From Word To Word

Those who have read Ivan Illich, or who have at least read my recent post on Ivan Illich, will perhaps recognize that the title of this post plays with the title of one of Illich’s books, Energy and Equity (London: Marion Boyars Publishing, 1976). The central thesis of this book is that “High quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu,” or, in plainer language, dependence on tools that require energy not only destroys the physical environment but also the social environment. For this reason, Illich argues that any increase in energy usage, even environmentally responsible energy, will still result in increased “inequality, inefficiency, and personal impotence,” and that “Only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity.”

In the section of the book that is dedicated particularly to transportation, Illich focuses this argument still more, making the startling assertion that people in an equitable society should not travel any faster than the speed of a bicycle or a horse. “Free people,” he says, “must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle,” because the capacity to increase speed always comes at a broader social cost, both economically, in terms of the infrastructure that is becoming an increasing problem for governments of developed nations, but also relationally, in terms of how transportation prevents the formation of communities.

Illich suggests that what the transportation system actually accomplishes is the production of a new sort of person: the passenger. He describes the passenger in detail, and I will quote this description at length, because I think it is still true of most of us today: “The habitual passenger’s inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal space have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that lie in man’s feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them.”

I mention all of this because I am most often a pedestrian, both by choice and by necessity, because our family owns one car, which is mostly used to convey my wife to work. Our intention is to have her transfer her job to Guelph when she can and to have the family go without a car entirely, but I am usually carless even now. This choice is mostly an economic and environmental one. Cars cost me and the environment in ways that I find increasingly unacceptable. Even so, I have lately been experiencing a heightened sense of the social cost that cars impose as a mode of transportation.

This past Thursday I set out with my two sons to meet some other parents in a park across town, a walk that takes us through the neighbourhood where we lived until this past fall. The walk would normally have taken about half an hour, only I had not gone even a block before I encountered some of my neighbours working on a new flagstone path. My eldest son was intrigued by this operation, so we stopped and talked for several minutes, during which time I realized how disconnected they were from their neighbourhood. Not only were they unaware that we had moved in just a few doors from them, but they had never met the woman who had lived in the house before us, not in the eight or ten years that they had driven past each other’s homes on a more than daily basis.

When we finally reached our old neighbourhood, I had a similar experience. There, a street or two from our old house, I encountered the mother of a friend of ours who was working in her garden. We stopped to talk again for several minutes, catching up on each others lives. This woman and I am only acquaintances. She has never visited my home, though I have visited hers occasionally. We have very little obviously in common. She is not a person that I would ever encounter if I did not walk through her neighbourhood. If I had driven to the park, the possibility of my encountering her, or someone else, would never have been opened.

This, to me, is the social cost of the car. It is the cost of letting ourselves become passengers who see the houses next to ours as so much untouchable landscape and who lack the confidence even to share space with their inhabitants. If we only drive through our neighbourhoods, it will never be possible to encounter our neighbours in the way that we can if we are on foot. In fact, in many ways, driving though our neighbourhoods essentially erases our neighbourhoods altogether, because it prevents those neighbourhoods from ever forming.

This is not to say that we cannot drive, of course, though I think that this is a more viable alternative than many people believe. It is to say that we cannot only drive, that we cannot primarily drive, not if we want to encounter those around us in ways that create neighbourhood, that foster hospitality, that enable ethical responsibility. The choice to walk is the choice to be open to encountering others, to share consciously with them the space in which we both live. It is a choice that implies an ethics far beyond economic and environmental concerns, because it implies an ethics of the neighbour.

In Dave Humphrey’s comment on Depth, Frequency, and Promiscuity, he suggests that the idea of rigour is often related to a certain professionalism, and he opposes to this professional rigour a kind of amateur irresponsibility in the use of “texts, and theories, and ingredients.” I am in substantial agreement with this idea, though I would suggest that there are responsibilities that I owe even and especially as an amateur in the sense that he is describing.

To the extent that an amateur irresponsibility is one that refuses to make itself responsible to an institution, or a discipline, or mode of publication, or an editor, or an anonymous reading public, to this extent, I affirm the amateurism that Dave is advocating. What I want, and what the web permits, is a writing and a publishing that escapes precisely these responsibilities. Irresponsibility of this kind comes at a cost to me, certainly, but the cost purchases a freedom to be responsible in other ways, in ways that are far more significant to me.

These other responsibilities arise, not in connection to an institution or a profession, but in relation to people and to the texts they share. I want always to have done what I can to make myself responsible to the friends with whom I am in conversation, to the authors and texts that I am reading, and to the texts that I am writing. I want always to have been rigorous in these relations, not out of a professionalism, but out of a sincere respect. I want always to have done what is proper in these relations, not out of a social expectation, but out of a sincere love. This kind of responsibility is the only reason that I write at all, and I want never to have been irresponsible in this sense, not to any extent, though I will always have failed in this responsibility to one extent or another, even now.

This past Saturday was Dinner and a Doc night again. We ate homemade carrot soup and watched Errol Morris’ Fog of War, which made a good combination in my estimation, since each reminded me of truths that I have a tendency to forget.

The soup’s story began longer ago than you might expect. Last year at about this time, my mother-in-law continued a tradition of her late husband’s by planting a substantial vegetable garden. She planted tomatoes for me to sauce, potatoes for me to store, strawberries for me to jam, and some other things, including a few carrots. Now, to be clear, when I say that she planted a few carrots, I mean merely that she planted more carrots than any single woman with a mostly absent son could have reasonably hoped to eat in a decade. She had bushels of carrots. She had far more carrots than she could dig or I could process. Fortunately, a friend mentioned that she could cover the undug carrots with some leaves and the carrots would stay fresh until the spring. So, we had a reprieve of several months, but for the past week or so I have once again been drowning in orange vegetables that neither of my sons will even eat.

I added the tops to stock until I had emptied my freezer of soup bones. I froze more bags of sliced carrots than I want to contemplate. I put carrots in one form or another on the menu three times last week. I made six different carrot soups to put in the freezer, and I brought a massive pot of my favourite soup to this month’s Dinner and a Doc. The recipe comes originally from one of the Moosewood cookbooks, its primary flavours being mint and yoghurt. Speaking only for myself, it was one of the best tasting soups that I have ever had, though its consistency could perhaps have been better.

It was also a reminder, albeit an ironic one, considering that the carrots were not exactly in season, of a truth that I always seem to be forgetting and relearning: seasonal ingredients, because of how suddenly they are harvested and how quickly they need to be used, force me to cook creatively and to discover new and interesting ways to prepare food. I had never realized what could be made with a carrot until this past week, and I have had similar realizations with everything from strawberries to garlic scapes to kale over the years. Seasonal ingredients force a kind of seasonal preparation that almost disappears with supermarket shopping, where almost everything is available all the time, and this seasonal preparation fosters culinary creativity and a connection to the seasons in a way grocery store produce does not. This is the truth that the carrot soup recalled to me.

The truth that the film recalled to me also begins some time ago. When I was first designing Documenting Justice, the documentary course that I teach, I had been told of a particularly relevant film, Seeing is Believing by Peter Wintonick. The film explores the use of the camera, particularly the handicam, as a tool or as a weapon in situations of social injustice. While it does draw attention to the problems inherent in the assumption that we can believe the filmed images that we see, its central thesis is essentially that the visual images produced by the video camera do inspire belief in a way that make handicams a powerful weapon. To phrase this thesis in a way that the film would not, the handicam is effective as a tool or a weapon precisely because most people are niave enough to believe in what they see.

I few months later I saw Fog of War for the first time. I enjoyed it very much, and it remains one of my favourite films, even through what was my fourth or fifth viewing on Saturday night. The film is really an extended interview with Robert S. McNamara, and it is structured around a series of lessons that he draws from his tenure as the United States Secretary of Defence during the cold war and the first years of the Vietnam War. What struck me on my first viewing and again on my fifth was one of those lessons: it reads, “Sometimes both seeing and believing are wrong.” This seems a simple and obvious statement, but I seem always to be forgetting it.

I keep forgetting McNamara’s lesson for at least two reasons: first, because the niave view, that I can actually believe what I see, is the dominant assumption of my culture and its media; and second, because the more critical and cynical view, that I see only what I want to believe, is the dominant assumption of most critical discourses in my culture and its media. Yet, what McNamara recognizes, and what I seem to be continually relearning, is that, while seeing and believing may function together to reinforce a particular perception of the world, both may be wrong. I would even argue that both are always wrong, in every case, to one degree or another. No amount of seeing, whether through the gaze of the camera or the data of a scientific instrument, and no amount of believing, whether in the goodness of humanity or the omnipotence of God, will suffice to guarantee the rightness or truth of anything.

This does not mean, at least to me, that we cannot know rightly and truthfully. It merely means that we can have no guarantee of this, and that both our seeing and our believing need to be characterized by a fundamental humility. I need to be humble in this sense, not provisionally, not because I have yet to find what will guarantee my seeing and believing, but absolutely, because I recognize that I will never be able to find this kind of guarantee. Though I am sure that McNamara did not mean to say quite this, it is nevertheless the truth of which Fog of War reminds me each time I see it.

In order to continue the history of my engagement with ideas of ethical responsibility, I indicated in The First of Those Other Things that I would turn next to Ivan Illich’s Rivers North of the Future (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005), which is what I intend to do in this post. Unfortunately, except for those who were reading radical literature in the sixties and seventies, relatively few people recognize Illich’s name any more, so perhaps something of an introduction is required.

Ivan Illich was a Catholic Priest who rejected a promising career in the church hierarchy and chose to work most often on the fringes of the church and the university. He served for several years with the Puerto Rican community in New York. He became the director of the Catholic University in Puerto Rico until he was forced to resign over a political disagreement with the Vatican. Having become highly critical of institutionalized education, he founded the Center for Intercultural Formation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, which provided language training for people wishing to work in international development, and which received intense criticism for its rejection of traditional development strategies and organizations. He taught and lectured widely, though never took a permanent position, living mostly in Mexico and Germany.

The majority of his books are focused on analyzing the central social institutions of Western culture: the educational system in Deschooling Society; the medical system in Medical Nemesis; transportation and energy in Energy and Equity, and several others. Tools for Conviviality, which sets out a somewhat broader philosophy on the function of tools and systems in society remains one of my favourite books. To understand Illich more broadly, however, it is his later books that I find most helpful, especially Rivers North of the Future and Ivan Illich In Conversation, both of which are transcribed interviews with David Cayley of the CBC. Where his earlier works are focused on analysing a particular subject, his interviews with Cayley range more widely and provide both the context of Illich’s broader philosophy and the perspective of thirty years on his earlier work.

I first encountered Ivan Illich, as I have first encountered several authors, through Dave Humphrey, who gave me a recording of the CBC Radio interviews that formed part of Rivers North of the Future. Illich fascinated me immediately. Not only was his approach to theology and philosophy remarkably different than I had encountered in anyone else, but his voice, with its vaguely European accent that bears the inflections of the many languages he speaks, has a kind of slow precision and gravity that captivated me. I bought several of his books, read them all, read some of them twice, and have been greatly influenced by his ideas.

Of Illich’s texts, however, it was Rivers North of the Future that influenced me most in regard to this little history that I am telling. Working through the story of the Good Samaritan, Illich basically argues that what causes the Samaritan to know his responsibility is not some abstract idea of the neighbour but a “movement in the belly.” He says that the key phrase, usually translated from the Greek as something like, “He was moved to pity,” would be more accurately rendered as something like, “He was moved in his belly,” or “He felt it in his bowls,” akin to the English phrase, “He had a feeling in the pit of his stomach.” The one who acts as a neighbour, therefore, is not the one who renders a predetermined duty to anyone, nor even the one who renders a predetermined duty to the one who appears as a neighbour. The one who acts as a neighbour is the one renders the duty that is moved in the belly, according to the bond of the neighbour. The neighbour is the one who is open to the movement of the belly, who attends to this movement, and who renders the duty that it requires.

This understanding of ethical responsibility is essentially theological. It is not comprehensible within the logic of a philosophy or of a legality or of a religiosity. It is never determined by a premise or by a law or by a commandment. It is in every case determined by an attentiveness to this movement in my belly that does not come from myself but from elsewhere, from I can never guarantee where, but that I nevertheless believe to be my right and proper duty. However I construe this elsewhere, its movement in me bears the structure of a revelation and, therefore, of a theology.

This revelatory and theological approach to ethical responsibility satisfied the question with which I had been struggling since reading King Lear; that is, how do I determine my duty as a neighbour in any given situation. It accorded with my experience of responding to others that often, beyond any sort of rule or commandment, I knew what was required of me, sometimes in ways for which I could not find satisfactory explanation. To this extent, Illich’s interpretation of the Good Samaritan story seemed to me proper and right.

Still, Illich’s interpretation did contain one point of concern for me that I could never quite resolve: If the neighbour is the one who acts according to the movement in the belly, how can Christ’s story of the Good Samaritan portray the Levite and the Priest as not acting as neighbours? After all, perhaps their bellies were not moved. Perhaps they looked at the man beside the road and felt nothing. Perhaps a situation might occur where everyone who passed by felt no such movement and the man beside the road would die unaided. How could any understanding of ethical duty permit this possibility? In other words, if ethical responsibility depends on the movement in the belly, what happens when there is no movement? This question, at last, brings me to Jean-Luc Marion’s Prolegomena to Charity, which I will take up in a later post.

I wrote a post some time ago called A Prologue to Other Things, in which I began a history of what the question of ethical responsibility has meant to me, in order to provide the context for an idea that I have recently encountered in Jean-Luc Marion’s Prolegomena to Charity. I proposed to unify this history by relating its various stages to the story of the Good Samaritan, and I suggested that the history would begin with a discussion of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, which this post intends to do.

I first read King Lear in highschool, during a stage when I took the school library’s copy of the Norton Shakespeare and read all of the tragedies, many of the comedies, and a few of the histories before I ran out of motivation (or until rugby season began, actually, if I recall correctly). I did enjoy King Lear at the time, but it made no more impression on me than some of my other favourites like Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus. During my MA, however, I took a course on Shakespearean Adaptations and found myself writing a paper on an adaptation of King Lear, which forced me to reread the play, or at least to reread the first act. In my second reading, struggling as I was at the time with the question of how to be ethically responsible in the world, I was seized by the significance of the love test, in which Lear demands that his daughters publicly proclaim their love for him in return for a third of his kingdom. The youngest daughter, Cordelia, refuses to participate in the test, basically claiming that Lear is asking more than is right for a father to ask, which provokes Lear to disinherit and exile her.

This scene caused me suddenly to recognize something very simple: that ethical responsibility is not a matter of absolutes to be applied in every situation, but is a product of a particular moment, a particlar place, and, most of all, a particular relationship with another person. Lear’s demand is not absolutely wrong. It is only wrong because it demands something that is not his to demand. Cordelia’s refusal to recognize his demand is not absolutely right. It is only right because it answers what Lear truly needs from her, the need that is appropriate to the relationship between father and daughter, the need that is beyond his explicit demand.

In the more positive terms of the Good Samaritan, my recognition was that the story is intended, not to indicate the kind of ethical responsibility that I bear in every case, but the kind of ethical responsibility that I bear precisely as a neighbour. I do not owe the man beside the road the duties that I would owe my father, which involves a different respect, or my brother, which involves a different affection, or my spouse, which involves a different commitment. I owe to the man beside the road precisely the duties of the neighbour.

This implies that it is possible for the man beside the road to ask, like Lear asks, for something that I can not rightly give, because it is not according to the bond of the neighbour. If the man were to ask me to pass by and let him die, for example, or if he were to ask me to find and kill his assailants, these may not be requests that I can grant as a neighbour in good conscience. My ethical responsibility, then, is not to what the man explicitly requests, but to what he needs from me precisely according to the bond of the neighbour that is between us.

Now, it might be objected that this understanding of ethical responsibility might permit me to rationalize away my duties as a neighbour, but this is in no way the case. The duty that I owe to the neighbour remains infinite in magnitude, though it may be limited in scope. It still remains that I owe my duty to my neighbour like an infinite debt that I can not repay. Indeed, my debt is now more difficult to repay, since there are some gifts that I may no longer give. What I can give, however, I must still give absolutely, without calculation and without reservation, because the debt is one that falls to me alone and no other. What is calculated and reserved are only things that are not proper to my place as a neighbour, or as a son, or as a brother, or as a husband.

There are some implications of this understanding of ethical responsibility. First, I cannot have this kind of responsibility to someone that I have not myself encountered. Though I do not know if it is necessary that this encounter be face to face, as some thinkers have argued, it is always necessary that I encounter the other, or, more exactly, that I become encountered by the other, that the other’s need as a neighbour or a father or a friend or a lover weigh upon me. In other words, the Good Samaritan owes nothing to the many men who lie beaten by the side of countless other roads, but owes infinitely to this one man who encounters him as beaten by the side of this one road. This encounter is the absolute prerequisite to ethical responsibility.

Second, though there remains the question of what duties I might owe the other in any given situation, I cannot owe duties that do not arise from the weight of the other as a neighbour or a brother or a lover, from the weight of the particular bond that exists between us. Only the singular, irreducible relation that is between us can hold me responsible, can reveal the nature of the infinite debt that I owe this other person. If the Good Samaritan had encountered his own spouse by the side of the road, it would not have been proper to leave her at the nearest inn, for he would have been acting like a neighbour toward her rather than a spouse. The nature of the duties that I owe according to my bond with the other may not always be clear, but they are always defined by this bond and by nothing else.

Third, the universal ethical imperative becomes not any particular act, but an openness to recognize the particular bond that exists between myself and the other, an openness to the weight of the other and of the singular relationship that binds us. It is for this reason that the Good Samaritan was a neighbour: not because he aided the beaten man, but because he approached the beaten man as a neighbour and opened himself to the responsibility that the bond of the neighbour might impose on him. In the same way, the Priest and the Levite failed to be neighbours: not because they failed to aid the beaten man, but because they failed even to approach him as neighbours, failed even to open the possibility that this kind of bond could exist and could impose a responsibility on them.

Where King Lear left me, then, was with a more satisfactory understanding of how I might bear ethical responsibility in the world by allowing each encounter with the other to determine this responsibility for me according to the bond that exists between us in that moment. Where it left me unsatisfied still, was in how exactly to determine what my bond with a particular other might demand of me in any given moment. How was I to determine what my real responsibilities to the other were? How was I to distinguish between requests that were proper to a bond and those that were not? These kinds of questions would wait several years for a reading of Ivan Illich’s Rivers North of the Future before finding the beginning of an answer.

The events of this past weekend have reinforced a kind of personal principle that is becoming increasingly important to me, the principle of the open home. Bill and Sharon, friends of ours who have moved to Collingwood, came on Friday evening and stayed the night. The next morning they joined our whole extended family, my wife, my two kids, my mother-in-law, and myself, for our ritual Saturday walk to the Guelph Farmers Market. When we returned home, we had breakfast together and chatted over coffee for several hours. For the latter part of this time we were joined by Steve and Christine, other friends of ours who have moved to Rockwood. We had met them by chance at the market earlier in the morning and invited them over to introduce their sixth child and to meet our second. They knew Bill and Sharon a little and stayed to chat with them for a while also. Then, just as everyone was leaving, Laura, a friend who has moved to Toronto, came by unexpectedly for a few minutes to have some tea and to catch us up with her life. There were a few hours of lull after Laura left, but that evening we hosted several couples and their children for a monthly meal that we have together, each couple taking turns to bring some element of the meal or to host the gathering. The food was good, and the conversation was good also. All of these things together, these comings and goings, sometimes planned and sometimes spontaneous, sometimes overnight and sometimes only for a few minutes, sometimes for a meal and sometimes just for tea but always for food, these passings to and from our house, fulfill the ideal of what I call the open home.

The open home is different from the open house for me in that it is not a specified range of time during which others can come to our place, but a way of living that is always open to having others come, and eat, and talk, and stay, and go. It is an invitation to share our home with us, not necessarily a house that is cleaned and prepared for company, but a home that at any moment may be filled with children’s toys or renovations or jam making. It is an invitation to eat with us, not necessarily a meal that has been specially planned and prepared, but whatever we happen to be eating at the time, whether it be the tea my wife is constantly making or the stew that has been simmering all day or the misshapen cookies that my three year old son has just made. It is an invitation to join with us, not necessarily to sit and be entertained, but to be a part of whatever we happen to be doing, whether going to the market or digging in the garden or cooking a meal.

The open home is one that understands others to be welcome always, not as visitors to be entertained and impressed, though sometimes this is fun also, but to be included in the activities and the rhythms of the home, as the Athelnys include Philip Carey in theirs (Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage London: Pan Books, 1975) or as rat includes mole in his (Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows Sydney: Rigby Publishers, 1983). It says, “Come and join us. You are always welcome here, just as you are and just as we are. Have a glass of what there is to drink and a bite of what there is to eat. Talk with me as I do what needs to be done today. Oh, and there is a bed for you if you want to stay the night. You are more than welcome to it.”

The open home is not, of course, always able to welcome everyone at every time. It is not possible to be always at home, and there are some matters of the home in which others can not or should not be included, but the open home is a way of living that welcomes the coming of others and asks that others come again, even if they cannot enter now, at this moment, for one reason or another. It is a way of living that always welcomes the arrival of others, even if this arrival cannot be received in this instant. It says, “I am so glad that you came. I am disappointed that we cannot receive you now. Please, come again, whenever you can.”

To live like this is to resist the understanding that a house is primarily a possession, a castle, a sanctuary, something to be held and defended as primarily my own. It is to resist the assumption that others need to be welcome only on my own terms, when I am at my best, when I have had the time to cook and clean and make myself presentable. It is to resist the idea that welcoming others is primarily a matter of entertaining them. It is to affirm that my house is primarily a place where people can be at home.

This does not always look the same from person to person and from moment to moment. Some people have stayed with us for several months, some just for a night. Some have shared a meal with us, some just a cup of tea. Some have joined us in kneading the bread dough, others have just watched from a safe distance. In every case, however, it has been good, not merely with the goodness of pleasure but with the goodness of what is good. Beyond any attempt at a theological or philosophical defence, I feel and know a rightness about a home that is open in this way. When I encounter it, I know it to be true in a way that very little else can be.

I began writing this post with the intention of discussing an idea that Jean-Luc Marion presents in his collection of essays, Prolegomena to Charity, a book that I have just completed and that I enjoyed very much. The idea occurs in an essey entitled “What Love Knows”, and it relates to the question of how I discover and determine my ethical responsibility to another, a question that has preoccupied me, if not in those precise terms, for as long as I can remember.

However, because this question does have such a long history for me, and because my thinking on it has been influenced by so many people, what Marion’s essay means for me would be largely incomprehensible unless I were to provide some sort of history of my own response to the problem of ethical responsibility, all of which would be too long for a single post, even in its most reduced form.

So, by means of beginning this personal history, which I will continue over several posts, I will position myself within the narrative of the Good Samaritan, as the rich young ruler asking Christ, “Who is my neighbour?” because I know that the law tells me to love my neighbour as myself, but I am not always certain how to do this. The story Christ tells in reply to my question is masterful in the sense that it undermines my real motive for asking the question, which is to find a limit to how much I really need to give to others, but even when I address this motive in myself, even when I try actively to understand how I am to love in the way the story instructs, I am confronted by the reality that the easy interpretations of Christ’s story are not satisfactory. Traditionally, people have tended to interpret the parable to mean that everyone is my neighbour, or, since this is patently impossible, that everyone that I encounter is my neighbour. This view claims that I must love each person I encounter, that I necessarily bear a responsibility to meet each person’s need. While the unlimitedness of this interpretation strikes on something true, I think, I find, when I try to live it, that it is seriously flawed for at least two reasons.

First, and most obvious, is the fact that this interpretation is entirely impossible. Even if I were to restrict myself to the most obvious needs that I encounter, which I may not do, I simply encounter too many people and too many needs each day to hope to meet them all myself. If I were also actively to discover and meet the needs of those who are not obviously in need, it would certainly be that I would never venture farther than my street corner before my means of assistance, monetary and otherwise, would be exhausted.

Second, and perhaps less obvious, is the problem of how far I need actually to go in meeting the needs of those I encounter. After all, the Samaritan could easily have helped more or less. Would he have been less a neighbour if he had merely bound the man’s wounds and given him food and water without taking him to the inn? Or if he had merely taken him to the nearest town without paying for his lodging? Or if he had paid only for the immediate expenses and not offered to settle the later accounts? Would he have been more a neighbour if he had waited with the man until he had recovered rather than leaving him behind? Or if he had taken the man into his own home rather than placing him in an inn? How, in other words, do I determine exactly what the need of the other requires of me? How do I determine what I need to do to be a neighbour?

It is in this difficulty that I found myself as I tried to understand how I was to love, how I was to be responsible, a difficulty compunded by the suspicion that my motives for asking these questions were less worthy than I was willing to admit. It was not until I read Shakespeare’s King Lear that I began to find an answer, and I will take up that part of this history in a later post.