THE Choice of Hercules, if you remember your Greek myths, is between Virtue and Pleasure. Choose virtue and you might just be at the start of a long, hard road; you might have to learn new things, sometimes difficult ideas to get your head round. Choosing pleasure is easier. It's good fun – but does it ultimately add up to anything?
Philosophers have been banging on about this ever since Socrates started wondering what made up the Good Life. But rather than ploughing on with abstractions, let's bring it down to earth. Let's apply it to Saturday's Book Festival tickets.
A ti
cket to see philosopher AC Grayling talking about his latest book, The Choice of Hercules? Virtue, obviously. Not too many laughs a minute there, but plenty of food for thought. Historian Michael Burleigh discussing terrorism? Virtue again: understanding the roots of fanaticism an unpleasant necessity in the modern age.
But what about sheer pleasure? Well, Saturday had two blatantly obvious choices. Jackie Kay just has to be the warmest-hearted poet on the circuit. And on Saturday, she gave the best of many readings I've heard from her.
In this buttoned-up country, when poets perform their work, each poem is often followed by, at best, audibly appreciative sighs or scattered, embarrassed applause. I don't think I've ever before been at a reading where each poem was so rapturously received, where every face in the audience seemed to have settled, contentedly, into a smile.
Granted, some of Kay's poems do not, as they say in poetspeak "address the totality of the human experience": it would be hard to claim this for her poem Ma Broon Goes for Colonic Irrigation ("Out to find a new hobby? Say cheerio to the impacted jobbie") or any of her otherwise wonderful poems in this sequence.
Yet no sooner has Kay, er, loosened up her audience then she knocks them sideways with the most moving, deeply-felt but unsentimental, poetry about the death of a friend, say, or makes a poem about a river journey with her now grown-up son turn into a wonderful meditation on motherhood.
Then again, for surefire, guaranteed pleasure, what about Saturday's reading by Alexander McCall Smith? Within seconds of him talking about, say, the correct pronunciation of Gullane, the morality of dogs, or the funeral rites for Glasgow gangsters, the RBS Main Tent was fairly rocking with levels of appreciation that, in less Presbyterian countries, would definitely pass for a standing ovation.
This is where this Virtue versus Pleasure business gets awfully complicated. Because on Saturday it was the "pleasure" choices that turned out to have more insight into the human condition.
McCall Smith, asked about happiness, gave an existential defence of it as a willed choice in the face of nihilism that, among the barrage of laughs, was actually more pithily convincing than Grayling could manage.
As for Kay, there's more humanity, and more empathy, in just one of her poems than Burleigh – blithely unconcerned by the roots of terrorism, just keen to show the moral dwarfism of terrorists – could manage in a whole hour.
Throughout, Burleigh on terrorism seemed to echo John Major on crime – that we should "condemn a little more and understand a little less". The only motivation he seemed to think worthy of mention was Eric Hoffer's "Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to the empty life". You don't have to be a lily-livered liberal to think that there's more to it than that.
Oddly, his audience seemed too cowed by the bluntness of his assertion that terrorism is mainly down to a cosseted but poorly educated Moslem underclass to argue. Only one questioner in the audience tried, right at the end of the event and too late for a proper discussion.
Last year, he said, he'd been in his native Lebanon, "picking up little bits of babies' bodies after bombing by Israeli warplanes". And while in some places, like Northern Ireland and the Basque region, there was a clear, democratic alternative to terrorist parties, there wasn't always.
Burleigh wasn't having any of it. Hezbollah, he said, was the tool of Iranian foreign policy, nothing more. The notion that the ANC might have had any moral superiority in the fight against apartheid got similarly short shrift. An unsatisfying conclusion to an unedifying event.
Which is why it's good to turn, at last, to one that was its opposite. In what's thought to be a first for any book festival, director Catherine Lockerbie has commissioned a book by four leading Scottish writers – John Burnside, Janice Galloway, AL Kennedy and Don Paterson – whose work she has championed almost from the start of their careers.
On Saturday, they each read from it – a haunting elegy from Burnside, mischievous Zen renkus from Paterson and two powerful stories about collapsing relationships from Galloway and Kennedy.
Better still, just as Saturday's book festival also hosted six writers from Stavanger in Norway, the Scottish writers will reciprocate in October. In such hands, cross-cultural exchange isn't just a virtue: it's a sheer, undiluted pleasure too.
The full article contains 853 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
