Article: Shaken to My Moral Foundations: Part I

   I talked it over with Mary. Mary agreed with my analysis of the situation, but she was nowhere close to being ready for bold moves. I could have acted on my own judgment, had my judgment been clear enough. But I was inhibited, not only by the trepidation anyone might feel on the eve of war, but also by my attachment to a moral vision in which the path of virtue is not that of the warrior but of him who turns the other cheek. I hesitated, I decided to try to heal the situation through more loving means, despite my intuitive knowledge that such an effort was futile.

   I stayed the week. It was a week during which Mary and I staggered through the Prado museum, seeing in Bosch's apocalyptic visions, and in Goya's grim reflections on Napoleon's butchery, a mirror of our own keening souls. Even the bright Mediterranean colors looked dismal to me that week.

   We limped out of Madrid at the end of the week, and resumed our romance as bethrotheds on the more hospitable soil of America, an ocean away from the forces that had wanted to tear us apart. Or at least we tried to resume it. As we drifted toward our break up many months later, I could see in retrospect that the love between us --though it survived-- had never really recovered from the tortures of Madrid. Some light had gone out, some young brightness quenched by the weight of a dishonorable defeat.

   I'm not going to argue that it would have been good if Mary and I had got married; that's not the point. We are now both doing very well in our lives, and with our mates.   In the years in between, she and I have each gone through times that were a lot worse, and we each made first marriages that served us much less well. But regardless of whether that marriage should have happened, what killed it should not have been allowed to do so. And two years after the debacle in Madrid, I sat in my apartment in Berkeley and looked mercilessly at my own failure to prevent it.

   My life, I know, affords a rather imperfect laboratory for testing various moral hypotheses. I know that what I did and did not do in Madrid was not a function solely of the more or less Christian morality of kindness and love that I then espoused. I know that the bolder steps I did not take were not the precise equivalent of taking up the sword. But in my heart, that experience opened up some deep moral questions about means and ends, about love and the sword, about the rightness of character and the rightness of results. As I saw it, my image of the spirit from which a good person should act had interfered with my acting to protect what is good.

And this discovery was profoundly unsettling.

I had failed, I felt, in my responsibility to protect the heart of a young woman I loved, to protect the bond between us and, yes, to protect also my own legitimate interests-- failed, in part, because I was trying to be "good."   It raised the question: what do you do when the kind of person you think you should be cannot achieve what you think should be done?

   It was the summer of 1968 as I wrestled with this question, while it seemed swords were being unsheathed all across the surrounding world.

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<em>This chapter will be continued with a second installment. And in the weeks to come, the other chapters of the book will follow.</em>

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