The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

all right stuff. Nothing wrong with it.”
    He put down his glass. “We had a superb first-growth claret in the office the other day. You wouldn’t believe it. The old man fished it out from somewhere. Covered in dust. It faded pretty quickly, but if you took it before it faded, my God!”
    Isabel had listened politely. She felt slightly cheered by his performance as she thought that Cat would be bound to tire of this sort of talk, and of Toby with it. Boredom would set in sooner rather than later, and when that happened it would eclipse whateverelse it was that she liked about him. Could Cat really be in love with him? Isabel thought it was unlikely, as she detected a sensitivity to his faults—the eyes cast ever so slightly upwards, for example—whenever he made a remark which embarrassed her. We are not embarrassed by those we love; we may experience passing discomfort, but it is never embarrassment in the true sense. We forgive them their shortcomings, or we may just never notice them. And she had forgiven John Liamor, of course, even when she had found him one night with a student in his rooms at the college, a girl who giggled and wrapped herself in his discarded shirt, while John merely looked out the window and said, “Bad timing, Liamor.”
    It might be simpler, she reflected, not to allow oneself to be in love with anybody; just to be oneself, immune to hurt from others. There were plenty of people like that who seemed content with their lives—or were they? She wondered how many of these people were solitary by choice, and how many were alone because nobody had ever come into their lives and relieved them of their loneliness. There was a difference between resignation, or acceptance, in the face of loneliness and choosing to be solitary.
    The central mystery, of course, was why we needed to be in love at all. The reductionist answer was that it was simply a matter of biology, and that love provided the motivational force that encouraged people to stay together to raise children. Like all the arguments of evolutionary psychology, it looked so simple and so obvious, but if that was all that we were, then why did we fall in love with ideas, and things, and places? Auden had captured this potential in pointing out that as a boy he had fallen in love with a pumping engine, and thought it “every bit as beautiful as you.” Displacement, the sociobiologists would say; and there was the old Freudian joke that tennis is a substitute for sex. To whichthere was only one reply: that sex could equally well become a substitute for tennis.
    “Very funny,” Cat had said when Isabel had once pointed this out to her. “But surely it’s absolutely right. Our emotions all seem geared towards keeping us in one piece, as animals, so to speak. Fear and flight. Fighting over food. Hatred and envy. All very physical and connected with survival.”
    “But might one not equally say that the emotions have a role in developing our higher capacities?” Isabel had countered. “Our emotions allow us to empathise with others. If I love another, then I know what it is to be that other person. If I feel pity—which is an important emotion, isn’t it?—then this helps me to understand the suffering of others. So our emotions make us grow morally. We develop a moral imagination.”
    “Perhaps,” Cat had said, but she had been looking away then, at a jar of pickled onions—this conversation had taken place in the delicatessen—and her attention had clearly wandered. Pickled onions had nothing to do with moral imagination, but were important in their own quiet, vinegary way, Isabel supposed.
    AFTER CAT AND TOBY had left, Isabel went outside, into the cool of the night. The large walled garden at the back of the house, hidden from the road, was in darkness. The sky was clear, and there were stars, normally not visible in the city, obscured by all the light thrown up by human habitation. She walked over the lawn towards the small