Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [150]
Mr. Thaw rubbed the side of his face and said, “You’ve read more books than me. How long have there been men in the world?”
“About three hundred thousand years.”
“How long have we had cities?”
“About six thousand years.”
“And how long have there been governments with worldwide powers? I know the answer to that one. Hardly more than a century.”
“Well?”
“Duncan, modern history is just beginning. Give us another couple of centuries and we’ll build a real civilization! Don’t worry, son, others want it beside yourself. There’s not a country in the world where folk aren’t striving and searching. Don’t be fooled by the politicians. It isn’t the loud men on platforms but the obscure toilers who change things. And if a few damned power cliques start an atomic war in the next ten or twenty years, humanity will survive. We may take centuries to breed out the effects of radiation, but ordinary folk will do it and start the steep upward climb once more.”
“Yah, I’m sick of ordinary people’s ability to eat muck and survive. Animals are nobler. A fierce animal will die fighting against insults to its nature, and a meek one will starve to death under them. Only human beings have the hideous versatility to adapt to lovelessness and live and live and live while being exploited and abused by their own kind. I read an essay by a little girl in a book about children in wartime. Her house had been bombed. She wrote,’ I am nothing and nobody. My cat was stuck to the wall. I tried to pull her off but they threw my cat away.’ Worse things have happened to children every day for the last quarter million years. No kindly future will ever repair a past as vile as ours, and even if we do achieve a worldwide democratic socialist state it won’t last. Nothing decent lasts. All that lasts is this mess of fighting and pain and I object to it! I object! I object!”
“Stop pitying yourself.”
Thaw opened his mouth to protest, noticed he was pitying himself and shut it again. Mr. Thaw sighed and said, “Let’s agree the world is one helluva mess. What do you think will improve it?”
“A memory and a conscience. I hate the heedless way it puts on life without noticing or caring, like a rotten fruit putting on mould.”
“But Duncan, memory and conscience are human things!”
“Unluckily.”
“Is it a God you want?”
“Yes. Yes, it’s a big continual loving man I want who shares the pain of his people. It’s an impossibility I want.”
Mr. Thaw pushed flat some wisps of hair on his head and said, “My father was elder in a Congregationalist church in Bridgeton: a poor place now but a worse one then. One time the well-off members subscribed to give the building a new communion table, an organ and coloured windows. But he was an industrial blacksmith with a big family. He couldnae afford to give money, so he gave ten years of unpaid work as church officer, sweeping and dusting, polishing the brasses and ringing the bell for services. At the foundry he was paid less the more he aged, but my mother helped the family by embroidering tablecloths and napkins. Her ambition was to save a hundred pounds. She was a good needlewoman, but she never saved her hundred pounds. A neighbour would fall sick and need a holiday or a friend’s son would need a new suit to apply for a job, and she handed over the money with no fuss or remark, as if it were an ordinary thing to do. She got a lot of comfort from praying. Every night we all kneeled to pray in the living room before going to bed. There was nothing dramatic in these prayers. My father and mother clearly felt they were talking to a friend in the room with them. I never felt that, so I believed there was