Kermit the Frog, of enduring Sesame Street fame, was always a favourite with my children and me: he was so amusing and appealing, and also had a way of unobtrusively communicating simple goodness along with the occasional moral message. He was also concerned with the most important matter of the self, so that in his most famous song he puts a positive spin on the matter of greenness. While admitting certain drawbacks to the condition, he eventually asserts that green is the shade of spring, and of trees. He lists the good things about being green: greenness can be big, important, or tall, and by the end of his song he professes himself happy with his lot and colour.
According to long tradition, however, green is the colour of envy and jealousy, two emotions that are often confused. Jealousy is a negative feature of relationships, and is usually connected with low self-esteem and the fear of being replaced by a more attractive person. Jealousy is thus concerned with challenges to construed possession, while envy concentrates on lack, and on emptiness in ourselves. Both, it seems, are connected with basic dissatisfaction. Kermit, for example, sometimes thinks it might be nicer to be red, yellow or gold. Jealousy and envy have always been with us, alas. Cain killed Abel because he envied the favour Abel had found in God’s eyes: the brothers had both made sacrifices to God, but Abel’s sacrifice was preferred.
Shakespeare was much concerned with the problem of envy, listed in Catholic doctrine as one of the Seven Deadly Sins: think of childless Macbeth’s envy of Banquo, whose descendants will be kings, or of Iago, envious of Cassio being appointed lieutenant, and also envious of Othello, who has won Desdemona: I do love her, too. It is a nasty irony that Iago warns Othello to beware the green-eyed monster. Closer to our own time, philosopher Bertrand Russell considered envy to be the most potent cause of unhappiness, and he was probably right. The tendency starts early, for we see both jealousy and envy in the pattern of sibling rivalry: my elder granddaughter, practising self- knowledge at the age of four and a bit when her sister was born, told her mother that she wanted to be the baby again.
Speaking of mothers, I was extremely fortunate in having a wise one: she was ever on the qui vive for sibling rivalry and