IV
Judge Mann followed Joe Bass to the elevator that clanked them gravely to the relative holiness of the sixth floor, where Mann's chambers occupied a corner with a north view. The windows were dark, under a windy spatter of unexpected rain. Mann glimpsed gold blurs of downtown windows, white hurry of headlights, a flow of them two blocks away at the corner of Main and Court, Winchester going home to suburban bedrooms. "Nasty night," said Joe Bass. The red eye closed, the green eye opened; a file of wet bugs poured up the Court Street hill. "Going home directly, sir?"
"I think so. You were in court, weren't you, Joe?"
"Yes. I ducked out before the end of Mr. Hunter's speech. Did Mr. Warner waive the opening?"
"More or less...." Joe Bass never hovered, or clucked. A sure instinct had told him Judge Mann preferred to light his own cigarettes. But he did not like to be dismissed before the Judge went home, preferring to read or meditate in the anteroom until any hour of the night. He had not much to go home to—a boarding-house bedroom uptown, his wife dead, children married and gone. "I wish Mr. Warner would cut down that belly. Too much work for the heart at sixty-eight."
"Sixty-eight, Judge?—I hadn't realized." Joe chuckled faintly in the shadows. "I'm sixty-seven. Apropos of old age, I took the liberty of browsing through your Thucydides a while ago—have the same paperback edition at home, and very good, I'd say—may I?" He was already drifting to the bookshelves. For Joe, there was always a quotation. It seemed to Judge Mann that this was at least the magpie instinct at its noblest, for Joe did not gather them as random bright beads, but for personal use and to be shared. "It's from a speech of Pericles at the funeral of those who first died in the war—and I wonder sometimes if the Peloponnesian War wasn't as great a disaster as the latest? If the Greece of Pericles could have survived—well.... Here it is: 'As for those of you who are too old to have children, I would ask you to count as gain the greater part of your life, in which you have been happy, and remember that what remains is not long, and let your hearts be lifted up at the thought of the fair fame of the dead. One's sense of honor is the only thing that does not grow old.'"
Judge Mann thought: What of one who dies young?—a child hit by a car? Ann Doherty? What of one who dies young by act of the State, with no fair fame? "I think, Joe, we've become a more complex people."
"Aren't the essentials much the same?"
"Not quite. I think there's even a new humanitarianism, new in the last hundred and fifty years. In the time of, say, Edmund Burke, there was still officially approved slavery even in England, where they got rid of it before we did. Hangings as public entertainments. Cats burnt alive for fun on Guy Fawkes Day. The modern stomach pukes up that sort of thing. Alongside the mushroom cloud, the decade of insanity that was Hitler's bloom, the damned impersonal devices for butchering unseen millions by throwing a switch, you try setting up the way people actually live, or try to live, from day to day: there's a difference. If the difference means as much as I think it does, if we get through another hundred years without blowing up the planet, modern medicine should have a great share of the credit." Joe looked puzzled. "In a time when any bad sickness or injury was probably a death sentence, a general fatalism would be almost unavoidable, don't you think?"
"Mm, yes."
"Cruelty and beastliness got taken for granted. If we value life more now, it's because we know more about maintaining it and reducing its miseries. It doesn't have to be 'nasty, brutish and short.'"
"'One's sense of honor'—I liked that part."
"Other things don't grow old. Knowledge. What you learned as a child is with you at sixty-seven. Some kinds of love remain young, so long as the body can support our curious brains where love is born."
[2]
It is extraordinary that a system hoary with age, extravagant and wasteful to the highest degree, should not be supplanted by some method of getting at facts directly, and having them passed on by men who understand the controversies that they seek to solve.
CLARENCE DARROW, The Story of My Life