Clean heroes and dusty rogues

dusty hand
Originally uploaded by tamaki.

Alas, after all has been said, I still can't choose a virtuous man as my hero. I can explain why: the virtuous man has been turned into a sort of horse, and there is no author who hasn't ridden him, urging him on with his whip or whatever comes to hand. Now I feel the time has come to make use of a rogue. So let's harness him for a change.

-- Nikolai Gogol Dead Souls

I have just finished reading "How to be good" written by a man with a woman as the main character. It is basically about people behaving stupidly. A woman, who is an adulteress, wants forgivness from her husband. He forgives her and she is happy for a time, then is infuriated by his piousness.

It is about getting better than we deserve, that our foolish stupidity is not rewarded by rejection and abandonment. It is a story about fragile forgiveness, making mistakes, and having a good heart. It is about women vicars who preach the gospel of love, yet don't believe in God. Of faith healers who cure sick people because they are sad. The removal of sadness from the husband at the right time is enough to enable him to forgive his wife.

I have wondered where you learn the most from. From a hero or a rogue, and at the moment I am persuaded that the rogue can teach us more than the hero. When other people make mistakes we recognise that we make the very same mistakes. We recognise injustice because we are unjust. We think about hunger in the world when we sit down to the Sunday roast... no we don't we stuff ourselves and tumble off to bed with a sore stommach to sleep off the gorge fest, and it is then we think that perhaps we have eaten too much.

When a hero acts heroically, we are not captivated by his valour, since we do not do heroic deeds ourselves. To be a hero requires you to be something special, something separate and different. We are all rogues and that requires no special talent. We just drift into it, roguishness.

It is like dust settling on a window ledge. You lick your finger and write in the dust. I am a rogue, and you notice that there is a clean surface under the dust. We become dusty without even knowing it. Dust covered people easily see other people who are covered with dust.