No one truly sensitive can hurt another human being.
I stood, stand, alone.
Hee. —Oh, one can, if one is forced, retreat behind the subtitle of what one is about (Imagining Fowles); one can point out that to dismiss an author utterly on the basis of their adolescent journals is as wrong-headed as to dismiss a neighborhood utterly because the houses are peeling and the children playing in the street are dirty; one should perhaps note that The Magus, for instance, isn’t at all important or good or even worthwhile for the reasons the book jacket says (then, what book is? —It would take too long to get into: suffice it to say that the Magus is only the first of the Major Arcana), and Fowles was an adolescent for such a terribly long time; even so, he is the sort of author that the world is better off having had.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a motherload of schadenfreude in Ian Sansom’s review of John Fowles: The Journals (and, almost incidentally, Eileen Warburton’s John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds)—
Basically, according to Fowles, everyone else is totally crap: useless, rubbish, a waste of time and not worth bothering about. He starts with his parents, as is traditional, and moves on from there. The parent-hate stuff is more Mole than Freud – not so much traumatising primal scene as terribly noisy hoovering. They tidy up, your mum and dad. ‘Spasm of hate. Trying to listen to Mozart 465 Quartet, when M[other] seems, almost deliberately, to spoil it.’ Every schoolboy knows that parents have no taste, but Fowles remains a pitiless adolescent into adulthood. ‘A new view on my parents, which embraces all their faults – or better, the qualities they lack. They have no sense of style. They can’t tell a stylish jug from a pretty jug, they don’t feel the style of things, of a book, of a piece of music, of a meal, of a flavouring, of life.’ ‘For some time,’ he concludes, ‘I feel willingly that I could like killing them.’ He does his best to analyse his parents’ apparent failings, compared to his own obvious excellence, and this is what he comes up with: ‘The difference in environmental norms accounts for much – a boarding-school, an officers’ mess, a university, all have led me into a much wider plane than 25 rather introvert years in the same quiet household, where the class has slipped.’ All that education didn’t go to waste, then. His poor sister, who is younger than him and who can therefore never catch up, comes off even worse: ‘Hazel is an interesting test-object for egotism. Financially it is to my benefit that she should not exist . . . She merely seems like a small pet.’
Nicholas Urfe, it seems, learned nothing. —Via The Minor Fall, The Major Lift.
"Hate Spasm" is my next band name. "Motherlode of Schadenfreude" will be our first album.
But oh my god "they tidy up, your mum and dad," is so good! Almost had tea out my nose.
C
"They tidy up, your mum and dad" really is a spectacular line.
At any rate, I've always thought that the entire point of a personal journal is to have a place to write down everything one thinks that makes one seem petty and pathetic and spiteful and sad. The idea here--or the hope, anyway, as I've always understood it--is that writing down such thoughts down might act as a kind of expatiatory act, preventing the journaller from actually speaking aloud or acting on those thoughts in real life.
What this does mean, though, is that all personal journals really ought be periodically and ritually burnt.
Or at the very least salted away by a significant other so that biographical detectives and other such vultures as might be inclined could have some bones to pick over—long after the corpus has been interred.
Or at the very least salted away. . . .
Sure! But only because I don't believe in an afterlife. The dead are beyond humiliation.
Fortunate they.
They tidy up, your Mum and Pop
You may not like it, but they do.
They sweep up all the crumbs you've dropped,
and buy you cases of Mountain Dew.