Essays in Idleness

“The world is vile and malicious. … As soon as misfortune overtakes you there is always a friend ready to come and announce it, and probe your heart with a dagger while bidding you admire the hilt.”

These words, of the Viscountess in Balzac’s Old Goriot, fairly express my own attitude this morning, as I set about writing another idle lucubration. There will always be a high society, and it will always be black and false. Those who rise in it will generally fall back on criminal behaviour, if they did not use it for their ascent. And, like Madame de Beauséant, those who have their hearts broken in high society, would be wise to flee Paris.

But there is worse than mere, mediocre high society, as we were reminded by overhearing a moment in the conversation of three of the world’s most vile and malicious dictators. The Chinese, the Russian, and the North Korean one, were chatting among themselves about their prospects of living to the age of 150, and perhaps forever, by means of organ transplants.

As one might deduce from reading That Hideous Strength — to my mind a great improvement on George Orwell’s dystopian classic — the supplier of those fresh organs would be some comparative innocents.

Any reader who is such a naif as to doubt the existence of Satan, should pause here. We already know that the “PRC” murders political prisoners; and that they extract and sell the prisoners’ fresh organs in the international medical trade; and yet we continue trading with them; while making our unctuous “human rights” declarations.

Rather than add another to this long, boring collection of hypocrises, the reader should retire now, to read Balzac, or possibly The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky.