All is well.īut beneath that simple surface, the churn of perceptions, memories, and ruminations is extraordinarily rich. In the end, her party, after threatening to fall flat, is a success-the banter is lively and the prime minister attends. She walks through town to fetch flowers for a party she’ll host that night, she has an awkward visit from an old flame, and she frets about an overly fervent Christian tutor’s influence on her teenage daughter, Elizabeth. Dalloway follows a middle-aged, upper-class Englishwoman through one hot June day in London. It is to this process, with its ceaseless exchange between inner and outer, past and present, self and other, that Virginia Woolf is exquisitely attuned. Our outward acts are an end product, a surface froth thrown up by a deep internal churning. In real life, the choices are usually subtler, the process murkier. Western literature celebrates plenty of heroes who dramatically choose to do right, even when it’s hard: Huck helps Jim escape slavery, Sydney Carton takes Charles Darnay’s place at the guillotine. It’s an approach that requires us to be awake to the actual needs of each fresh moment we can’t outsource our rendezvous with right and wrong to some higher authority or abstract it into a one-size-fits-all checklist. But we can cut through the haggling with a kind of spiritual pragmatism: what behavior helps lift me and others out of suffering and confusion and into the light? That (as I understand it) is the essence of shila paramita, sublime morality, the second of Buddhism’s six sublime virtues. If we approach these matters as abstract ethical puzzles or edicts from a Boss God, the debate is endless. And many Jews have happily conceded-as Philip Roth puts it in Portnoy’s Complaint-that in Chinese restaurants “the Lord has lifted the ban on pork dishes for the obedient children of Israel.”
Is it OK to eat meat, to have an abortion, to read on the day of rest, to drive a planet-warming car to work so you can feed your family? The commandment against making images of the divine is still on the books, but most Christians seem quite comfortable with their nativity scenes and the Sistine Chapel. Do the right thing don’t do the wrong thing.Īll religions agree on the basics: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t schtup your neighbor’s husband or wife. In this series on The Dharma of Western Literature, we’re considering six classic works through the lens of the six paramitas, or sublime virtues: generosity, ethical conduct, patience, diligence, meditation, and wisdom.
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