Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 56

“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”

An economics professor uses this saying to teach his students a lesson. The words have several layers of meaning. The most obvious is that there is nothing wrong with wanting more and providing well for our families, so long as that drive does not lead to “cooking the books,” insider trading, pyramid schemes, or other illegal activities. That could land you in prison, provided you get caught.

Another meaning goes one layer deeper than the fear of getting caught. “Getting fat”—making a good income, acquiring many things, having the accoutrements of success—does not bring personal contentment. The good life in our day, Edwin Searcy writes, has become a matter of “securing the bottom line, building up a good portfolio, bolting the door against trouble, and playing your part as a consumer.”45 We know people who have done all that but lead lives of quiet desperation.

There is another interpretation. Maybe the good life is neither about getting fat nor about getting slaughtered. Maybe it is more about relationships. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian historian, novelist, and Pulitzer Prize winner, spent almost a dozen years in labor camps and in exile because he spoke out against Joseph Stalin. He advised: “Own what you can always carry with you; know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your bag.”46

“Own what you can always carry with you.” Solzhenitsyn does not mean what we can carry in a wallet or backpack or wheelbarrow or U-Haul. He means the bag of memories we have made and always carry in our hearts and minds. If we get slaughtered—swindled out of our life savings or sentenced to a concentration camp or diagnosed with terminal cancer—that bag of memories is the one thing that cannot be taken from us.