In anxious and uncertain times, we have all been searching for consolation. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” as TS Eliot sharply reminded us: we tend to look away and take the easiest way out. My own response to the pandemic – typical enough, I guess – has demonstrated this shying away. Through the darkest days of the lockdowns, what has kept me going has been less the headlines about hopeful vaccines or the tales of NHS heroics than the more transient comfort I have found in commonplace small things: a limp pot plant suddenly flowering on the terrace, the good-natured ebullience of Schitt’s Creek, my evening schooner of cold dry sherry.
But after reading Michael Ignatieff’s new book, I feel almost ashamed of myself: I’m nothing but a first-world snowflake, grasping at straws and failing to think about life hard enough. What Ignatieff offers is something sterner: 17 brief biographical essays on men and women who, in the course of more than two millennia of Western civilisation, have looked the deepest horrors, agonies and deprivations in the face and found philosophical poise – a reason for it all, an inner calm, a reckoning with death.
The result is something wise, truthful, and kindly but, oh dear, perhaps as alarming and depressing as it is consoling. This unintended effect stems from an intense and unremitting seriousness of tone: Ignatieff writes with such lucid intelligence, but his honourable high-mindedness doesn’t lighten up, leaving him immune to the solace of laughter, humour, comedy, the sense that perhaps none of it matters much anyway. So just be warned: P G Wodehouse doesn’t get a look-in, and there are no jokes and few smiles here.
In other respects, Ignatieff covers a wide variety of positions, from Job and his false comforters to the saintly founder of the hospice movement Dame Cicely Saunders. The Pauline epistles conjure up promises of a Second Coming and paradise on the other side of earthly suffering; Cicero’s stoicism is tested by both the death of his daughter and the collapse of the Roman republic; Marcus Aurelius meditates on life as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Awaiting execution in prison, Boethius decided that we are all simply victims of the wheel of fortune, and that human agency is helpless in the face of its wanton spinning. God might be watching, but he’s not going to intervene.
More than a thousand years later, Nicolas de Condorcet and Karl Marx nurse optimistic Enlightenment beliefs in social progress and a potential amelioration in human behaviour that the violence of the French and Russian revolutions would decisively crush. In Auschwitz, Primo Levi bravely clings to the exhortation of Dante’s Ulysses to his beleaguered crew that “you were not born to live your life as brutes/ But to be followers of virtue and knowledge”.
