Reflecting on Integrity

I came across a quote this morning in something I wrote long ago. It was a collection of short stories called Ambages, with a quote from Michael Ventura on the cover page.  I gather quotes… the way some people collect Hummel figurines, earrings, baseball cards, or coasters from foreign bars. This timely quote said:

“The value of having an inner map of the world as it is (not as its broadcast) is this: it allows you to know that your task is larger than yourself. If you choose, just by virtue of being a decent person, you are entrusted with passing on something of value through a dark, crazy time—preserving your integrity, in your way, by your acts and your very breathing for those who will build again when the chaos exhausts itself. People who assume the burden of their own integrity are free—because integrity is freedom, and (as Nelson Mandela proved) its force can’t be quelled even when a person of integrity is jailed (or fired). The future lies in our individual, often lonely, and certainly unprofitable acts of integrity, or it doesn’t live at all.”

I thought of this today because I’m re-reading Burmese Days by George Orwell. Had Eric Blair not gone to Burma as a policeman for the British crown and spent five years there, and seen at first hand the dirty work of empire, as he called it, we might not have the fiction and non-fiction that George Orwell left to the world.  No writer I can think of is more relevant for our times.  Now. Right now.

And yes, I’m a fool who believes in fine literature as moral council, as letting us see how we both fail and triumph as human beings. I’m also a fool because I write a blog which very few read and which requires the time of a friend who has the computer skills I lack.  But I persist in doing this because it affirms, if only to myself and to a few others, that the value of good literature must be honored by those whose belief in integrity… is alive and well, in our dark times of imperial and corporate rule.