The Novel Habits of Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

things for which there is no satisfactory evidence. And what about you? Do you think it’s anything more than wishful thinking?”
    Sam was more hesitant. “Not really. But then half of humanity believes in it, you know. Belief in reincarnation is…well, it’s fairly mainstream.”
    “That may be,” said Isabel. “But then half of humanity is prepared to believe the most extraordinary things.” There were so many examples of this—and not just the obvious ones. The
Scotsman
had recently reported a survey that showed that an astonishing number of people believed they would win the lottery—and made that belief part of their retirement planning. They actually believed it, even when the odds against that happening were explained to them. Then there were those who were convinced they had been abducted by aliens, or who thought that unproven remedies would protect them from all sorts of illness, or who believed in the Loch Ness Monster. They held these beliefs in spite of a complete lack of evidence; vitamin supplements had never been shown to do half the things claimed for them, and if there were some unknown creature in Loch Ness, some secretive survivor of an earlier age, then surely bodies or skeletons of these peculiar animals would have washed up, or somebody would have photographed one. There were photographs, of course, but they were always conveniently blurred, or taken in half-light, and could just as easily be of otters or a jumping salmon, or of something equally prosaic and explicable; it had been pointed out that a duck could, in certain lights, look like a monster. One might as well believe in Santa Claus…
    Isabel stopped herself. A well-known campaigner against religion had recently suggested that we should stop telling our children fairy stories because these encouraged irrational habits of thought. She did not want to end up in that camp, because the imagination was a delicate plant that could be so easily destroyed, and childhood’s stories were the mulch that it needed to thrive. Without imagination we find it more difficult to be good, because imagination enables us to understand the pain of others: destroy imagination and you destroyed empathy.
    Charlie believed in Santa Claus, and she would not have it otherwise. And he believed in the Tooth Fairy too, and in kelpies, those skittish Scottish horses that lived in the sea. He would find out the truth about all these things soon enough, but for the time being she was content for him to believe in things that did not exist but that we wished were there.
    “They may be right, of course. For all we know, that is.” There was a gentle note of reproach in Sam’s voice, and Isabel picked this up.
    “Yes, they may be.”
For all we know—
it was the essential, if unspoken, qualification to everything we said about anything.
    “Not that I think it is,” said Sam.
    “No, I don’t either. And anyway, can you think of anything more depressing than the thought that we come back time and time again? What an awful thought—to have to do it all over again—as somebody else, of all things.”
    “But things might be better,” said Sam. “You may have a better deal, so to speak, next time round.”
    “Or a worse one.” Isabel had always thought that reincarnation provided rather convenient solutions to the problem of evil in moral philosophy. If evil were to be punished, then the moral balance would seem much less out of kilter. The bully would become the bullied; the proud would become the humbled; the exploiters would be the exploited. There was a certain attraction in it, but the problem with attractive solutions was that they were often just wishful thinking.
There are no ships that will come to save us,
she thought.
    She thought of Harry, that small boy, living with his mother in their flat in Morningside. She pictured the boy thinking of his father, the pipe major in the Army, and she saw the father, too, in his swathes of tartan, twirling his