Substance and Accidents.

Read an excellent article by Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian (click here to read it). Jenkins suggests that what makes a place attractive to us is the network of friends and associations it has for us rather than its objective beauty. I have the good fortune to live in a breathtakingly beautiful place, yet I’m rarely any longer consciously aware of its beauty: it’s simply my home. Something similar can be said of people themselves. It's often struck me that it’s much easier to describe the appearance of those we don’t know very well than that of our close friends and family. Their physical appearance changes over the years but unless we look at an old photograph we’re not conscious of the fact. And although when we have lost contact for years with someone who used to be a close friend we’re immediately struck by their changed appearance when we meet them again the shock soon wears off. Last week I met an old schoolfriend again for the first time for over forty-five years. He now bears a striking resemblance to George Bush senior . However, after a few hours the sexagenarian had melded seamlessly with the bluecoat boy I’d shared a dormitory with for seven years of my life. Not only do the changed accidents seem unimportant one soon ceases to be aware of them - only the substance remains.

   A critic - I think it was Walter Allen - remarked that it was untrue that Dickens created caricatures. What he did was to embody his creations with the vividness of perception which we have as children. Think of those larger than life eccentric masters who dominated your schooldays. If you meet them in later life they seem to be disappointingly normal. Allen suggests that as adults we subconsciously reduce everyone to the norm: we flatten their eccentricities and heighten their ‘normal’ features. We no longer see them as they are but what convention tells us they should be. But Dickens uses accidents to manifest his characters’ substance. However, in our close friends and family substance has no need of accidents: we apprehend their substance in the same way a mystic knows his God.