Saturday 17th December

Thank goodness this is the last of the deadly sins; what started out as a bit of a wheeze has ended up a slight chore.  And so Anna and her sister Anna the dancer arrive in San Francisco to discover Envy – the worst surely of all the deadly sins.  Envy eats you up from the inside, and is never satisfied – there is always someone who has more than you, and you will never catch them up, but just look behind you for once and you will discover that there are far more who have less than you do.  And they will never catch you up either.

The whole of our economic system works on envy, that most insidious of sins.  And the motor for this is advertising, without advertising how would we know what others have and therefore what we might not have known that we desired.  Try to imagine a world only a couple of hundred years ago if you can; if you were poor, as the vast majority would have been you either worked on the land, like your fathers and mothers before you, and would have known little of the world, and even if you had money you almost surely knew your place and just how far you would be allowed to rise up the ladder – and how far you could slide down too.  You would have seen the rich pass by in their grand carriages and big houses, but no seeds of envy would be germinated; how would they grow if they were without advertising to fertilise them.  Then as commerce and communications improved, so too did envy, until during the First World War large numbers of working class lads saw at close hand how the rich disported themselves, and revolution was in the air, driven no doubt by a degree of envy.  And now with advertising everywhere, every minute of the day bombarding us with envy, feeding our sense of entitlement – why should we not have all these gadgets and clothes and jewelry and cars and happiness that these other people all seem to have in abundance.   Well, the reason is my friend that the having it will not make you any happier at all, but getting rid of envy certainly will.  It will be like a weight off your shoulders when you stop worrying about what others have, and just enjoy whatever you have yourself.

And after coming back home after seven years of travel and discovery, the sisters Anna have by a combination of hard work and employing some of the sins they have seen, succeed in earning enough to buy the little house back in Mississippi, but as a result Anna the dancer begins to be resentful of all those who engaged in the sins which she has deprived herself of (she left the sinning to her sister Anna), and the epilogue ends in a sad reflective mood, with Anna’s resigned response to her sister, “Yes, Anna.”

I have never really understood this much loved cautionary tale, no doubt the seven sins did enrich but corrupt the first sister Anna, but the pure untouched sister Anna was not satisfied either.  Is this the message then; the human condition means that whether we experience the deadly sins or not we will still remain unsatisfied.  Anyway, no more sins – it will soon be Christmas, which would surely have to have been invented by now if it wasn’t here already.  How can we possibly face the coming winter without this annual cheering up?

I hope you have enjoyed my interpretation of the Seven Deadly Sins, now go out and buy the music – there are several recordings but I still like the one by Marianne Faithfull the  best.