A Severed Wasp: Orwell – Woolf – Kierkegaard

(November 2011)

All of these things ring true. In fact, Orwell occasionally sounds a bit like a British Heidegger, using elegant and straightforward English (rather than pretentious Teutonic jargon) to spear humanistic hubris. However, if you read the article from which the quotation is taken, the eventual implication is that humanism has to do better because, in the end, no man is an island. But does hubris feed on that very thought?

Beautifully written. Yet people who write this kind of thing may be expressing not a quiet sense of spiritual insularity but a fiercely resentful narcissism. And the difference is enormous.

People catch trains and go to work, but civic life is a genial pretence. Virginia sees through it all. Not for her the dismal mediocrity of making a living. Safe in the upper middle-class enclave she thinks has been so unfair to her, she sees herself as a deserter, of all things. Then, adding to the fast-growing list of ordinary people she mocks for being, well, ordinary, she has a go at ordinary churchgoers:

It just goes to show that you should look at how people comport themselves towards the world before accepting that they have something worthwhile to say about turning away from it. But the good news is that, when you do look, what you see is not always a disappointment.

His devoted simple folk would not have thought that they were nothing if not what they were in terms of their gifts and talents. On the contrary, they would have been seen those gifts and talents as pleasing to God rather than self-definitive.

We have to start there.

 

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