Now that they were neighbours, Philippa and Mary began to see a great deal of each other, Mary finding Philippa as rewarding as ever. The war had provided concrete pictures around which each woman’s moral philosophy would later take shape. We cannot throw up our hands and claim to find the actions of an Eichmann unintelligible, Mary thought; we must be ‘willing to grasp imaginatively how [wickedness] works in the human heart, and particularly in our own hearts’.[47] Wickedness is not like aggression, ‘whose intrusion into human life needs a special explanation’; rather it is ‘a general kind of
...more
