For this Saturday night / Sunday morning then, another dip into the common place book I started when at school. In my VI Form year I was directed to the author RC Hutchinson and read a number of his books including 'Testament,' a great work set in the Russian revolution.
Sometime in 1984 I noted this scrap of dialogue from the book into my commonplace book. The Christian and the Bolshevik debate their actions and the difference that the former will not agree that the ends justify the means. The Christian explains:
"Our difference is not a matter of mere politics, it is a difference in attitude towards truth, towards the purpose of man's existence. It is only this. I believe that every surrender to cruelty makes the battle harder for those who follow."
Hutchinson's last novel, 'Rising' (which I seem to have read in 1982) was a haunting tale of redemption achieved through the sacrificial self offering of one man for another. I noted this passage:
"Sometimes when Sabino was small he did helpful things for me. Oh, only little things. But without my asking. Then he'd do something heartless and drive me to despair again. No, not quite despair. I kept remembering the other things, the times when we he'd thought of people's feelings. It meant there was a spring of goodness in him, out of sight - something which would come to life again. It's in him still - it doesn't die to nothing, it can't, that part of a person which has once made us love him. We accept the fact of evil, which we can't explain. Surely we've got to accept the mystery of goodness too."
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