The Careful Use of Compliments Read Free

turn away those who came later. But history might provide few firm foundations: ultimately, almost everybody came from somewhere else, if one went far enough back, and even those who asserted their rights as original peoples were often not really indigenous, but had sailed over from some other island or walked across a long-dissolved land bridge.
    Isabel found this intensely difficult, and had noticed that most people simply avoided the issue or did not discuss it in the open. The heart went one way—those who want a new life should be helped to get it, if possible—but the head might look in another direction, at the pragmatic impossibility of allowing the unfettered movement of peoples. So there were passports and quotas and restrictions, all of which amounted to a discouragement. Please don’t come, these regulations said; please don’t ask.
    She looked at the room around her, at her desk, at her books. None of this would belong to her forever; it would change hands and somebody new would be here, somebody who would not even know who she had been, somebody who would look at her with astonishment if she came back, in some thought experiment, and said, That’s my desk—I want it. Our possessing of our world is a temporary matter: we stamp our ownership upon our surroundings, give familiar names to the land about us, erect statues of ourselves, but all of this is swept away, so quickly, so easily. We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.
    Still deep in thought, Isabel stared at the pile of unopened mail. The harvest of just two days, it was neatly stacked in a red metal in-tray. Much of this was manuscripts; Isabel did not accept electronic submissions to the journal—she disliked reading on-screen—and required everything that was submitted to be printed out for her perusal. This meant that a river of paper entered the house each month, swirled in eddies about her study for a week or so, and then was guided out in a stream of recycling bags. The rejected manuscripts, those that she judged unworthy of the editorial board’s scrutiny, were often the work of doctoral students, anxious for their first publication. Isabel was gentle in her rejection of these, expressing the hope that the authors would find somebody else willing to publish their work. She knew that this was unlikely, that the Review may have been their fifth or sixth port of call. But she could not be brutal; she had been a doctoral student herself once and remembered what it was like.
    She took an envelope off the top of the pile and slit it open. “Dear Ms. Dalhousie, The enclosed paper may be suitable for publication in the Review of Applied Ethics and I should be grateful if you would consider it. The title is ‘The Concept of Sexual Perversion as an Oppressive Weapon’ and in it I examine some ideas which Scruton advanced in his book Sexual Desire. As you know, the concept of perversion has been subjected to critical reassessment…”
    She sighed and laid the paper aside. She received numerous submissions on the subject of sex; indeed, some philosophers seemed to imagine that applied ethics was more or less exclusively concerned with sex. Often these papers were interesting, but on other occasions they were distinctly scatological and she wondered whether she should be reading them with gloves on. The absurdity of this struck her as quickly as the thought itself came to her, but it was amusing to think of editors handling such material with the protection of gloves, as if the grubbiness of the subject matter might rub off or infection might leap from the page.
    A few days previously she had received a paper entitled “On the Ethics of Pretending to Be Gay When You Are Not.” If she had been taken by surprise by this title, then that was clearly the author’s intention. We expect the issue to be the ethics of pretending to be straight when you are not, he wrote,