There is a passage in Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate that has stayed with me. It asks a series of simple but difficult questions about the meaning of good:
“What is ‘good’? ‘Good’ for whom? Is there a common good?”
The questions go further: can what is good for one people be evil for another? Is goodness something eternal and unchanging? Can yesterday's good become today's vice?
I don't remember every word of the passage, but I remember how it made me think.
We often see things from our own point of view. We judge a situation according to what we know, what we have experienced and what we believe to be right. It is easy to feel that our understanding is the obvious one.
But someone standing on the other side may see things very differently.
I think this is one of the reasons I enjoy reading novels so much. A good novel takes us into lives we would never have experienced ourselves. We meet people with different backgrounds, different struggles and different ways of looking at the world. Sometimes we understand their choices; sometimes we don't. We may even disagree with them. But we spend time with them, and gradually we begin to see something of the world through their eyes.
I have noticed that reading has made me a little more patient with people in real life, too.
When something happens, I try not to make up my mind too quickly. Perhaps there is something I don't know. Perhaps the person is dealing with circumstances I have never experienced. It doesn't mean I will always agree with them, or that everything they do is right. But I am more willing to pause before making a judgement.
I don't think reading has taught me how to tell right from wrong. If anything, it has made me more aware of how complicated people and their lives can be.
And perhaps that is enough.
Sometimes, before deciding what to think of someone, it is worth taking a little time to understand where they are coming from.
That is something I have learnt, not from a lesson or a set of rules, but from spending time with the people I meet in books.
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