, with Gerald Moore accompanying her on the piano.  It was among a set of six 10″ records, privately published under the HMV White Label.  It was not a great moment in the English-speaking world for German Lieder, and I don’t think more than two or three hundred sets were published.  In 1984 Keith Hardwick transferred the recording to tape and thence to LP as part of HMV’s massive, six-disc ‘Lieder on Record’ compilation.  It’s been out-of-print for years, and is now almost unobtainable.

Electrical recording in 1939 was done straight to wax disc; there was no editing involved.  We hear today, as a live recording, what they played and sung in studio no. 3, on 20 October ’39.  How sensitive is Moore’s accompaniment, how clear Gerhardt’s diction, how profoundly moving her interpretation.

(There are a few loud pops–surface noise–during the first phrase of the third line of stanza one.  They do not continue.)

“Therese” and “Der Tod”
“Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht”

For a first-class recent performance, see: Graciela Alperyn

Music in The End of the Monsoon

Can music and spirituality have a place in a political thriller?  I think they can, if they’re sub-themes illuminating character.  In The End of the Monsoon, Mrs Ambler, an idealistic lawyer, is also an amateur musician and practicing Buddhist.  Her guilt over her illicit affair strengthens her desire for at least a breath of transcendence.

In 1983 I thought I had such a breath in the wee small hours of the morning, while playing the clavichord in my third world luxury apartment in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

In my novel I transferred this experience to the character of Dr White, a no-nonsense, middle-aged expatriate English doctor in Phnom Penh.  In the penultimate chapter he recounts it to the story’s skeptical main character, the American diplomat, Mike Smith:

      ‘There’s a kind of music—Bach composed several examples—which I’m sure Mrs Ambler was aware of, called canon.  I no longer play, but many years ago I did, and one evening, while playing a Bach canon from memory, I felt, briefly, as if I were outside myself; I felt that I’d entered a musical stream, like the flow of a river, or the rushing of the wind, and that this flow—which was the music of the canon—was continuous: it came from I knew not where and continued I knew not whither.  While I played, I was, for a short time, a part of that musical flow.  This vision or waking dream ended the moment I finished the piece.’

Dr. White’s point is that although medical science may determine the chemical reactions associated with such an experience and the location of the brain where it takes place, that doesn’t explain the real cause, or the essence, or the meaning–if any–of such an experience.

In the novel, there are three instances of ‘spiritual experience’: an unusually successful meditation, just before dawn in the jungles of northern Cambodia; the expected and observed death of a main character; and Dr White’s out-of-body moment years before, while playing the Bach canon.  Mr Smith, fighting against having to swallow any of it, challenges the doctor with an angry: ‘What do you believe?’  The doctor replies,

      ‘Me?  I believe in nothing, Mr Smith.  Nothing.  However, I do believe in trying to keep my mind open—just a crack.’

Music samples: why the clavichord?

I am not an authentic instrument fanatic.  I think that mature and late Beethoven sounds better on a modern concert grand than on the type of piano built during the first two decades of the 19th century.  And who would deny Gould his achievement?  Neither do I believe that the clavichord should be limited to music of its period.  A friend often plays a South American samba on mine.  However, taking the trouble (and it can be trouble) to play Bach or even Haydn on a clavichord leads to insights in technique and interpretation difficult to find any other way.

There are challenges.  Clavichord technique is different from both harpsichord and piano technique.  The touch must be firm, whether piano or forte, but the keys must not be pressed too deep.  Fretted instruments demand an accuracy of touch greater than any piano.  One of the most serious challenges can be getting over the initial disappointment of the weakness of the sound.  The clavichord was played before the constant background noise of our world–which we do not even notice.  When attempting to play this instrument, you will notice it: the hum of the refrigerator; the distant traffic outside the window; in Calgary, the background whoosh of the central heating; the plane passing by several thousand feet overhead. 

The clavichord teaches you in a striking way just how different a quiet night in Leipzig must have been in 1765.  Playing it today, at one in the morning, perhaps with a snow storm outside and all traffic over (as quiet as it’s ever going to be), struggling to bring out every note, one’s attention focusses in, and after a few minutes a forte–which in aural reality is a piano–sounds to the ear or the mind of the player like an actual forte.

A Dutchwoman of my acquaintance put it well.  “Playing the clavichord,” she said, “is like a meditation.”

Music samples from The End of the Monsoon

I played and recorded these two pieces on a copy of a 1765 Friederici clavichord which I built in 2006 and 2007.  The original is in the Grassi Museum in Leipzig.

Variation 15 from Bach’s Goldberg Variations: a canon in inversion at the 5th.

Variation 25 from the Goldberg.  This variation was marked ‘adagio’ in Bach’s own hand, in his copy of the printed score.

Somerset Maugham: wanting, but not quite able, to believe

In September of 2007 I flew to Phnom Penh to gather material for a new novel.  Two of the books I brought with me were by Maugham: a first edition (a gift from Susana Serna) of The Gentleman in the Parlour, a Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong (1930), which is as its title suggests a travel book, and a Penguin paperback edition of The Summing Up (1938), a collection of valedictory essays.

In both books Maugham devotes a section to the question of evil; that is, how to satisfactorily explain the existence of evil in this world.  He goes through the standard Christian and other philosophical arguments and finds them wanting.  Then he discusses Buddhism.  I find his essays so interesting that I have included the last few paragraphs of both below.  Regarding his style, Maugham himself wrote that, given his natural limitations as a writer, he decided that he should aim at lucidity, simplicity and euphony.  I find his style powerful, but not as simple as it appeared in 1938.

From The Gentleman in the Parlour

While reading Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, Maugham is repelled at the author’s explanation of evil:

‘But when I came upon his treatment of the problem of evil I found myself scandalized.  The Absolute, I read, is perfect, and evil, being but an appearance, cannot but subserve to the perfection of the whole.  Error contributes to greater energy of life.  Evil plays a part in a higher end and in this sense unknowingly is good.  The absolute is the richer for every discord.

And my memory brought back to me, I know not why, a scene at the beginning of the war.  It was in October and our sensibilities were not yet blunted.  A cold raw night.  There had been what those who took part in it thought a battle, but which was so insignificant a skirmish that the papers did not so much as refer to it, and about a thousand men had been killed and wounded.  They lay on straw on the floor of a country church, and the only light came from the candles on the altar.  The Germans were advancing and it was necessary to evacuate them as quickly as possible.  All through the night the ambulance cars, without lights, drove back and forth, and the wounded cried out to be taken, and some died as they were being lifted on to the stretchers and were thrown on the heap of dead outside the door, and they were dirty and gory, and the church stank of blood and the rankness of humanity.

And there was one boy who was so shattered that it was not worth while to move him and as he lay there, seeing men on either side of him being taken out, he screamed at the top of his voice: je ne veux pas mourir.  Je suis trop jeune.  Je ne veux pas mourir.  And he went on screaming that he did not want to die till he died.

Of course this is no argument.  It was but an inconsiderable incident the only significance of which was that I saw it with my own eyes and in my ears for days afterwards rang that despairing cry, but a greater than I, a philosopher and a mathematician into the bargain if your please, said that the heart had its reasons which the head did not know, and (in the grip of compound things, to use the Buddhist phrase, as I am) this scene is to me a sufficient refutation of the metaphysician’s fine-spun theories.  But my heart can accept the evils that befall me if they are the consequence of actions that I (the I that is not my soul, which perishes, but the result of my deeds in another state of existence) did in past time, and I am resigned to the evils that I see about me, the death of the young, (the most bitter of all) the grief of the mothers that bore them in anguish, poverty and sickness and frustrated hopes, if these evils are but the consequence of the sins which those that suffer them once committed.

Here is an explanation that outrages neither the heart nor the head; there is only one fault that I can find in it: it is incredible.’

From The Summing Up

Again at the end of a later essay on the existence of evil, Maugham is appalled at how devoid of reasonable explanation are the philosophers and theologians:

‘Evils are there, omnipresent; pain and disease, the death of those we love, poverty, crime, sin, frustrated hope: the list is interminable.  What explanations have the philosophers to offer?  Some say the evil is logically necessary so that we may know good; some say that by the nature of the world there is an opposition between good and evil and that each is metaphysically necessary to the other.  What explanations do the theologians have to offer?  Some say that God has placed evils here for our training; some say that he has sent them upon men to punish them for their sins.

But I have seen a child die of meningitis.  I have only found one explanation that appealed equally to my sensibility and to my imagination.  This is the doctrine of the transmigration of souls.  As everyone knows, it assumes that life does not begin at birth or end at death, but is a link in an indefinite series of lives each one of which is determined by the acts done in previous existences.  Good deeds may exalt a man to the heights of heaven and evil deeds degrade him to the depths of hell.  All lives come to an end, even the life of of the gods, and happiness is to be sought in release from the round of births and repose in the changeless state called Nirvana.  It would be less difficult to bear the evils of one’s own life if one could think that they were but the necessary outcome of one’s errors in a previous existence, and the effort to do better would be less difficult too when there was the hope that in another existence a greater happiness would reward one.

But if one feels one’s own woes in a more forcible way than those of others (I cannot feel your toothache, as the philosophers say) it is the woes of others that arouse one’s indignation.  It is possible to achieve resignation in regard to one’s own, but only philosophers obsessed with the perfection of the Absolute can look upon those of others, which seem so often unmerited, with an equal mind.

If Karma were true one could look upon them with pity, but with fortitude.  Revulsion would be out of place and life would be robbed of the meaningless of pain which is pessimism’s unanswer
-ed argument.   I can only regret that I find the doctrine impossible to believe.’