'You miss my point, Elizabeth. Hellenism was an alternative. Poor as it may have been, Hellas was the one alternative to the Christian vision that humanism was able to offer. To Greek society – an utterly idealized picture of Greek society, but how were ordinary folk to know that? – they could point and say,
Hellas: half-naked men, their breasts gleaming with olive oil, sitting on the temple steps discoursing about the good and the true, while in the background lithe-limbed boys wrestle and a herd of goats contentedly grazes. Free minds in free bodies. More than an idealized picture: a dream, a delusion. But how else are we to live but by dreams?
'I do not disagree,' she says. 'But who believes in Hellenism any more? Who even remembers the word?'
'Still you miss the point. Hellenism was the sole vision of the good life that humanism was able to put forward. When Hellenism failed – which was inevitable, since it had nothing whatever to do with the lives of real people – humanism went bankrupt. That man at lunch was arguing for the humanities as a set of techniques, the human sciences. Dry as dust. What young man or woman with blood in their veins would want to spend their life scratching around in the archives or doing
'But Hellenism was surely just a phase in the history of the humanities. Larger, more inclusive visions of what human life can be have emerged since then. The classless society, for instance. Or a world from which poverty, disease, illiteracy, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the rest of the bad litany have been exorcised. I am not putting in a plea for either of these visions. I am just pointing out that people cannot live without hope, or perhaps without illusions. If you turned to any of those people we had lunch with and asked them, as humanists or at least as card-carrying practitioners of the humanities, to state the goal of all their efforts, surely they would reply that, however indirectly, they strive to improve the lot of mankind.'
'Yes. And therein they reveal themselves as true followers of their humanist forebears. Who offered a secular vision of salvation. Rebirth without the intervention of Christ. By the workings of man alone. Renaissance. On the example of the Greeks. Or on the example of the American Indians. Or on the example of the Zulus. Well, it cannot be done.'
'It cannot done, you say. Because – though none of them were aware of it – the Greeks were damned, the Indians were damned, the Zulus were damned.'
'I said nothing about damnation. I am talking only about history, about the record of the humanist enterprise. It cannot be done.
She shakes her head. 'Blanche, Blanche, Blanche,' she says. 'Who would have thought you would end up such a hardliner.'
Blanche gives her a wintry smile. The light flashes on her glasses.
It is Saturday, her last full day in Africa. She is spending it at Marianhill, the station which her sister has made her life's work and her home. Tomorrow she will travel to Durban. From Durban she will fly to Bombay and then on to Melbourne. And that will be that.
It was the graduation ceremony she came for, but what Blanche really wanted her to see, what lay behind the invitation, was the hospital. She knows that, yet she resists. It is not something she wants. She has not the stomach for it. She has seen it all on television, too often, till she cannot bear to look any more: the stick limbs, the bloated bellies, the great impassive eyes of children wasting away, beyond cure, beyond care.
