Hillary Clinton

Source: Bigstock

But with Mrs. Clinton the process has worked in the opposite, more usual direction: The skin round her neck had become wrinkled as a turkey’s; her face was no longer as smooth as a plastic surgeon’s dream; she exuded no longer a false youth, as if the years had taken no toll of her; and defeat, sorrow, and grief, perhaps even a kind of senile incomprehension, were in her eyes, at least in this photograph. It is one thing to experience a hopeful ambition ignominiously shattered at a time in life when there is still time for another, but it is quite another thing when it is too late for any comparable ambition to be realized.

I was surprised by my own feeling of sympathy for her, I who had previously detested her (quite without admiring Mr. Trump”€”very far from it) for her ruthless self-righteousness and self-righteous ruthlessness, with one eye always fixed on high moral principle and the other on the main chance, the latter always seeming to triumph over the former.

But I should not have been surprised. In the beautiful and elegant opening passage of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments we read:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow, from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instance to prove it; for this sentiment, like other original passions of human virtue, is by no means confined to the virtuous ad humane…

My sympathy did not, of course, go very deep or last very long. He who lives by ambition dies by ambition. If you make the achievement of power the meaning of your life and you are thwarted in it, some kind of collapse is only to be expected.

Then a question entered my mind: Had all the previous photographs of Mrs. Clinton that had appeared in the world’s press and other media before her defeat, that made her look as well-preserved as Tutankhamun’s golden visage, been the result of a conspiracy by makeup artists and others to deceive? I, for one, was deceived: Whatever else I thought about her, I thought she was well-preserved.

I must reread The Picture of Dorian Gray.