Life is full of alternatives but no choice. - Patrick White

they were both shocked, if not positively alarmed, by an interruption to their celebration. The door opened. ‘Sister, can she be seen?’ It was Mr Wyburd in something too loud for a whisper and less than his usual grammar. ‘The princess has arrived. Her daughter.’ As if this were not enough, a second figure was pushing rustling past the one at the door: for Mrs Hunter it was sound perfume joy despair; whereas Sister Badgery saw a tall thin hatless woman, somewhere around fifty (to be on the kind side) her dress unsurprising except for its simplicity and the pearls bounding about around her neck, and on her bosom, as she half ran half staggered. A princess shouldn’t run, the nurse recovered herself enough to disapprove; and she shouldn’t have a horse face. But Dorothy floundered, imperviously, on. ‘O mon Dieu, aidez-moi !’ she gasped, before assuming another of her selves, or voices, to utter, ‘Mother!’ and lower, ‘Mum!’ Then, by act of special grace, a blind was drawn over the expression the intruder was wearing for this old mummy propped up in bed, a thermometer sticking out of its mouth; if life were present, it was the life generated by jewels with which the rigid claws were loaded.

The ideal of non-attachment has been preached again and again in the course of the last 3000 years. It is found in Hinduism, the teachings of Buddha, the doctrine of Lao Tsu, in the philosophy of the Greek Stoics. The Gospel of Jesus is essentially one of non-attachment to the things of this world, and of attachment to God. What the Jewish philosopher Spinoza calls "blessedness" is simply the state of non-attachment, just as Spinoza's "human bondage" is the condition of one who identifies himself with his own desires, emotions, and thought processes, or with their objects in the external world.

I have derived immense comfort, hope, faith, inspiration from a great American, the Cistercian monk-teacher-activist Thomas Merton. Initially a contemplative religious, Merton's spiritual drive was aimed at halting the dehumanization of man in contemporary society, a sickness he saw as leading to mass violence and ultimately nuclear war. War of any kind is abhorrent. Remember that since the end of World War II, over 40 million people have been killed by conventional weapons. So, if we should succeed in averting nuclear war, we must not let ourselves be sold the alternative of conventional weapons for killing our fellow men. We must cure ourselves of the habit of war.