A Fortunate Man by John Berger

consequence of his approach.
    He can argue that the foresters are in some respects fortunate compared to the majority of people in the world. But what is far more relevant to his own preoccupations is that he knows that the foresters are in almost all respects unfortunate compared to what they could be – given better education, better social services, better employment, better cultural opportunities, etc.
    Talk of the ‘bad old days’ before the war can encourage a certain superficial belief in progress. But faced with the young – and the prospects before them – it is hard to maintain any such belief. Sassall is forced to acknowledge that, by his own standards, they are having to settle for a fifth best.

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    The situation by no means leaves him helpless. He can safeguard their health. Through the Parish Council he can urge improvements in the village. He can explain children to parents and vice versa. His word about a boy or a girl can carry some weight in the local schools. He can try to extend the meaning of sex for them. But the more he thinks of educating them – according to the demands of their very own minds and bodies before they have become resigned, before they accept life as they find it – the more he has to ask himself: by what right do I do this? It is not certain that it will make them socially happier. It is not what is expected or wanted of me. In the end he compromises – as the limitations of his energy would anyway force him to do; he helps in an individual problem, he suggests an answer here and an answer there, he tries to remove a fear without destroying the whole edifice of the morality of which it is part, he introduces the possibility of a hitherto unseen pleasure or satisfaction without extrapolating to the idea of a fundamentally different way of life.
    I do not want to exaggerate Sassall’s dilemma. It is one that many doctors and psychotherapists have to face: how far should one help a patient to accept conditions which are at least as unjust and wrong as the patient is sick? What makes it more acute for Sassall is his isolation, his closeness to his patients and a bitter paradox which we have not yet defined.
    I believe that Sassall’s disquiet is provoked, not by individual issues or cases because then all his attention is absorbed in ‘feeling his way’ and in reckoning how far he can go, but by the constant contrast between the general expectations of his patients and his own.
    The average forester of over twenty-five expects, when healthy, little of life. (His extravagant expectation of fraternal recognition when ill is understandable precisely because the illness returns him to childhood, to a period before he had learned to abandonhis hopes, and when these hopes could still be reasonably satisfied within the family.) He expects to maintain what he has – job, family, home. He expects to continue to enjoy his pleasures – a cup of tea in bed, Sunday newspapers, the pub at week-ends, an occasional trip to the nearest city or to London, some form of game, his jokes. His wife has her equivalent pleasures. Both of them have fantasies which are infinitely more resourceful and rich – perhaps particularly the wife, who ages far faster. They also have their opinions and their stories to tell, and these may cover much wider ground. But what they expect in their own situation in any foreseeable future is very little: they may want more, they may believe they have a right to more: but they have learned and they have been brought up to settle for a minimum. Life is like that, they say.
    Their foreseen minimum is not purely economic: it is not even principally economic: today the minimum might include a car. It is above all an intellectual, emotional and spiritual minimum. It almost empties of content such concepts (expressed in no matter what words) as Renewal, Sudden Change, Passion, Delight, Tragedy,