Several people I have encountered in this life have impressed me with their integrity-of-purpose: the coherence, sincerity, and compelling nature of their objectives and life mission. Sometimes these objectives have been political, as in the case of Don Day and Bill Mansfield. In other cases, they have been spiritual or religious, as in the case of Jes Albert Moeller, whom I first met in Prague in 1984. I have been fortunate to know several musicians whose artistic goals demonstrated such integrity-of-purpose. All of these people have influenced me greatly.
There are other people whose purposes are both political and spiritual, something which seems to have been true for Vaclav Havel (whom I never met).
In my experience, this human attribute is rare. And I have never seen or heard anyone else talk of it, until now. In Judith Wright’s autobiography, she speaks (page 234) of her partner and later husband, the philosopher Jack McKinney, meeting her father:
That my father was grieved by my relationship with Jack is undeniable but, once they met, he gave in to Jack’s obvious honesty of intention and the needs of my own that Jack was filling. . . . “
Judith Wright [1999]: Half a Lifetime. Edited by Patricia Clarke. Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing.
