Also read "The Trains" Paul Zimmer
When I first saw this essay I thought it would be about something totally different. I didn't really know what the word "scruples" meant, so I looked it up: Scruples-a doubt or hesitation that troubles the conscience or that comes from the difficulty of determining whether something is right. The first part of this essay really captures that. The first part of this essay is talking about how a professor asked anonymously about if his class would kill someone in another country if they would receive 1 million dollars and never be caught. He noticed that the number of people that said yes grew a little each year. He also asked them for their reasons behind doing it and the reasons varied. The point of this part of the essay was him asking himself how they know what is right and wrong to do in this situation. "I love that it wasn't high-mindedness back then, merely the obvious, and that so many wished to do good. Experience took years to show us what we could not sustain."
The second part of this essay was titled "Saints". The second part was written much differently than the first part. The first part was written like someone reflecting on a memory, while the second part was written more of how someone feels about the other people. The two different writing styles helped to play in with the title of the essay. "Those who earn their names know what suffering is...and elect it anyway. They love without ambivalence one shining thing, yet some-the even more saintly-are tortured by the manifold richness of the discernible world."
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