In a church, even the artists can be awkward. This painter, working on an image for public display(!), said I should not take a photograph. I ignored him, of course, as I ignore every Russian-Soviet knee-jerk нельзя (it is forbidden). Few people seem unduly bothered when I do. It is just a habit, an unpleasant one, but no more than a habit. It is the ones who take it seriously who worry me, but they tend to be elderly, poor and bitter-looking, as if the defeat of the proletariat was the result of trickery rather than the complete practical absurdity of the expectation that the meek might actually inherit the earth. In this respect, I think Kim Philby (see below) got it about right when he surveyed his options after the crimes of Stalin became known. He said that he faced the alternatives of either sticking it out in the hope that wiser counsels would one day prevail or (I am quoting from memory) "becoming a querulous outcast of the Muggeridge, Koestler, Crankshaw variety, forever railing against a God that had failed me. That seemed a ghastly fate."
Wednesday, 6 June 2007
Doing the decorating
In a church, even the artists can be awkward. This painter, working on an image for public display(!), said I should not take a photograph. I ignored him, of course, as I ignore every Russian-Soviet knee-jerk нельзя (it is forbidden). Few people seem unduly bothered when I do. It is just a habit, an unpleasant one, but no more than a habit. It is the ones who take it seriously who worry me, but they tend to be elderly, poor and bitter-looking, as if the defeat of the proletariat was the result of trickery rather than the complete practical absurdity of the expectation that the meek might actually inherit the earth. In this respect, I think Kim Philby (see below) got it about right when he surveyed his options after the crimes of Stalin became known. He said that he faced the alternatives of either sticking it out in the hope that wiser counsels would one day prevail or (I am quoting from memory) "becoming a querulous outcast of the Muggeridge, Koestler, Crankshaw variety, forever railing against a God that had failed me. That seemed a ghastly fate."
