Merinder's House

Once, many years ago, I witnessed the raw ambition and unrestricted malice of a person with little talent and no finesse, a rather ugly combination. With no apparent shame, they were a seeker not of truth but of ways around it, and their rise to power was of the kind without moral boundaries or uncomfortable questions.

More disturbing, however, was the person’s successful appeal to the fear and indifference of those around them, and the imposition of a moral bann on beauty and respect. Perhaps they thought that, in some sordid way, a glorification of the mundane would make their own inadequacies less visible and that unopposed bullying would shorten the long road to success. When those in their vicinity became aware that there may be something unpalatable in this apparently contagious behaviour, the general reaction was to feed it, in case it should turn in on everyone else.

My own misfortune was to see it differently and – a little naively – to hope that if I showed respect – however little there was around me – the beauty would return. The trail of destruction, however, continued unchecked, and even a little bostered by its apparent success, so that I was forced to turn and run, leaving the beauty hopelessly subject to the mundane. I went on a long journey to look for it somewhere else.

In time, the sadness has lessened, but the destruction has not, and the threshold of powerlessness has shifted a little for the worse. I remain perturbed by a curiously persistent question: “Why does everyone apparently prefer the ugliness to the beauty? Where does respect hide?” If this is not the case, and the people of the daily world are simply hiding behind their fears, perhaps we should expect beauty and respect to return at length from their exile, or at least occasionally to show their faces in an uncommon act of honour? Where, amongst all the mayhem, have they gone in the theme park of today’s mercenary world?

The Buddha apparently once said, “Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals.” What he failed to say is that its success resides in the sad fact that everyone falls for it.

Discover the magic of Scottish fiction through The Books and the Sea, a collection of short stories, Scottish literature with a maritime flavour, written by Jane Coutts.