[b]John Fowles from The French Lieutenant’s Woman
You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it … fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.[/b]
The real reality? Right.
I think he was a little like the lizard that changes color with its surroundings. He appeared far more a gentleman in a gentleman’s house. In that inn, I saw him for what he was. And I knew his color there was far more natural than the other.
You tell me your real color and I’ll tell you mine.
He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom – that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror.
Talk about an intellectual contraption!!
Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things.
Let’s elaborate. You know, if that’s even possible.
But though one may keep the wolves from one’s door, they still howl out there in the darkness.
And not just wolves for most of us.
When he returned to London he fingered and skimmed his way through a dozen religious theories of the time, but emerged in the clear a healthy agnostic. What little God he managed to derive from existence, he found in nature, not the Bible; a hundred years earlier he would’ve been a deist, perhaps even a pantheist.
And a hundred years later…?