[b]Stephen Fry
'Could do better’ is a meaningless conclusion. ‘Could be happier’ is the only one that counts.[/b]
Beyond good and evil even.
It can come a bit hard sometimes to see one’s own unique, heroic life pinned so pitilessly to a wall. At other times it can endorse, affirm and save, but as I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters at all but me.
Let’s file this one under, “you might as well just flip a coin”.
It is perfectly possible to live a life from cradle to grave that is entirely dishonest.One might never reveal one’s true identity, the yearnings and cravings of one’s innermost self, even to the most intimate circle of family and friends; never really speak the truth to anyone. Priests and psychotherapists may believe that the confessional-box or the analysis session reveals truths, but you know and I know and every human being knows that we lie all the time to all the world. Lying is as much a part of us as wearing clothes. Indeed Man’s first act in Eden was to give names to everything on earth, our first act of possession and falsehood was to take away a stone’s right to be a stone by imprisoning it with the name “stone”. There are in reality, as Fenellosa said, no nouns in the universe. Man’s next great act was to cover himself up. We have been doing so ever since. We feel that our true identities shame us. Lying is a deep part of us. TO take it away is to make us something less than, not more than, human.
With any luck it’s all genetic. Beyond our control in other words.
Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy.
Tell that to Joker.
Jo Wood was sound, sound as a bell. Solid, cynical, amused and occasionally amusing, he did not appear to be very intelligent, and unlike Richard Fawcett and me, seemed uninterested in words, ideas and the world. But one day he said to me:
I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?
I’m sorry?
You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.
The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read.
Of course you can take this too far, can’t you?
The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know.
And they certainly don’t care about that.