The Lost Art of Gratitude_ An Isabel Dalhousie Novel - Alexander McCall Smith [35]
The thought cheered her. All these volumes, passive and unmoving, rarely opened, it seemed; all of them were building blocks in the edifice of ideas that made for a humane and civilised society. And her own journal, shelved in this very room, was part of that. Well worth doing, whatever hours of sitting in the sun it precluded; books cost that. She remembered reading a poem that somebody had written about Walter Scott and his Herculean writing labours. What hours of love that great literary effort had deprived him of, the poet wrote. Yet Isabel thought that this observation might be misleading. Hours of love left little behind, unless the love was directed at mankind in general; Walter Scott’s years of exile at his desk created a voluminous legacy.
Her eye ran down the titles of the journals on the shelves, and she stopped. Reaching into a pocket, she extracted the slip of paper on which she had written the reference: the name of the journal, the volume year and the page number. And the author’s name, of course: Dove, Christopher.
She bent down. The journal in question was stored on the bottom shelf, and its volumes as a consequence were dustier. She ran her finger along the spines, and stopped at the year she had written down. She eased the book from its shelf, a tight fit, and then took it to one of the tables at the window. From the dim semi-darkness of the book stacks to the light of the window table—the contrast was sharp, and she shut her eyes for a moment. But then she turned and looked out through the great sheet of glass, out to the rooftops of Marchmont across the Meadows; and beyond that, just visible in the distance, the inner slopes of the Pentlands. She had climbed there with Jamie on a bright day in January when the hills had been covered in snow right down to the burns below. The wind had come in from the west—a knife-like wind in spite of the broad sunlight and the high cloudless sky. Off the tops of the hills powdered snow had streamed in thin white veils from the ridges, blown by the whistling wind, white against blue, like smoke from the top of a volcano. Now, in the summer, the hills were nothing to do with January; green, blue, gentle.
She opened the volume and found the page she was looking for: “Reflections on Free Riding,” by Christopher Dove, M.A., D. Phil., senior lecturer in philosophy, University of Durham. It had been written before Dove was appointed to his chair at the newly minted university in London where he now professed, a university that Isabel thought sounded more like the destination of a bus rather than a place of learning. The lack of charity behind that thought jarred, and she reminded herself that Dove’s institution would be doing good and useful work, even if it was unglamorous, and pedestrian, and staffed by self-important people like Dove: education, however administered, was a good in itself, and not everyone could receive it in a grove. More than that, it might well be all the more precious when passed from teacher to pupil in a prison cell, or in a tumbledown classroom, or by the flickering light of a candle. No, it was mean-spirited to tar Dove’s university with the brush that should be reserved for him, and she would not think like that. Or she would try not to. Yet how could any academic institution worthy of the name not see through a man like Christopher Dove …
She began to read Dove’s article. Free riding, he explained, involved taking the benefit of collective action without contributing in return. I know that already, thought Isabel. The free rider might not vote, then, because it might be irrational to expend the energy involved in seeking out a polling station when he knows that his vote will make no difference to the outcome. How ridiculous! Isabel read on, her irritation increasing with each page. Dove, it seemed, was pinning his colours to the mast of the free rider, endorsing the argument made by a small group of philosophers who had supported this thoroughly dubious position. It was unadulterated selfishness, she thought; an example