Free The Novel Habits of Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

of course, was not entirely true: there were plenty of chains, real or imaginary, that people created for others—or that
desks
created, she thought…

I SABEL HAD LOOSE LINKS with the Enlightenment Institute. There was a separate department of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh—she had worked there years earlier, and still attended their Friday-afternoon seminars when she could—but recently she had found herself having rather more to do with the small institute tucked away on the edge of the Meadows, the green wedge of park that separated the university area from the acres of stone-built Victorian tenements to the south. Its name, of course, was a nod in the direction of the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century—the period when Edinburgh had been the intellectual centre of Europe.
    She had first become involved with the Institute when she had got to know an Australian philosopher, a visiting fellow whom she had helped in a personal search. The following year Isabel herself had been asked to read a paper at the Institute and had written for this occasion a piece on justice between the generations: “Do the young
really
have to support the old?” They did, she had argued, although not because the old were old, but because they were people. That had gone down well, even if it had led to a spectacular exchange of divergent views—accompanied by accusations of ageism directed, oddly enough, against one of the older participants by one of the younger ones.
    Her connection with the Institute had been strengthened when she heard that Edward and Cheryl Mendelson were to spend the summer there, each working on books that they hoped to finish. They came from New York, where Edward was a professor at Columbia, and from where, as W. H. Auden’s literary executor, he ran the poet’s affairs. Edward had a book of essays to complete, and Cheryl was putting the finishing touches to a study of the history of marriage. It was Isabel’s interest in Auden that had first put her in touch with Edward: she had written to him with a query about one of his books, and he had responded helpfully. The correspondence had deepened and become quite regular; she very much appreciated his willingness to explain the more obscure poems in the poet’s canon.
    “What on earth does he mean here?” she asked about these poems. “Am I missing the point?”
    She sometimes was.
    “He can be somewhat opaque at times,” sighed Edward. “But that’s part of the charm, I think, and there’s always a meaning there. It just might be that the references, shall we say, are not always immediately obvious.”
    “He knew so much, didn’t he? Theology, science, opera—they’re all there in the poems.”
    Edward nodded. “Yes,” he said simply. “All of that—and much more.”
    Edward greeted her as she went up the stairs to the coffee room. “Cheryl’s going to be coming in a bit later,” he said. “She’ll be sorry if she misses you. I hope that you can stay until she comes back.” He hesitated. “Or perhaps I shouldn’t ask you. I know how busy you are.”
    “Absolutely everybody’s busy,” said Isabel, thinking of the one truly idle friend she had, who always complained of having far too much to do. “But I’m happy to linger. I’m in denial about the state of my desk.”
    “Like so many of us,” said Edward.
    She knew that he was being polite; he should have said
you
rather than
us.
“Not you,” she said. “I can imagine your desk, and it’ll be a paragon of…” She struggled to find the right word. How did one describe the state of being uncluttered? “Unclutteredness.” She rather liked the idea of a category of people singled out for their tidy desks, unlike those whose desks were piled high with papers.
Desk guilt,
she thought; it could be a useful new term to join all the other available forms of guilt and self-reproach.
Desk guilt, gym guilt, chocolate guilt…
It was another case for compound