Adultery and Other Diversions by Tim Parks

Author:Tim Parks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-541-0
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Charity

I am frequently moved to tears, but rarely give to the needy. On the phone a man is telling me that his budget is huge, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Is he to spend it merely telling people that Benetton sweaters are prettier and better than everybody else’s? How dull! It’s much more interesting for him to get involved in sponsoring a conference against famine in the world. Or this thing down in Corleone that he is trying to persuade me to go to. One is helping people is the point. And if that sells sweaters as well, then all the better. ‘I’m pretty sure we could get your article published in Espresso,’ he says. I decline.

Has the attitude of devotion to the human race somehow substituted for wisdom, and even common sense? On my desk there is a fax from a TV company. They have been commissioned by BBC2 to make a series called Writers on Rwanda. ‘By presenting the situation through the words of writers we can say more controversial things than when expressing a view directly.’ After each programme they will announce a phone number for people to call to pledge their gifts. ‘We know you are already very committed,’ they concede, but all the same they would like me to comment on my reactions to watching the disaster unfold on television (’your feelings of hopelessness, yet questioning of the appropriateness of some of the footage’). I remember at Sunday School they showed us slides of starving children in Rwanda and Burundi. I had a Church Missionary Society savings box in the shape of a mud hut in which I inserted a tenth of my pocket money. It is interesting that someone can write a word like ‘committed’ without feeling they need to specify to what exactly. Yet despite this assumption of some mainstream I belong to, it is also evident that anything I say will be ‘controversial’. And desirably so. It occurs to me that lucidity is an ancient enemy of devotion. Paradox is the territory of faith.

When the guy from Benetton phones back I pluck up the courage to tell him I didn’t like their recent poster of the three bloodied human hearts, all identical, with the legends black — white — yellow over them. Nor the guy dying of AIDS. Nor the bloodstained clothes from Bosnia. ‘But these were important in raising people’s consciousness,’ he says. ‘I found them unattractive.’ ‘You can’t deny they were powerful images. They have impact.’ I tell him I prefer the impact of beautiful girls wearing bright Benetton sweaters. When I accept the TV company’s offer to write about Rwanda, but warn them that my piece will indeed be controversial — I will be explaining why I tend to steer clear of visual depictions of famine and genocide — they do not take the trouble to reply.

One of the things I remember perplexing me on Bible study evenings in my father’s church was that verse in St Paul’s eulogy to charity where he says: ‘And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor.

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