darkflavor

White is the background. Would a black background affect the way I write?

When I die I will be forgotten. I will pass out of memories like grains of sand through fingers. Though I will be immortalized with a headstone, that marker in the ground will be a unique as a leaf and as insignificant as a leaf. It will be a stone among stones – a dusty leaf resting among a wind-blown pile on the edge of the city.

I do not wish to be remembered that way.

There is an object I DO idealize: a star — a point of light of infinite brightness ever present in the night sky. Moreover, it’s a beacon of hope and inspiration that some things are not transient and destined to fade from memory, but are fixed and known from generation to generation.

The glory of immortality.

I received a message stating that I have touched, say half a dozen people. It goes on to argue that I am famous and have impacted the world because of the impression I made with the said half dozen. My response is what part of “impacting the world” do you not understand? Furthermore, I am supposed to react with “oh, ok.. that’s enough impacting and touching for me. I think I will settle now.”

This reminds me of the analysis of the play “Secret Life” from Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider:

(Excerpt)

(following paragraph from George Sampson’s Concise Cambridge History of English Literature)

[The Secret Life] is a puzzling, disturbing post-war play [that] shows us the intellectual world reduced to spiritual nihilism. There is no clear center of dramatic interest. The characters just come and go, and what ‘love interest’ there is seems entirely gratuitous. The dialogue is sometimes normally dramatic, sometimes philosophically enigmatic, as if the speakers had no other purpose than to ask riddles to which there can be no answer. Perhaps in no other volume is there so complete a revelation of the spiritual bankruptcy produced by the war.

Colin Wilson continues…
The background of the play is the post-war party politics of the Liberal party. The interest centers around two main characters, the middle-aged ex-politician Evan Strowde, and Oliver Gauntlett, his natural son, who has returned from the war minus an arm. What plot the play has can easily be outlined. Before the war, Strowde had been in politics. He had quarreled with the party leader and resigned. Now the party wants him back.

Oliver Gauntlett has been invalided from the war, gone into the City, and started to make a business career. When he is arrested at an anarchist meeting, he is glad to make the scandal an excuse for escaping from the futility of the City. It is Evan Strowde who puzzles him most. (At the beginning of the play he is not aware that Strowde is his father.) Strowde’s powerful intellect and great will-power should have made him a success in some field. Oliver wants to know why he has failed.

The play opens with a curious scene at Strowde’s house by the sea; Strowde and a group of old schoolfriends have gathered to perform _Tristan_and_Isolde_ on the piano, singing the parts themselves. The performance over, they talk reminiscently of their younger days, and Salomons states his creed as a practical politician:
Salomons: Never be carried off on crusades you can’t finance… Don’t, for one moment, let art and religion and patriotism persuade you that you mean more than you do. Stand by Jerusalem when it comes to stoning the prophets. I must be off.
Eleanor: Before you’re answered?
Solomons: Answers are echoes.

Joan Westbury, with whom Strowde had had a love affair sometime long before the war—who represents for him the clearest vision of certainty that he ever achieved—leans on the parapet of the loggia and stares at the moon:
Joan: I must pray now to the moon… as one burnt-out lady to another, to teach me to order my ways.

She has lost her two sons in the war. More recently, her home was destroyed by fire. She leans, staring at the moon, as the guests leave; from inside float snatches of the Second Act of _Tristan_–the love duet. The curtain descends on the first scene.

The fact that the play has no ‘clear center of dramatic interest’ makes it difficult to summarize. Certain conversations stand out as being important to the exposition. There is the long scene between Strowde and Joan, when Strowde’s sister Eleanor is in London and they have spent the day together. They pick up the threads of their old romance, and Joan admits that she is still in love with Strowde; nevertheless, she insists they were right to separate instead of marrying. She could not have lived her love for Strowde; it would have killed her. Now she asks him the question which also puzzles Oliver: why is he not a success? Why is he not in power instead of these bungling, well-meaning politicians? His answer is the essence of the play:

Strowde: Save me from the illusion of power! I once had a glimpse—and I thank you for it—of a power that is in me. But that won’t answer to any call.
Joan: Not even to the call of a good cause?
Strowde (_as_one_who_shakes_himself_free_from_the_temptations_of_unreality_): Excellent causes abound. They are served—as they are—by eminent prigs making a fine parade, by little minds watching what’s to happen next… Search for their strength—which is not to be borrowed or bargained for—it must spring from the secret life.

He scouts Joan’s suggestion that perhaps it would have been better if they had never met:

Strowde: No, that’s blasphemy. At least don’t join the unbelieving mob who cry: Do something, anything, no matter what… all’s well while the wheel’s go round—while something’s being done.
Joan ( _with_…_irony): But seek first the kingdom of God, and the desire of all other things shall be taken from you?
Strowde ( _very_simply_ ): It has been taken from me. I don’t complain and I don’t make a virtue of it. I’m not the first man who has found beliefs that he can’t put in his pocket like so much small change. But am I to deny them for all that?

This passage shows Strowde had a ‘glimpse of power’, of contact with some reality, awareness of a new area of his own consciousness, that came in a time of emotional stress. There is the constant searching of motive; analysis of other people’s and his own driving force (politicians are ‘little minds’ etc.). In one passage he even speaks with the accents of Wells’s pamphlet:

Joan: Evan—stir youself out of this hopelessness of unbelief.
Strowde ( _grimly_ ): When the donkey’s at the end of his tether and eaten his patch bare, he’s to cut capers and kick up dust, is he?

It is motive that has collapsed. The Outsider has glimpsed a higher form of reality than he has so far known. Subsequently he loses that glimpse and has to accept a second-best. But that ‘first-best’ is known to exist. Joan admits that she accepted marriage to a civil servant and ‘housekeeping in odd corners of the world’ because the strain of living on the level of ‘first-best’ would have been too much for her. Strowde has not given up the aspiration to the first-best, but he has preferred to do nothing when it seemed out of reach.

When, at the close of the scene, Eleanor returns with the news that Joan’s husband has died of a heart attack, the full implication of the scene has been hammered home. It was Joan who accepted second-best; now she has lost eve that.

In the Second Act, Strowde decides to return to politics; Oliver wants the job of his secretary, and when Strowde refuses, he automatically turns to the woman they are both in love with, Joan Westbury. There is an important scene between Oliver and Joan. He explains to her the reason he wants the close contact with Strowde. He wants to know why Strowde has failed. Joan points out that Strowde can hardly be said to have failed as a politician; but Oliver was not referring to that kind of success:

Oliver: Nothing’s much easier, is it, than to make that sort of success if you’ve the appetite for it…. But Evan set out to get past all tricks, to the heart of things…. Is it a stone-dead heart of things, and dare no one say so when he finds out?

Oliver has a symbol for this state of moral emptiness:

A shell missed me outside Albert and did for my watch. I could shake it, and it would tick for a bit, but the spring was gone. I’ve an idea I don’t grow any older now, and when I come to die, it’ll seem an odd, out-of-date sort of catastrophe.

This is Keat’s ‘posthumous existence’ of the last letter to Brown. Oliver’s solution to the question is simple: destruction.

Oliver: Save me from weary people with their No More War. What we want is a real one.
Joan: And where’s the enemy?
Oliver: If I knew where, I shouldn’t be sitting here helpless. But we’re tricked so easily.

In spite of this, certain notions still have value for him: courage and discipline. When Joan asks him: “Tell me how one soberly hates people—I don’t think I know.’

Oliver: Well, you can’t love a mob, surely to goodness? Because that’s to be one of them, chattering and scolding and sniveling and cheering—maudlin drunk if you like. I learned to be soldier enough to hate a mod. There’s discipline in heaven….

Both Oliver and Strowde are obsessed by a Pascalian world-contempt, an insight into ‘the misery of man without God’. But for either of them to accept God would be bad faith; the Existentialist must see and touch his solution, not merely accept it.

Strowde’s problem is not a dramatic problem; it can produce none of the violent emotions and make ‘good theater’. And with the problem fully set out in these two important conversations, Granvill-Barker has very little more to do than devise further situations that will show Oliver and Strowde in their characters of world-contemners. Strowde beings electioneering, with Oliver as his secretary; in America, Joan Wesbury is dying. It remains for Strowde to throw over the politics and sail for America; renounce the meaningless and turn toward his symbol of meaning. He leaves London on the eve of the election. But Joan Wesbury is dead before he gets to Southampton. The reader is left feeling oddly ‘up in the air’ about it all. No happy finale, no dramatic tying up of loose ends.

The last scene of the play recalls echoes of the first. When Strowde has gone, Oliver talks to the millionaire businessman, Lord Clumbermere. Clumbermere is another symbol of material success, like Salomans. But his philosophy is not so brutal; he is a vague, rather shy idealist, as well as a vastly successful businessman:

Clumbermere: You think you’re all for truth and justice. Right—come and run my pen factory and find out if that is so.
Oliver: If I ran your pen factory, I’d be for the pen, the whole pen and nothing but the pen
Clumbermere: Then you’d be of little use to me. If we want a good gold nib, it’s religion we must make it with….
Oliver: But are you a devil then, my lord, that you want to beat the souls of men into pen nibs?
Clumbermere: I hope not, Mr. Gauntlett, but if I am, please show me the way out of the pit…

Afterwards Oliver and the American girl Susan argue about whether to recall Strowde with the news that Joan is dead. Oliver finally gives way, with a bad grace. And when Susan tells him that he doesn’t know what he wants, he summarizes:

Oliver: There’s a worse mischief with most of us, Susan. What we want doesn’t count. We want money and we want peace… and we want our own way. Some of us want to look beautiful, and some want to be good. And Clumbermere gets rich without knowing why… and we statesmen puzzling the best way to pick his pocket. And you want Evan to come back to the middle of it all.
Susan: He belongs here.
Oliver: If he’d come back, he or another, and make short work of the lifeless lot of us…
Susan: Why didn’t Joan marry him? They’d have had some happiness at least, and that would have helped.
Oliver ( _a_last_effort_ ): Why doesn’t life plan out into pretty patterns and happy endings. Why isn’t it all made easy for you to understand?
Susan: Don’t mock at me any more, Oliver
Oliver: I’m sorry. I only do it because I’m afraid of you

And the closing cadence of the play is not a real ending:

Susan: Wouldn’t you want to be raised from the dead?
Oliver: No, indeed.
Susan: You’ll have to be, somehow.
Oliver: Do you wonder I’m afraid of you, Susan? ( _He_goes_out_.)

There is no prospect of anyone being ‘raised from the dead’, for that would mean new motives, new hopes and a new belief.

Earlier in this chapter, I used the phrase ‘near-religious terminology’, and it is now time to elucidate it. At the beginning of the Third Act, Strowde asks Oliver to check a quotation for him:

Strowde: Get me the Bible, will you?> I want to verify…. I think it’s first Kings, nineteen…
Oliver: What’s the quotation?
Strowde: Now, O Lord, take my life, for I am not better than my fathers. Very modern and progressive and disillusioned of Elijah! Why ever should he expect to be?

But that is the whole point. Strowde does expect to be, and Oliver expects to be… and they are not. There is an appetite for ‘progress’ in all Outsiders; and yet, as Strowde knows only too well, not primarily for social progress. ‘Not _better_ than his fathers’ –that is to say, not wiser than his fathers, not less futile, being a slave to the same weaknesses, the same needs. Man is as much a slave to his immediate surroundings now as he was when he lived in tree-huts. Give him the highest, the most exciting thoughts about man’s place in the universe, the meaning of history; they can all be snuffed out in a moment if he wants his dinner, or feels irritated by a child squalling on a bus. He is bound by pettiness. Strowde and Oliver are both acutely sensitive to this, _but_not_strong_enough_to_do_anything_about_it. Human weakness. When Joan tells Strowde she cannot marry him (at the end of Act II), Strowde, left alone, murmers: ‘Most merciful God … who makest thy creatures to suffer without understand …’ But he is not praying to God, he is only wondering at the pain he feels, his vulnerability, human weakness. And Hemingway’s early work, up to the short story a bout the Major whose wife died, is a long meditation on human vulnerability. And mediation on human vulnerability always leads to ‘religious thinking’, to Hemingway’s ‘He must find things he cannot lose’; to a development of an ethic of renunciation and discipline. It leads to a realization that man is not a constant, unchanging being: he is one person one day, another person the next. He forgets easily, lives in the moment, seldom exerts will-power, and even when he does, gives up the effort after a short time, or forgets his original aim and turns to something else. No wonder that poets feel such despair when they seem to catch a glimpse of some intenser state of consciousness, and know with absolute certainty that _nothing_ they can do can hold it fast.