Louise Penny: Let’s Talk about Goodness

In a new video of Louise Penny talking about The Grey Wolf (posted for the Queen’s Reading Room, no less: the novel was selected by HRH Queen Camilla), she talks about goodness. About kindness.

Penny suggests that the reason she hasn’t tired of Gamache (and she notes the Christie example, to my delight) is that she created a protagonist who is someone she would like to be with–someone, in fact, that she married, given that he is so closely modelled on her late husband, a children’s hematologist who dealt with both tragedy and joy every day of his professional life.

And that brought me up short.

This morning I had two ideas for posts, one of which I drafted yesterday: first, Jeffrey Epstein and academia, a bilious, furious post; and I was also contemplating former Chilliwack school trustee Neufeld and the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal decision that orders him to pay 750K in damages to the local teachers’ union–they sued him for making repeated, defamatory anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity: a B.C. curriculum requirement) comments from his platform as a member of the school board.

Both are deeply unpleasant topics.

Both are being written about elsewhere (although the quick assessment of the BCHRT decision in The Globe needs a lot more nuance).

No one needs my hot take on either.

So let’s talk about something more pleasant, to cite Roz Chast’s mother.

Kindness.

Goodness.

Louise Penny, in her fabulous teal glasses, begins by reading an excerpt from her novel and then turns to her theme, with a quotation from one of her favourite poets, W.H. Auden:

Penny tells her listeners, in fact, that “The spine throughout the series comes from this couplet from [Auden’s] poem to Melville:

Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge.
His terror had to blow itself quite out
To let him see it . . .”

Penny then says, “I think that one of the reasons the books resonate and have found a worldwide audience is because they’re about goodness. Goodness. Kindness.

And so many people, I think, have mistaken it for weakness.

And it takes so much more courage to be decent, to be kind. . . It takes a lot of courage to be decent and stand in the sunshine. And that’s what these books invite people to do.”

I needed that reminder today. I will, as the moment requires, whisper to myself: Goodness. Kindness.

Not snark, or criticism, or easy cruelty. Not the facile superiority of mockery at another person’s expense.

Goodness. Kindness.

I, too, love Auden, and I especially appreciate his tribute to Yeats, who died in late January, during an icy month.

Many of you are shivering in the northeast while daffodils bloom on the west coast, and I wish I could send you armfuls of them, as consolation.

Instead, have some more Auden; this is the glorious third and final section of Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” which I need this morning:

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

I’m reminded of my U of T grad school seminar on W.B. Yeats with the formidable Michael J. Sidnell. He encouraged me to go to Sligo for the summer school devoted to the poet, but I was shy, and broke, and all kinds of things that made adventures seem out of reach.

Applying now, I think. I need more poetry in my life.