If symptoms persist. . .

APPEARANCES can be deceptive, as I am sure everyone knows. Unfortunately, appearances are all we have to go on, which is why (in part) we are deceived over and over again.

These remarks, which I admit are nei- ther original nor of Kantian profundity, were occasioned by a recent visit of mine to the prison. I had been consulted by the usual crowd of malingerers, ingratia- tors and threateners (TN see you on the out') when I was pleasantly surprised by the arrival of a fine-featured, middle- aged man with not a tattoo visible any- where. He was pleasant without being obsequious; be bade me good morning and I asked him to sit down. At last, I thought, I had someone civilised to whom I might talk.

I noticed that in his rather delicate hands (it is odd how we unconsciously associate fine bone-structure with fine feeling) he held a book about Hume's moral epistemology. Now it happens that, insofar as I have a hero at all, Hume is my hero. How admirably good humour and irony suffuse every word he wrote, just as dishonesty and malice suf- fuse every word written by certain jour- nalists I could name (but won't). Hume's writings, despite their lightness of touch, were both subtle and profound. No one ever understood better the limits of rationality, or embodied more fully in his life and work the man of philosophic good sense.

I said something along these lines to the prisoner, who agreed with me whole- heartedly. Hume was his hero, too. We talked a little of philosophy; and then he told me that his real passion was music, that he composed and spent almost all of his waking time practising Brahms and Scriabin on the penitentiary piano. As he talked, I flicked idly through his prison record. 'What's a man like you in prison for?' I asked.

'Murder,' he said.

'Your wife?' I asked — the great majority of murders are domestic tiffs writ large.

'No, two kids in the park. I cut their throats.'

I found an account of the crime in his records. It was so terrible — so com- pletely arbitrary and senseless — that my hands began to tremble.

'Why did you do it?'

'I've asked myself that,' he said. 'I can't think of any reason at all.'

I began a series of banal reflections of the there-but-for-the-grace-of variety. But can it really be true that each of us, in a moment of frenzy, might commit such an act?

My next patient was a man found guilty several years before of murder. He had always vehemently denied the charge, and had waxed indignant about the terrible injustice which had been done to him.

So convincing was his indignation that doubts about his guilt had entered his records, which were written by men whose contact with criminals made them unsentimental about human nature, to say the least.

'You still maintain you're innocent, I suppose?' I said.

'No,' he said casually. 'I did kill her.' 'Why?'

'I was upset at the time.'

Was his confession any more believ- able than his denial? No wonder jesting Pilate asked what truth was and would not stay for an answer.

Theodore Dalrymple