Near the end of W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" (1915), when Philip Carey's lover Sally tells him she might be pregnant, he experiences an epiphany of Nietzschean affirmation: "And thinking over the long pilgrimage of his past he accepted it joyfully. He accepted the deformity which had made life so hard for him; he knew that it had warped his character, but now he saw also that by reason of it he had acquired that power of introspection which had given him so much delight." The twist is that she turns out not to have been pregnant after all, but his vision of unconditional acceptance of his life's experiences remains. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 18 October 2022)
No comments:
Post a Comment