[b]John Fowles from The Collector
It’s despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It’s despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It’s despair that so few of us care. It’s despair that there’s so much brutality and callousness in the world.[/b]
It’s despair, true. But all the more [or less] in an essentially meaningless world.
Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I’ve more knowledge of life than you, I’ve lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what’s trivial and what’s important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don’t want to be virtuous. My charm for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I’m not a good man. Perhaps morally I’m younger even than you are. Can you understand that?
Let’s be honest: Can anyone?
People won’t admit it, they’re too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can’t see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there’s always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness. The black and the black and the black.
Great, he thought, another matrix.
People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.
Any fresh and green ideas here?
They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they’d have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.
Of course today it’s millions and millions.
He’s a collector. That’s the great dead thing in him.
Here the great dead things that are collected by many here: definitions.