Stories by Doris Lessing

After reading a few of Doris Lessing's short stories, I realize how much great writing I have missed by not reading more of her works earlier. Of the few stories I have read lately -- "Wine," "He," "An Old Woman and Her Cat," "A Room," "The Unposted Love Letter" and "The Other Garden" -- the thing that struck me repeatedly was the universality, the timelessness of Lessing's stories.

In "Wine," for instance, a husband and a wife talk as they sip wine. Lessing does not give this couple names. After all, it doesn't appear as if they really know each other that well anymore anyway. And they could be any married couple, perhaps many couples -- those who, as they say, have grown apart or those who never were quite together anyway.

The story that most affected me, though, was "An Old Woman and Her Cat." This story is about a poor and lonely widow named Hetty whose only companion in her London flat is a once-stray cat named Tibby. She feeds it, she talks to it, she sings to it. So, when demolition in the name of progress threatens their home, she protects Tibby with her life, much as the friendly, trusting Tibby has protected her -- by bringing her birds to cook as she had no money to buy food -- and as the little cat ultimately will trust another less-deserving human for its own protection.

Humanity. Progress. Society. Trust. For me, the story was all about society's misplaced priorities and the dangers of misplaced trust. We trust political leaders filled with hate -- and money -- to guard our freedom; we trust often-greedy banks with our money; we trust our children with teachers who make less than plumbers, our lives with exhausted emergency-room doctors. We trust our safety with police officers who make less than men who can run fast and throw a ball far. We trust, and all too often we get burned, cheated, robbed, hurt because there's someone else who's richer, smarter, closer in kin, higher in rank, more powerful or just better-looking.

Our obituary may someday show up in a newspaper if any of our "survivors" sees fit to buy the space. But for the most part, most of our deaths will go unnoticed by the rich, the powerful, the smarter, those higher in rank or status. But our life will have mattered -- to ourselves and to the ones we helped, especially if their station in life was even lower than our own. And their life, no matter how unnewsworthy, will have mattered to us as well.