"Almost" Part 8: Chapters 24-25

Chapter Twenty Four

Reginald had caused a great academic sensation at All Souls. His language skills were so extraordinary that arguing with him was almost impossible. His abilities were centered in two main areas: the first was scorn, and the second was agility.

His scorn was a force of nature, something which had to be seen to be believed. Reginald was of the opinion that every moral stand was a mere posture, and he mocked earnest young men without mercy. He dismissed theoretical constructs as a waste of time, constantly insisting that focusing on practical matters was the only useful approach. He did not believe in bad men, but conceded that some people were in fact ‘misguided’ about their own interests. He was a great fan of Gandhi. He was not optimistic about human nature, but was optimistic about the future. People were squalid, grasping and only concerned with their own welfare – but that very selfishness was what would save mankind, he felt. Now that the bomber had brought warfare to the homes of the leaders, no-one would dare start a war. He had no love of democracy, but respected its historical roots in England. “It is our way,” he would say, with an ironic smile. “And we are stuck with it.” He liked Mussolini (“There is a man who knows what he is about!”) but knew that fascism would never take root on British soil. “Our local, gin-sodden worthies – who can no more write books than they can fly – are, for some unfathomable reason, most attached to their freedom of expression.”

Reginald had a prodigious memory, (in great contrast to Tom, who had great difficulty keeping all but the broadest abstractions in his mind), and was a past master of the ‘oppositional quote.’ In debates, he would dig up some obscure reference by a great thinker, toss it at his opponents, and watch them writhing under the challenge of opposing genius.

(Of course, there was a faint pattern to the kind of knowledge which Reginald retained, but that did not become evident for some time.)

Certainty was quite hard to come by in the early Thirties. The only way to approach it was to be dogmatic, and Reginald was far too vain for that. He disliked communism as Messianistic German idealism, but conceded that it would probably never work because man was too selfish. “The theory is very nice, but the problem is that mankind is not very nice, so it would never work.” (In this he was in the same camp as the Vatican, which said that, although communism would in fact be heaven on earth, it was impossible, because the framers of communism forgot to take into account Original Sin, so that mankind, due to his innate sinfulness, could never achieve heaven on earth.)