Dear Oscar,

I hope this letter finds you well. I hope that your presence across the span of history is somehow at ease, and that you can view from your vantage point with compassion. After all, your own faults were more known to yourself than they were to anyone else, and that is true of all of us.

I have been writing to you recently about how slowly time advances, and how changes in opinions and social mores are even slower, but that if we wait long enough, and look back through aeons, there are indications that some elements of human evolution are to the benefit of man, and beast, and planet itself. Admittedly they seem few and far between, particularly as the worst possible elements of human interaction keep on reasserting themselves, even in the face of the best. I suppose one has to assume that it was ever thus – but I wonder if that need be the case?

Evolution seems to imply a state of being that is not one of stasis, that there is movement, that there is change, that alternatives come into being. I have been giving this much thought, as set in my ways as so many of us are; as you were, Oscar, even to the point of your own demise. Is the failed hero a real hero?

It seems to me that change comes also very, very slowly, and that in reality change comes in the smallest of moments, the tiniest of gestures, in those quick and fleeting seconds where one actually does do something that one did not do before. I think that it is in its insignificance that its actual significance lies. Taking an alternative route, a different course of action, and actually making a decision that is unlike decisions that have been made before, that would seem to me to indicate real change. It is as simple as choosing not to butter one’s toast in order to reduce one’s fat intake, and then repeating the action, day after day, until a ‘new normal’ comes into being. Not to put the cigarette to one’s lips; not to fill the glass of wine brimful; not to ignore the neighbour as they appear in their garden, but to say: “Hello”, and then to say: “Hello” again; not to put one’s cross into a familiar box on the ballot paper, just to move one’s hand, just before it happens, whatever the consequences may be imagined to be. Taking the alternative, with precision, or sometimes recklessly, and re-charting the course.

If you, dear Oscar, had not …. but then of course, you did.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.