A cold, quiet morning. Ruckus, after an hour's clawful devotion to my apron strings (and I mean this literally), is blessedly asleep. I have begun an essay about Iris Murdoch's novel The Nice and the Good. This is about the hundredth essay I've started about an Iris Murdoch novel, but today I feel optimistic about writing, though not about my moral coherence, as you might understand when you read the passage that is triggering the essay:

Jessica thought, or had thought, that she was talented as an artist, but she could never decide what to do. From her education in art she had acquired no positive central bent or ability, not even any knowledge of the history of painting, but rather a sort of craving for immediate and ephemeral “artistic activity.” This had by now become, in perhaps the only form in which she could know it, a spiritual hunger. She and her comrades had indeed observed certain rules of conduct which had something of the status of tribal taboos. But Jessica had never developed the faculty of colouring and structuring her surroundings into a moral habitation, the faculty which is sometimes called moral sense. She kept her world denuded out of a fear of convention. Her morality lacked coherent motives.