Free Notes From Underground by Roger Scruton Page B

compare us to those people in the ancient world whose city has been destroyed and who have been led away into slavery. No motive remains that will keep us to the path of honor and justice. We steal from each other, even what we love. We become scavengers. And when one of us shows that it need not be so, that he, for one, is prepared to make a sacrifice, there is suddenly joy and light and for a brief moment we remember what we were. And then we go back to captivity, for we have nothing else.
    They were simple thoughts. But Rudolf linked them to such a wealth of philosophy and culture that I found myself shaking with desire for the path of truth and sacrifice that he described. He held my attention as the hand of eternity holds the apple of time, and I watched as the thin dust of humanity was blown across that apple and then polished away. My underground life, I saw, had been another form of selfishness and fragmentation. I had been avoiding even the fear that I should have been feeling, the fear that I saw all around me and which, had I opened my heart to it, would have saved my mother from her fate. This fear was real; I heard it in Ivana’s voice on the telephone, as she shut the door on the life that we had shared. I saw it in Mother’s face as she was led away. It was the all-pervading substance from which
Rumors
had crystallized, the stuff from which my underground friends and lovers had been composed. And yet I had avoided it until this moment, had allowed myself to fall in love with the girl beside me precisely because she showed no sign of it. The new life required me to acknowledge fear and to open my heart to it. And by fighting this fear in myself, I would be fighting it in the world around me.
    Rudolf stopped speaking and discussion began. I looked on eagerly, astonished to find myself in a gathering where questions were posed as though they were common property and where knowledge was assumed, not displayed. At a certain point, Rudolf’s wife, Helena, entered, carrying a tray of
chlebí č ky
: she was a small woman,with a soft wrinkled face like a dried apricot. She smiled timidly at the guests as they helped themselves to the little circles of bread, on each of which a piece of cheese and a slice of gherkin had been balanced like a hat.
    Never since Dad’s death had there been guests in our apartment. I associated hospitality with the gatherings of apparatchiks, with their expensive leather coats and plump mistresses wrapped in fur. Hospitality belonged to the unapproachable world of
them
, where it signified not kindness or compassion but the insolence of privilege. Yet, here before me was the vivid disproof of that: powerless people offering and receiving gifts. A new dimension of being was outlined before me in a dramatic tableau that invited me to change my life. Someone was talking next to me of a poem that ended with just those words—
musíš zm ě nit sv ů j život
, you must change your life. The poem was by Rilke, whose
Duino Elegies
had found their way into Dad’s trunk, and the discussion of it spread like laughter through the gathering. I smiled at Rudolf, and then at Betka. I did not mind that the bread was stale or the cheese hard and acrid, with the texture of a toenail. That was the way we lived. I was standing in a sunbeam, and had lost all consciousness of the surrounding storm.
    I find it hard to recapture the experience now, for that dream-scape has been swept away. Here in America’s capital, where the ripe fruit of abundance hangs from every tree, where days end in parties, where friends come and go with easy hilarity and where fear is a specialist product, to be bought and sold in videos or downloaded from the Internet, how can I conjure a world where words were kept close like secrets, and friendship had the furtiveness of sin? All I can say is that I left the seminar as though walking on air. As we descended the stairs, Betka told me to meet