The Secret Agent Compassion Quotes

Stevie gets really upset when he sees a cabman whipping a horse. It's probably a good thing he doesn't have a knife on him, because from what we can tell as this point, he'd probably use it. Right after this moment, though the cabman starts poking Stevie with his weird hook-hand. He tells Stevie that the life of a nighttime cab driver isn't as glamorous as its cracked up to be, so he has to whip his horse to make as many fares as he can. Dude has a family to feed, and there's not much Stevie can do about that. Again, you see Conrad hammering away at the point of Stevie's compassion, which applies to all living things.

When he keeps staring at the horse, Stevie starts worrying not only by the animal's painful life, but also the badness of the entire world. He tries as hard as he can to make sense of the situation, as though he might come up with some great solution to the world's problems. His sister Winnie, though, never thinks about these sorts of things because she feels that nothing can be done about them. Stevie never lets up in his efforts to figure a problem out, and in this case, the narrator ironically shows us that despite his intellectual disabilities, Stevie is actually a way deeper thinker than Winnie.

In his desperate attempt to think of a solution for all the pain and badness in the world, Stevie decides that he has to find an example of perfect compassion and bring everything back to it. For him, the best feeling ever is the feeling he had growing up when Winnie would take him into her bed. And no, not in a creepy way. Stevie would never associate going to bed with anything sexual. Instead, he remembers the feeling of Winnie bringing him into her bed to comfort him when he was growing up. So he wants to take this example and bring the whole world to bed with him. This passage gives us a really close look at the bond between Stevie and Winnie, while also showing how impossible it is for Stevie to heal the world. In this passage, Conrad might come closest to saying directly why he thinks compassion can't thrive on a social level.