Here are the last few lines of the poem Herman Melville, by W.H. Auden. As I read and reread those line, I keep coming back to “evil is unspectacular and always human” which reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s description of evil as often banal. I find it so much easier to characterizing evil as grandiose and monstrous, like war. Evil can be that. Evil can be cataclysmic. But it can also be little and pernicious, stuff that we tolerate because it is just not worth bothering about, given everything else going on in our lives. But all those little things mount up, the effects add up and take their toll. The little things pave the way to the monstrous. It reminds me to pay attention to slippery slopes

I also like this fragment of Auden’s poem because it juxtaposes goodness and evil, and gets me even more to thinking about paying attention. It is a eloquent call to me to be awake and aware of what is right in front of me, even in my very own drawing-room (well, if I had a drawing-room).

Read on, my friends, read on.

“Herman Melville”

by

W.H. Auden

---

. . .

Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table,
And we are introduced to Goodness every day,
Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults;
He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect,
But wears a stammer like a decoration:

And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;
It is the Evil that is helpless like a lover
And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,
And both are openly destroyed before our eyes.

For now he was awake and knew
No one is ever spared except in dreams;
But there was something else the nightmare had distorted–
Even the punishment was human and a form of love:
The howling storm had been his father’s presence
And all the time he had been carried on his father’s breast.

Who now had set him gently down and left him.
He stood upon the narrow balcony and listened:
And all the stars above him sang as in his childhood
“All, all is vanity,” but it was not the same;
For now the words descended like the calm of mountains–
–Nathaniel had been shy because his love was selfish–
Reborn, he cried in exultation and surrender
“The Godhead is broken like bread. We are the pieces.”

And sat down at his desk and wrote a story.