The Good Deed of the Flame

There was a single candle in the room when my father died, and I have thereafter never been able to look at one without the entire event reconstituting itself around me with complete and uninvited fidelity.

It had been placed there by the nurse, a practical woman of few words and enormous competence, whose name I cannot now recall and whose kindness I will carry to my own grave, in the interval in which the electricity had, with the exquisite and terrible timing that inanimate things sometimes achieve, chosen to fail. The candle glow quivered warm and quick like a Christmas tree in that enormous darkness, a cone of radiant energy burning in a huge black womb of a room, and I watched it with the split, dissociated attention of a man whose primary business is grief but whose secondary business, apparently irrepressible, is observation.

The winds molested it — the draught from the ill-fitting window, the small disturbances of breath and movement that attend a deathbed — and it bent, recovered, bent again. Time threatened it, as time threatens everything in which it takes an interest, the wax diminishing by its slow and irreversible arithmetic. And yet the flame shone on. It shone, I thought, like a good deed. Precisely like a good deed: small in its dimensions, profligate in its illumination, and indifferent to the scale of the darkness it had been asked to address.

Wherefore does a single flame refuse the infinite dark? Not because it is unaware of the dark, but it burns nonetheless. Herein, I have come to believe, is the only honest answer to nihilism that I have ever personally witnessed: that the light does not require the darkness to be finite before it consents to shine.

My father’s breathing changed. I took his hand. The candle burned between us and the enormous nothing, that one small, warm, committed, and utterly disproportionate flame, and I understood that this was what a life was. Not a conquest of the darkness. Simply: a cone of warmth. A quivering. A good deed performed in full knowledge of the dark, and performed regardless.

He went quietly. The flame, thereafter, continued.

It did not grieve. It simply, stubbornly and magnificently, burned.

The Picture That Shook the World

It was not the eyes, though the eyes were full of trembling tears that the photographers had thereafter captured with a fidelity so unsparing as to make every subsequent viewing an act of unwilling intimacy. Not the rioters surrounding him, bloodthirsty and terrible. It was the hand, the timorous hand, doubled against its fellow in desperate supplication.

The picture captured the nation’s imagination and shook its universal conscience. I can speak to the shaking, having been among those shaken. I saw it first on the front page of a newspaper in a tea-stall in Nagpur, on an ordinary morning in which I had no expectation of being philosophically ambushed, and I thereafter sat with my tea going cold for a considerable time, unable to proceed to the rest of the news.

He was, in that photograph, a man reduced to his absolute constituent: the irreducible human core that exists beneath every identity, every affiliation, and every carefully constructed social self, a creature that wishes, with every remaining fibre, not to die. Heroism was the last thing in his mind. And herein, I submit, resided the image’s power: not in spite of the absence of heroism, but because of it. Why do we thereafter find the timorous hand more devastating than the raised fist? Because it tells the truth that the raised fist, for all its legitimate magnificence, cannot tell. The raised fist says: I am more than my fear. The timorous hand says: I am afraid, entirely afraid, and I am here regardless, and I am asking you to remember that I am a person. He was spared. This I subsequently learned, and the learning thereof was a complicated relief, complicated because the sparing was arbitrary, as such sparings invariably are, and the arbitrariness rendered the relief inseparable from the guilt of knowing that the man beside him in the same photograph was not.

The timorous hand has been thereafter in my mind for twenty years as the most precise image I have encountered of what courage actually looks like and stands before us as it truly is: terrified, supplicant, and shaking. And still, somehow, present.

The Gift Nobody Ordered

The sunset happened in pink, and I was entirely unprepared for it.

I had been sitting on the veranda, and my body was present but the mind had thereafter wandered somewhere. I had been, if I am precise about it, in the process of feeling thoroughly sorry for myself, and I had been making rather a competent job of it.

And then the sky did what it did. Pink as cyclamen buds: that was the only description that presented itself and thereafter refused displacement by any more sophisticated alternative. The whole western expanse had been seized by some Monet who had apparently gained access to the heavens with a fistful of pink pastels and a magnificent irresponsibility. The clouds had been transformed into scuds of pink yoghurt, improbable and delicious and faintly absurd in the best possible sense of that word. The sea shimmered like some extravagant pink tonic poured into a glass the size of the horizon. The whole world, in the space of twenty unrequested minutes, had filled itself to the brim with cyclamen flowers.

I had ordered none of this; it had arrived regardless. Why do the grandest gifts present themselves in precise proportion to our inattention to them? I have received, in my life, things I wanted enormously and thereafter found wanting. I have planned and anticipated and curated experiences with elaborate care, only to discover, upon their arrival, that they had somehow misplaced the quality I had been anticipating. And then, on an ordinary and uninspiring Tuesday, on a veranda to which I had brought nothing but my accumulated fatigue and my perfectly serviceable self-pity, the universe had simply presented this.

No requirement that I be in a condition of worthiness or readiness or appropriate receptivity.

Herein, I have come to believe, resides the central and most quietly radical theological proposition available to a secular mind: that beauty is not earned. It is not distributed according to merit or withheld pending emotional preparedness. It arrives, with the cheerful arbitrariness of an unexpected guest, at whatever hour it chooses, and knocks upon whatever door it pleases, and does not linger to enquire whether the occupant is in a fit state to receive it.

The pink deepened, and the sea held it. The clouds drifted through their own improbable loveliness with magnificent unconcern. The sea rejuvenated and smothered its tiny, pink waves into itself, as if it were its own oppressor. In a morbid way, perhaps all of us are.

I sat in it, thereafter, and let it do what it came to do, which was, I slowly understood, nothing more and nothing less than simply be. That was sufficient. That, on any day, is more than enough.