I finished Maugham's Summing Up some time ago. But just did not have the time to type all the quotes I wanted to post here.
Initially, when the book dragged, I wondered why Rog had recommended it. But if he had recommended it, I knew it was worth being patient. :) I was amused at a few perspicacious things Maugham said about the theatre, about writing style and about publishing books. But these comments were also often prolonged and tiring.
But when Maugham came to experience and his philosophy stemming from that experience, I found his frankly and artlessly expressed thoughts deeply moving. I just could not help being affected. Maugham says that though he has been called a pessimist, he is merely frank. And from the feeling with which he has put forward his explanations, it is not difficult to believe that.
Since it is difficult to record my immediate responses to these pages now, I will only quote, with a remark here and there. And anyway, commentary would be both unnecessary and pointless. When I read the last chapters of the book, I was a silent receptacle: some books make you think, weigh and argue, these pages were too overwhelming (and convincing) for any such "active" response.
Maugham is full of characteristic irony at the beginning of the book:
I have no natural trust in others. I am more inclined to expect them to do ill than to do good. That is the price one has to pay for having a sense of humour. A sense of humour leads you to take pleasure in the discrepencies of human nature; it leads you to mistrust great professions and look for the unworthy motive that they conceal; the disparity between appearance and reality diverts you, and you are apt when you can't find it to create it... The humorist has a quick eye for the humbug; he does not always recognise a saint. But if to see men one-sidedly is a heavy price to pay for a sense of humour, there is a compensation that has a value too. You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance... [The humorist] does not moralize, he is content to understand; and it is true that to understand is to pity and forgive.
[T]he doctor, especially the hospital doctor, sees [human nature] bare. Reticences can generally be undermined; very often there are none. Fear for the most part will shatter every defence; even vanity is unnerved by it. Most people have a furious itch to talk about themselves and are restrained only by the disinclination of others to listen. Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as a result of innumerable rebuffs.
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Here is some demystification for the novelist:
[T]hough the whole world, with everyone in it and all its sights and events, is your material, you yourself can only deal with what corresponds to some secret spring in your own nature. The mine is incalculably rich, but each one of us can get from it only a definite amount of ore. Thus in the midst of plenty the writer may starve to death. His material fails him and we say that he has written himself out.
It would be difficult to persuade an author that there was not a close interaction between the body and the mind… Most writers have chills and fevers, aches and pains, nausea at times, when they are engaged in composition; and contrariwise they are aware to what morbid states of their body they owe many of their happiest inventions. Knowing that many of their deepest emotions, many of the reflections that seem to come straight from heaven, may be due to want of exercise or a sluggish liver, they can hardly fail to regard their spiritual experiences with a certain irony; which is all to the good, for thus they can manage and manipulate them.
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And now he is a man who has experienced and thought of life for years. These passages are sad with the ring of truth:
If death ends all, if I have neither hope for good to come nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what I am here for and how in these circumstances I must conduct myself. Now the answer to one of these questions is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning. We are here, inhabitants for a little while of a small planet, revolving round a minor star which in its turn is a member of one of unnumbered galaxies… And if the astronomer tells us the truth this planet will eventually reach a condition when living things can no longer exist upon it and at long last the universe will attain that final state of equilibrium when nothing more can happen. Aeons and aeons before this man will have disappeared. Is it possible to suppose that it will matter then that he ever existed? He will have been a chapter in the history of the universe as pointless as the chapter in which is written the life stories of the strange monsters that inhabited the primeval earth.
I must ask myself then what difference all this makes to me and how I am to deal with these circumstances if I want to make the best use of my life and to get the utmost that I can out of it. Here is not that I speak, it is the craving within me, which is in every man, to persevere in my own being; it is the egotism that we all inherit from that remote energy which in the unplumbed past first set the ball rolling; it is the need of self-assertion which is in every living things and which keeps it alive.
I have sought to make a pattern of my life. This, I suppose, might be described as self-realization tempered by a lively sense of irony; making the best of a bad job.
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It is evident that this author has a penetrating insight into his art and craft:
Much pessimism is caused by ascribing to others the feelings you would feel it you were in their place. It is this (among much else) that makes novels so false. The novelist constructs a public world out of his own private world and gives to the characters of his fancy a sensitiveness, a power of reflection and an emotional capacity which are peculiar to himself… The lack of privacy, to take an instance, in which the very poor live seems frightful to us who value it; but it does not seem so to the very poor. They hate to be alone; it gives them a sense of security to live in company.
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And the rest is above comment:
I wonder why so many people turn with horror from the thought of suicide. To speak of it as cowardly is nonsense… I think the reason of the indignation which it seems to arouse in so many is that the suicide flouts the life-force, and by setting at nought the strongest instinct of human beings casts a terrifying doubt on its power to preserve them.
The egoism of man makes him unwilling to accept the meaninglessness of life, and when he has unhappily found himself no longer able to believe in a higher power whose ends he could flatter himself that he subserved he has sought to give it significance by constructing certain values beyond those that seem to further his immediate welfare. The wisdom of the ages has chosen three of these as most worthy… Oases in the vast desert of existence, since he knows no other end to his journey, man persuades himself that they at all events are worth reaching and that there he will find rest and the answer to his question. These three values are Truth, Beauty and Goodness.
...Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe, and his idealism, it has sometimes seemed to me, is merely an effort to attach the prestige of truth to the fictions that he has invented to satisfy his self-conceits.
...I discovered that beauty was a full stop. When I considered beautiful things I found that there was nothing for me to do but to gaze and admire. The emotion they gave me was exquisite, but I could not preserve it, nor could I indefinitely repeat it; the most beautiful things in the world finished by boring me.... It seemed to me that beauty was like the summit of a mountain peak; when you had reached it there was nothing to do but to come down again. Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
...The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love… We are all creatures of change, change is the atmosphere we breathe, and is it likely that the strongest but one of all our instincts should be free from the law? We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love… It is only because the power of love when it seizes us seems so mighty that we persuade ourselves that it lasts forever.
...Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward. I am ashamed to reach so commonplace a conclusion. With my instinct for effect, I should have liked to end my book with some startling and paradoxical announcement or with a cynicism that my readers would have recognized with a chuckle as characteristic. It seems I have little more to say than can be read in any copybook or heard from any pulpit. I have gone a long way to discover what everyone knew already.
What a deep sense of deja vu this account of his childhood dream gave me!
When I was a small boy and unhappy I used to dream night after night that my life at school was all in a dream and that I should wake to find myself at home again with my mother. Her death was a wound that fifty years have not entirely healed. I have long ceased to have that dream; but I have never quite lost the sense that my living life was a mirage in which I did this and that because that was how it fell out, but which, even when I was playing my part in it, I could look at from a distance and know for the mirage it was. When I look back on my life, with its successes and its failures, its endless errors, its deceptions and its fulfilments, its joys and miseries, it seemed to me strangely lacking in reality. It is shadowy and unsubstantial. It may be that my heart, having found rest nowhere, had some deep ancestral craving for God and immortality which my reason would have no truck with. In default of anything better, it has seemed to me sometimes that I might pretend to myself that the goodness I have not so seldom after all come across in many of those I have encountered on my way had reality. It may be that in goodness we may see, not a reason for life or an explanation of it, but an extenuation. In this indifferent universe, with its inevitable ills that surround us from the cradle to the grave, it may serve, not as a challenge or a reply, but as an affirmation of our own independence. It is the retort that humour makes to the tragic absurdity of life. Unlike beauty, it can be perfect without being tedious, and greater than love, time does not wither its delight.
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Kept saving this draft for so long. Finished it today, finally! (12/09/08)
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