V~Something that fingers the thigh of what is true

One of the many people I have mentioned very sparingly in my
chapters thus far is Paolo, the vegan, and the gargoyle of H0. I
describe him as such not because he is unpleasant to look at, which he
is not, but because there is a purity about him that evades most
creatures, particularly those who claim to be pure of heart. Gargoyles
were (I am led to believe,) used to ward off evil spirits.

I recall being crouched in front of the fridge, its door wide open, a
litre bottle of milk held to my breast, when Paolo entered the kitchen.
I felt I should explain myself.

"I'm just wondering," I said, "which of these older bottles of milk I
should throw away in order to make room for mine?"

"All of it," he instructed, before I could inform him I had narrowed
down my choices to Joe's nearly empty one and Paul's out of date one.
"Throw all the milk away. It'll only give you prostate cancer. Milk is
meant for baby cows, Jon, not humans."

"All the same," I muttered, going for Joe's, "it goes well with
cereal."

Another time I had been filling up the dirty old plastic kettle with
water from the hot tap. Paolo stepped in.

"Ah, I wouldn't do that, Jon. It may seem like you're saving time and
electricity, but the water from the hot tap isn't properly filtered,
and it's full of very nasty things. Sorry to sound like a mother,
but?"

"No, no, that's alright," I interrupted him, tipping the water into
the sink. "Thank you."

And I meant it.

Yet another time, I heard Joe Hell complaining, not bitterly but quite
cheerily, about Paolo's very particular nature.

"You can't win with Paolo," he told his companion. "You think you've
done good by buying something organic, and he tells you that some
farmer somewhere has been ripped off in order to earn the middle man
money."

These incidences, along with my other informative run-ins with his
friendly lectures, lead me to think very highly of Paolo, and I am
certainly not alone in this respect. I can, however, see cause for
Joe's complaint - or rather, a satisfying explanation. We have, after
all, everything to fear from a very knowledgeable man who goes around
parading that knowledge wherever it is entirely relevant. It isn't that
you can't win with Paolo himself, but that you can't win with the truth
of the matter, and Paolo is a willing agent of the truth of the matter.
The truth of the matter being that, despite the qualities I profess all
these wonderful creatures to have, we are far from pure and good. We
live in luxury at the expense of the vitality and diversity of the
planet's natural structures, at the expense of other people's lives and
of the future itself. It needs repeatedly pointing out, I feel, that we
are not a noble or enlightened race - we are a proud race, and blind
where blindness permits us to think very highly of ourselves. The man
who stands on a podium and accuses his enemy of lacking moral integrity
goes home and eats part of a slaughtered animal - because he does not
consider himself an animal, or under threat from animals, or anything
like an animal, he has no desire to campaign for an end to barbarism in
general. Barbarism has nothing to do with moral integrity when it isn't
directed at someone like you.

And no one likes to be reminded that they themselves are an
irresponsible parasite, especially those who look forward to the
extermination of our own irresponsible parasites - our little manmade
monsters who disgrace us so badly.

"I look at cows," Paolo once said, "and they remind me of the photos
of Jews in concentration camps. They've been denied dignity, and
they've been denied it for centuries. We don't know what they might
have become if we had never enslaved them."

The values of man are not in decay. We've always liked the idea of
living like Roman aristocrats.

Paolo is to be revered, I think, for putting far more effort into
being a good man than is deemed necessary by our precious,
self-interested civilisation. Most of what I love about people only
affects other people, and often no one who is not close to them - they
are internal qualities, and that is why I call them lies. They are so
difficult to judge by any quantitative figure that for all I know, I
may be making them up.

External qualities - those whose effects reach outside of our enclosed
international society - are far harder to come by in men and women
alike, and it is only an irritable fear that persuades us to think
little of the people who possess them. Most of us take great liberties
in calling ourselves good people, when our effect on the planet is so
utterly negative, when we can't even stave off the desire to abuse and
destroy our own remarkable bodies.

Paolo does not simply work to deter people either. We once caught him
devouring an artichoke, and he gave me a couple of pieces to
sample.

"Try to savour the subtleness of the flavour," he said. "Our
taste-buds have been blasted by all sorts of unhealthy artificial
chemicals, so a lot of people find artichokes dull and tasteless. But
there is a wonderful flavour there, if you're willing to let yourself
experience it."

I did try to take his advice to heart, but I think I will need more
practice eating artichokes before I can second his remarks. As
consolation, however, I can't help but wonder if my declaration that I
much preferred vegetables raw had some slight influence in his decision
to give up cooking entirely in the Spring.

To finish on a discouraging note, Paolo is not perfect. I did hear him
frantically searching for his missing mobile phone once.

"It's sad, I know," he told Joe, "but I'm so used to having it I can't
survive for any length of time without it."

I could have said, "It'll only give you brain cancer." But I didn't,
partly because Paolo has done a lot more to earn forgiveness for his
weaknesses than I have, and partly because I wasn't feeling impolite
enough to muscle into the conversation.