it. Personally I do not want sympathy at all if I am in trouble,
because it only makes me suffer more; the real comfort under such
circumstances is when people behave quite naturally, as if there were
no troubles in the world; then one has to try to behave decently, and
that is one's best chance of forgetting oneself.

The only thing, it seems to me, that one may do, is to love people, if
one can. It is the mood from which sympathy and help spring that
matters, not the spoken word or the material aid. In the worst troubles
one cannot help people at all. The knowledge that others love you does
not fill the aching gap made by the death of child or lover or friend.
And now too, in these democratic days, when compassion and help are
more or less organised, when the sense of the community that children
should be taught issues in Education Bills, and the feeling that sick
people must be tended is expressed by hospitals--when the world has
thus been specialised, tangible benevolence is a much more complex
affair. It seems clear that it is not really a benevolent thing to give
money to anyone who happens to ask for it; and it is equally clear, it
seems to me, that not much is done by lecturing people vaguely about
their sins and negligences; one must have a very clear sense of one's
own victories over evil, and the tactics one has employed, to do that;
and if one is conscious, as I am, of not having made a very successful
show of resistance to personal faults and failings, the pastoral
attitude is not an easy one to adopt. But if one loves people, the
problem is not so difficult--or rather it solves itself. One can
compare notes, and discuss qualities, and try to see what one admires
and thinks beautiful; and the only way, after all, to make other people
good, if that is the end in view, is to be good oneself in such a way
that other people want to be good too.