In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout Finch, who had once assumed her mysteriously reclusive neighbour Boo Radley was some sort of monster imprisoned in his parents’ house next door, finds out at the end of the novel that he has saved her life from a man bent on revenge against her family. Boo comes reluctantly from out of the shadows to meet her for the first time, and she greets him with a characteristic childish acknowledgement, in an understatement that he undoubtedly appreciates: “Hey, Boo.” The reader is instantly reminded of the difference between the monster of the past and the hero of the present. This famous quote inspired the title of a thoughtful documentary film on the novel.
In the English-speaking world’s most popular trilogy, J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Frodo the hobbit reflects on a missed opportunity to despatch the would-be thief Gollum: “It’s a pity Bilbo didn’t kill Gollum when he had the chance,” he tells the wizard Gandalf. “Pity?” replies Gandalf. “It’s pity that stayed his hand.” Gandalf knows that pity, unlike mercy, with which it is sometimes confused, is a double-edged sword, to be used with caution. Not for nothing did Stefan Zweig entitle his novel Beware of Pity, as it may well be the product of mere selfishness, as a close reading of the novel will demonstrate.
Only once in Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel The Great Gatsby does its wisely observant narrator Nick Carraway reveal his judgement of Daisy Buchanan, the beautiful wife of Tom, a privileged serial adulterer. As he is her cousin, he is less likely than others to be seduced, as they are, by the attractions of her great wealth, her physical beauty and bewitching gestures and observations. Nick, normally both discreet and cautious in his judgement of others, nevertheless reveals, near the beginning of the novel, that Daisy’s beauty is “meretricious,” which means it is merely superficial. The word is derived from the Latin, meretrix, meaning a prostitute. By the end of the book, readers come to see the aptness of this adjective when applied to her character, and not to her looks.
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ famous poem Spring and Fall describes the poet’s sensitive young friend Margaret as “grieving” at the sight of falling leaves in autumn. He knows she will want to know why beauty must pass from the earth. Adults know why: it is “the blight man was born for,” by which Hopkins means not the annual succession of the seasons, which we all come to recognize as inevitable, and comfort ourselves with the knowledge that spring and summer will come again. No, he says in the poem’s final line, she is, in her own way, mourning the transience of all life, although at the time she is too young to understand this. All things must pass. You do not know it yet, the poet warns, but “it is Margaret you mourn for.” For the sombre conclusion is that Margaret, like Hopkins, and like you and me, too, dear readers, are mortal, and we will also all pass away eventually, forever, never to return….
