10.2307/3505228

Abstract

The stories of William Trevor often contain, near the end, a single sentence that captures – in one crystalline moment – a core insight toward which the story has been building all along. Near the end of his recent novel Death in Summer, the following sentence occurs: “Her compassion faltered: shame creeps through guilt and feels like retribution.”2 I believe that my ability to understand the profundity of this sentence, and thus the story in which it occurs, was aided enormously by my reading of the essays of Herbert Morris. And thus, in my essay, I will reflect on the themes present in this sentence and thereby follow, in my own limited way, a path familiar to all those who have read Morris: drawing philosophical inspiration from literature, trying to be open to the moral and spiritual insights latent in dark and mysterious stories and sayings,3 reflecting on the inter1 This paper was presented on April 2, 1999, in Berkeley, California, at the annual meetings of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, at a special session “The Work of Herbert Morris.” I was pleased and honored to be a part of this session, since my own thinking has been greatly influenced and enriched by Morris’s work and my life has been enriched by my personal interactions with him. I thus dedicate this paper to him with esteem and affection. I have received useful comments on an earlier draft, for which I am very grateful, from Herbert Morris, Peter de Marneffe, Elaine Yoshikawa, Jerome Neu, Sharon Lamb, Betsy Grey, Dan Strouse, Rebecca Tsosie, and Margaret Holmgren. 2 Trevor William, Death in Summer (New York: Viking, 1998), p. 211. In Trevor’s earlier Felicia’s Journey – a novel ultimately of understanding and even forgiveness of the most apparently unworthy of people – a similar function is performed (at least for me) by this sentence: “Lost within a man who murdered, there was a soul like any other soul, purity itself it surely once had been.” 3 Morris’s ability to use stories as a basis for deep philosophical reflection is impressive – e.g., his use of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s Traps at the beginning