Socrates was never wider of the mark than when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. He brushes aside some of the best lives ever led – if, that is, by ‘best’ we mean productive and by ‘unexamined’ we mean unexamined by the individual himself. This reflection occurred to me as I explored an exhibition (closing this Saturday, 17 May) at the Blue Gallery in London. Thatcher: An Exhibition of New Contemporary Art is a small collection of specially commissioned works of art and design inspired by Margaret Thatcher.
‘Good Heavens,’ she would say. ‘What nonsense is this?’ She wouldn’t see the point. She hardly ever writes or talks of her feelings, her doubts, her joys or sadnesses. She does not find herself half as interesting as we do.
It is a characteristic of many tremendously valuable people that their whole lives have been gripped by a sense of external purpose. Such men and women are unselfconscious, having neither the time nor inclination to look inward. Let others be their biographers; they would see autobiography of the introspective kind as a mark of weakness.
I find such individuals very strange and wholly admirable. To feel impatient with the inward and anxious to get on with the job strikes me as one of the components of human greatness. I once asked someone close to the Baroness Thatcher whether the former prime minister was ever hurt by the satirical portraits in words and pictures that she had inspired.
My respondent placed both palms into the position of a horse’s blinkers: ‘Tunnel-vision,’ she replied. ‘Her reading-matter was what came in her red boxes. It wasn’t that she refused to read the more personal stuff, and it wouldn’t have upset her; it was that she really wasn’t interested.
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