At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [101]
Scrotes thought this rather a long-winded way of saying Christians disapproved of schoolboys jumping into each other’s beds and MacMurrough had to laugh at his gentle teasing.
Scrotes allowed, nevertheless, there was something in what MacMurrough had said and by way of illustrating this allowance he quoted from Augustine who had polluted the vein of friendship with the filth of desire—a phrase, Scrotes remarked, which would mean nothing to the Greeks, for whom friendship and desire were congenial (if MacMurrough would forgive the paronomasia) bedfellows. And yet, Scrotes continued, even for the Christians, friendship was not irremediably flawed for, as Augustine later confessed, it was his love for his friend that brought him closer to his God—a notion, said Scrotes, worthy of the Athenian Bee himself.
Such gentlemanly discussion, so affably did they speak, MacMurrough felt a rising gratitude for his old friend. He was a decent sort was Scrotes. True, he had taken to haranguing of late; but this morning it was like old times again, when they had had leisure in the sick-ward at Wandsworth to converse. Not conversation by any civilized standard, but a kind of a mussitation, the prisoner’s half-mime half-whisper, under the nodding eye of an orderly. Funny old man with his donnish ways. His courtesy had affronted the warders whose satisfaction lay in black looks and oaths unuttered. At first MacMurrough had conceived it a kindness on his part that he should take an interest in the fellow. Months passed before he understood it was the odd old fellow who had taken him in charge. Their friendship became his refuge; their talks his reprieve. That old man’s nidorous whispered breath had entered into MacMurrough’s heart an insufflation of—of what, exactly?
MacMurrough could not exactly say. He sniffed now, and sniffing caught the smell of hearthstone and heartbreak that had tenanted those echoing halls, those echoing halls, those echoing, those.
Whatever about that, he was sure this morning they were getting along famously. Indeed, he was coming to the opinion they had their subject nicely wrapped; when Scrotes of a sudden smacked his palm on the flat of his forehead and exclaimed,
—First principles!
MacMurrough queried the void beside and repeated the curious ejaculation.
—Here we are discussing the media, Scrotes elaborated, through which virtue may be advanced, without firstly having decided what virtue may be.
It was a grievous fault and they immediately set about its rectification. Scrotes, as was his use, delved to the root of the word and expounded its meaning as that which befits a man. As such, he said, virtue in its original was unavailable to women. Whereupon MacMurrough introduced a lighter note, to wit, nowadays the reverse held true, virtue being most commonly construed an instinct, proper in girls, to preserve their virginity, and in women to nurture the results of its loss.
Between these extremes, they had stoics at the door, epicureans to dinner, they had cynics snapping at their heels. Doctors they examined, angelic, subtle and invincible. They passed from the sophists’ virtue of the interest of the strong over the weak to its happier sibling, latterly denominated enlightened self-interest, but whose epitome they found in Matthew 7:12. Of mechanicalists they spoke, of rites and taboos; of revelationists, of ultimate goodness, of the soul. Of himeros, the desire that strikes the spirit through the eyes; of pothos, the soul’s yearning for its separated love. Injunctions detained them: Gnosce teipsum; Cogita ut sis. Nor did the utilitarian ethic of the greatest happiness of the greatest number escape their attention. Did they speak of the hedonic calculus and the is/ought problem? Most assuredly. As also of imperatives,