My mother was given to enigmatic pronouncements. "Where can they all be going?" she would puzzle, battling increasingly feral Auckland traffic, oblivious to the fact that she, too, was inexplicably going somewhere. "I like to know what I think," she would declare. That made me laugh when I was young and therefore knew everything and what I thought about it.
Now I spend way too much time wishing I knew what I thought about just about everything in an increasing complicated world. Imagine having the unclouded certainty to think that opening everything up during a global pandemic means sweet liberty. See such headlines from the UK as, "England's 'freedom day' marred by soaring cases and isolation chaos." Nearly 50,000 cases in a day as I write, with Boris Johnson in isolation and, arguably, in chaos.
There are other dilemmas, as old as human frailty. Can you love the art and think the artist is a horrible human being? Virginia Woolf was a fearful snob and, despite being married to her "penniless Jew", Leonard Woolf, wrote in her diary things like, "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh." She also wrote some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read.
There's inevitably an element of subjectivity in decisions about who you won't read again, whose movies you won't watch. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books remain on the shelf despite the fracas over her views on gender. I'll read Roald Dahl to my grandchildren though my experience of his stories is shadowed by - yes, again – the anti-Semitism he expressed in his lifetime.
I don't care if I ever see another Mel Gibson movie. Roman Polanski is harder. His movie The Pianist, based on story of pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman's survival in the Warsaw Ghetto, recounts my family's history. An extended family member told me that movie allowed her to forgive the demons of a parent who had lost almost everyone in the Holocaust. Polanski saw his mother taken to her death. He escaped the Krakow Ghetto at the age of 7. His father cut the wires of a fence and told him, "Walk, don't run." In 1978 he fled the United States after pleading guilty to the rape of a 13-year-old girl.