Hitching to Gomorrah
by Theodore Dalrymple (October 2013)
Once we hitch-hiked round the whole coast of Ireland, from Dublin back to Dublin. In a wild part of Galway we found a soft field, very comfortable for camping, but it was next to a house, to which it evidently belonged and we felt obliged to ask permission of the owner to pitch our tent in it. He was the local doctor, and by that time in the evening was perfectly drunk, his bottle of whiskey on the table beside his armchair.
One event, which I have recounted before but which was so important to my development that I do not hesitate to recount again (a sign of age, no doubt), occurred when I was hitch-hiking in Scotland. It is astonishing that even in a land as heavily populated as Great Britain there should be areas of wilderness such as the west of Scotland, where inhabitants are very few, you can go do miles without seeing a house, and the roads are one track with passing places at intervals.
It was on one of these roads that a honeymooning couple picked me up. They were an educated couple, teachers if I remember. They exuded an ordinary happiness, that of good people content with their place and duty in the world, that I now find moving. As we were driving, me in the back of the car, we passed a sheep that had evidently been hit by a car, by the side of the road, its green guts spilt from its burst-open abdomen and its legs kicking in what I suppose must have been agony.
The newly-wed wife cried out when she saw it, and in distress said that the sheep was still alive and suffering. Her husband, solicitous that she should not suffer distress herself, said that the sheep had clearly been dead. Then he turned to me and asked me for confirmation that it was dead.
In that moment, I realised the absurdity of the supposed categorical imperative to tell the truth on all occasions, as Kant would have us believe, irrespective of circumstances. There are situations in which there are higher values than truth, or at least than truth-telling, as every doctor has eventually to learn.
I was also soon proud that the husband, so much older than I (which is to say at least ten years, an eternity when one is sixteen), had enough confidence in my intelligence, undertsanding and savoir faire after his brief acquaintance with me to have entrusted me with his question, that he would surely not had he thought I was of slower apprehension.
Now I often think of that couple, who seemed so happy then, so freshly, hopefully and insouciantly started out on the path to old age that they must now have nearly completed, being already well on into their seventies. How mature and sophisticated they seemed to me at the time, how young and inexperienced they seem to me now in my memory! I hope that their life has been a happy and contented one, as it seemed then to presage, that their children brought them joy and not pain, that no tragedy befell them. In my heart, however, I can hardly believe that it was so, for few of us entirely escape tragedy even if the fleetingness of human existence from the vantage of age were not itself a tragedy. They must long ago have reached the age at which contemplation of the past was more interesting to them than that of the future (as it always has been to me). I thought of them again when I happened on upon the following lines by Edward Fairfax that I had never previously read, and that reflect on that perennial theme of English (and other) poetry, the shortness of life:
So in the passing of a day doth pass
The bud and blossom of the life of man,
Short is the day, done when it scant began,
This, apparently, is very similar, almost a plagiarism, from Spenser: but (in my opinion) improves upon it. Be that as it may, the lines were my madeleine that brought back to life that couple in the lanes of Scotland nearly half a century ago.
The other day I picked up a couple, a young Frenchman and a young American woman, who were together, though he spoke little English and she no French. I joked that they had chosen the best method of language tuition, and they laughed.
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