I’ve often wondered- even before I had my own kids- about where people get their goodness from. Their innate goodness I mean, the moral fiber, not learned behavior like not belching in public and not taking the biggest slice of cake. The stuff that lets us differentiate between right and wrong, and makes us want to do the right thing.
Of course much of it is due to our parents or other adult role models. Children emulate their elders to some extent and children want to act in a way that brings them love and affection from the people they love. So do puppies. It’s a mutually satisfying relationship.
But I can almost remember the exact time that I actually started considering other people’s wants and feelings as well as my own needs and desires. The time when I consciously made a choice to give things up to another person rather than hoard them all for myself, and it probably wasn’t until I was eight or so and mature enough to observe how the adults in my life behaved or contemplative enough to read deeply. I have a younger sister as well, and it was at about the same time (though she may argue that it has never stopped) that I ceased to pick on her and became a protector of sorts.
And I can trace it directly back to the books I read and loved. Ok, embarrassing confession here. I did read a lot of Enid Blyton at a certain point in my life. And much of it is saccharine goo, but there is some diversity as well, some three-dimensionality in her characters where they face their flaws and try to make amends and she had tomboys too, and a few illustrated nature books which were actually very informative field- guides. And even then I knew that the Blyton stuff was escapist and I read Tolkien and Dickens and Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary and a lot of my parent’s adult books which gave me probably too much insight into the world but dealt with basic human dilemma as well, just not in such a concise and deceptively simple way as the children’s literature did.
I remember one particular summer we spent in Italy, at my nonnis small home in Roccasinibalda- a medieval fortress town near Rome where the days were so brutally hot that we took a siesta during the hours when the sun was at its highest, and then stayed up very late, eating a leisurely dinner and running around the castle with the village ragazzi while the grown-ups made their evening passegiata.
I can recall an overwhelming urge to be good that particular summer. It may have had to do with a second-hand copy of a girl- scout handbook which had many suggestions for lending a helpful hand, and certainly I was rigorous for a month or two about making my bed every morning and tucking the sheets in tightly and putting away my clothes and doing chores. But such extremely good behavior is hard to keep up unless you become a nun which I also briefly considered.
And besides I’m not talking about perfect behavior. I’m speaking of the warm-blooded, imperfect, human aspiration to be kind and to do no harm, and I found my role models- flawed, searching, stumbling, often troubled and frequently confused about which path to take, within the pages of the books I adored. I could relate so intimately with some of these characters- especially the flawed people like Edmund, Eustace and Jill from the Narnia books and Mary from A Secret Garden and most of Roald Dahl’s kids and Pippi Longstocking and E. Nesbit’s Five Children, that even before I had to face my own moral confusion I had already had some experience vicariously. I had battled side by side with them to do the right thing, and of course since then I have tripped and fallen many, many times but often the way is surprisingly clear. Familiar almost.
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