Richard Holloway Writer and Broadcaster hough I have met Edwin Morgan a couple of times, I do not know him, and I doubt if he would even recognize me. That does not bother me in the slightest, because it is his art that has challenged and nourished me, and that is gift enough. It is in my own thinking and the writing that has flowed from it that I have found him to be so helpful. One of my preoccupations has been in trying to account for the emergence of compassion in a meaningless and indifferent universe. Some philosophers have described the lifeforce as a pure will to power that achieves in us the expression and consciousness of its own nature. Because we are creatures with aims, we ask about the purpose of this extraordinary process, but the universe itself gives us no answer and there may be none to give. Nietzsche was convinced that the universe itself had no meaning:
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‘Becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing,’ he wrote; it simply is. Even if we accept this, it does not mean that we ourselves are destined to lead pointless lives: we could hear it as a challenge to give our own lives meaning and purpose by the way we choose to act. Nevertheless, the waste and aimlessness of the universe can sicken us, and for those who want to believe in some kind of purpose behind it, its immense indifference is disturbing. That is when another paradox attracts our attention and finds a voice: human compassion. In an aimless universe, the emergence of compassion like that in his poem ‘In the Snack Bar’, is an evolutionary miracle, a shock as remarkable as the sudden jump into life of the primal gene. I am grateful to Edwin Morgan not for explaining it, but simply for expressing it. It is more than enough.
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