When Ideas Dovetail

Some ideas have been folding together in my head these days. Dovetailing. Let me see if I can explain ...

This morning, reading Richard Ford's latest, a collection of stories called Sorry for Your Trouble (2020), I came across this reference to novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-82):

He'd read that line of Trollope's many times over .... "There is an unhappiness so great that the very fear of it is an alloy to happiness" (87--in Ford's story "The Run of Yourself).

I think he's referring to the definition of alloy that means, says Merriam-Webster, an admixture that lessens value or detracts from quality.

But as I just checked my copy of the Autography, it seems more likely that the fear of unhappiness can strengthen happiness.*

I didn't recognize the source of that Trollope quotation--and Ford does not provide it. Enter Google, which found it in a second: It's from Chapter 4 of Trollope's Autobiography (which I've read, by the way), published posthumously in 1883.

I smiled at the Trollope allusion because just yesterday, on Facebook, I'd shared a "Memory" from eight years ago: our table-top showing all forty-seven of Trollope's novels, which I'd read over a ten-year period (1997-2007).

Reading those books has been one of the great adventures of my life--most of it done in the evening, in bed, a chapter a night.

And all of this Trollope stuff dovetailed with a thought I've been having about COVID-19. We know that many of those who have died have been the elderly--many of them in nursing homes or other facilities. And circulating out there have been some ideas--implicit and explicit--that, you know, old people die anyway--so why not open up the country?

I think I qualify now for membership in "old people," so I find this idea a bit more repellent than I would have in, oh, my thirties.

Anyway, this led me to another Trollope-connected thought. One of his last novels was The Fixed Period (1882), a short one involving a group of immigrants who arrive in a place called "Brittanula," near New Zealand, where they endeavor to set up an ideal sort of society. They all agree that there should be a "fixed period" to life--that getting old is uncomfortable, is inconvenient for the younger. So, they decide that 67 is a life long enough.

When you reach that exalted age (eight years ago for me!), you enter a facility where they prepare you for a painless death.

All goes well in Brittanula...

Until, of course, the first settlers begin to approach the "fixed period." Then, amazingly, it doesn't seem to them like such a great idea, you know?

Trollope knew us--knew us very well. And if he were living now, I'm sure he would be recommending his book to those who seem prepared to sacrifice their elders for their own convenience, those who don't appear to comprehend that they will one day be older and will cling to life like the rest of us.

Not that too many of our current cruel folks could comprehend ... Besides, the noise overhead is distracting: A dove is winging away.

Link to the novel online.

*With thanks for this thought from old high-school friend Ralph Green, who responded to this post.