by W. Somerset Maugham
Could this book have been a little bit shorter and been just as effective? At 684 pages, of course. Yet I am so glad I stayed with it.
I nearly did otherwise. Midway, it felt like nothing more than the story of a young man making one bad decision after another. And it was definitely that! Then came the philosophy.
“He could not be positive that reason was much help in the conduct of life. It seemed to him that life lived itself.”
“He did not act with a part of himself but altogether. The power that possessed him seemed to have nothing to do with reason: all that reason did was to point out the methods of obtaining what his whole soul was striving for.”
Philip Carey is orphaned young and lives a hard life. The story does not take some of the obvious turns that you think it might. Philip makes a brief stab at being a chartered accountant; tries to be an artist in Paris; then finds his groove as a medical student before falling into penury. He learns much along the way, finally (at page 590) finding a sense of meaning in the meaninglessness of life. “As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if one was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might a man look at his life, that it made a pattern.” It’s really a beautiful couple of pages that follow.
To drag out G. M. Hopkins once again: “What I do is me; for that I came.”
Tytania 