Second opinion
ONCE, when I went to Delhi, I stayed with a general in the Indian army. His house was opposite some wasteland on which stood Moghul ruins. No sooner had I arrived than I wanted to explore these ruins — something which the general, as a good Hindu, had never done.
Somewhat reluctantly, he accompanied me. On the way there I noticed an encampment of low huts, constructed of detritus, in which there lived some very dark and short people.
'Who are they?' I asked the general.
He turned to look, like a man peering through binoculars.
'I don't see anyone,' he said.
The English are like that with rubbish: they don't see it. I suppose this is because they live so much in the world of their repellent vicarious entertainments that the real world is less real to them than the virtual universe in which they live and breathe and take their being — if being is not too strong a word in the context.
The house next door to mine, for example, is owned by a very sweet old lady, approaching 100, who has long rented out rooms to students. The other day I saw one of them leave the house to post a letter in the pillar-box opposite. A fox had got among the rubbish and scattered it in the front garden. The young man waded through this rubbish, the packets of a thousand pre-packaged meals, looking straight ahead of him; and likewise he returned.
The old lady's house is large: she has eight tenants, all students. I waited to see whether any of them would clear up the rubbish, the work of five minutes. None did, and in the end I did it myself.
Of course, it is possible that the minds of the students were on higher things: not the dross of the sublunary world, but the glories of the Platonic realm of abstraction. I don't think so, however; looking through the window of one of the rooms in the old lady's house, I see a huge poster of a tattooed rock star. Though middle-class, the students inhabit the Hades of popular culture, among whose manifestations is the eating of fast food on the street and the discarding of packaging where the consumer stands. The retina of modern man filters out such trivia as garbage in the streets and gardens, leaving it free to concentrate on television and video. The eternal struggle, not between good and evil but between respectability and decadence, continues close to my house. Personally, I am in favour of respectability relieved by secret vice, but this is an oldfashioned view. Sincerity and authenticity demand, we are told, that all our vices should be out in the open.
Last night I was walking my dog (as usual) around the church when I noticed some guardians of the public virtue: four middle-class ladies and gentlemen of the street-watch, clad in luminescent jackets, loitering if not with intent, at least with deliberation.
Suddenly my dog began barking furiously at the bushes around the church and a very tall prostitute broke cover, clad in extremely high boots and a leather coat with a slit up its side revealing her nakedness.
'Fuck!' she screamed as she ran off, with some difficulty because of the height of her heels. I shall always remember the click of her heels on the pavement, a sound that would bring joy to the heart of a masochist.
'We knew she was in there,' exclaimed the members of the street-watch. 'Give that dog a bone!'
Theodore Dalrymple
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