精读4-第一单元-thinking-as-a-hobby.pdf

Thinking as a Hobbyby William GoldingWhile I was still a boy,I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking;and sinceI was later to claim thinking as my hobby,I came to an even stranger conclusion-namely,that Imyself could not think at all.I must have been an unsatisfactory child for grownups to deal with.I remember howincomprehensible they appeared to me at first,but not,of course,how I appeared to them.It wasthe headmaster of my grammar school who first brought the subject of thinking before me-though neither in the way,nor with the result he intended.He had some statuettes in his study.They stood on a high cupboard behind his desk.One was a lady wearing nothing but a bath towel.She seemed frozen in an eternal panic lest the bath towel slip down any farther,and since she hadno arms,she was in an unfortunate position to pull the towel up again.Next to her,crouched thestatuette of a leopard,ready to spring down at the top drawer of a filing cabinet labeled A-AH.Myinnocence interpreted this as the victims last,despairing cry.Beyond the leopard was a naked,muscular gentleman,who sat,looking down,with his chin on his fist and his elbow on his knee.He seemed utterly miserable.Some time later,I learned about these statuettes.The headmaster had placed them where theywould face delinquent children,because they symbolized to him to whole of life.The naked ladywas the Venus of Milo.She was Love.She was not worried about the towel.She was just busybeing beautiful.The leopard was Nature,and he was being natural.The naked,musculargentleman was not miserable.He was Rodins Thinker,an image of pure thought.It is easy to buysmall plaster models of what you think life is like.I had better explain that I was a frequent visitor to the headmasters study,because of the latestthing I had done or left undone.As we now say,I was not integrated.I was,if anything,disintegrated;and I was puzzled.Grownups never made sense.Whenever I found myself in apenal position before the headmasters desk,with the statuettes glimmering whitely above him,Iwould sink my head,clasp my hands behind my back,and writhe one shoe over the other.The headmaster would look opaquely at me through flashing spectacles.What are we going to dowith you?Well,what were they going to do with me?I would writhe my shoe some more and stare down atthe worn rug.Look up,boy!Cant you look up?Then I would look at the cupboard,where the naked lady was frozen in her panic and the musculargentleman contemplated the hindquarters of the leopard in endless gloom.I had nothing to say tothe headmaster.His spectacles caught the light so that you could see nothing human behind them.There was no possibility of communication.Dont you ever think at all?No,I didnt think,wasnt thinking,couldnt think-I was simply waiting in anguish for theinterview to stop.Then youd better learn-hadnt you?On one occasion the headmaster leaped to his feet,reached up and plonked Rodins masterpieceon the desk before me.Thats what a man looks like when hes really thinking.I surveyed the gentleman without interest or comprehension.Go back to your class.Clearly there was something missing in me.Nature had endowed the rest of the human race with asixth sense and left me out.This must be so,I mused,on my way back to the class,since whether Ihad broken a window,or failed to remember BoylesLaw,or been late for school,my teachersproduced me one,adult answer:Why cant you think?As I saw the case,I had broken the window because I had tried to hit Jack Arney with a cricketball and missed him;I could not remember Boyles Law because I had never bothered to learn it;and I was late for school because I preferred looking over the bridge into the river.In fact,I waswicked.Were my teachers,perhaps,so good that they could not understand the depths of mydepravity?Were they clear,untormented people who could direct their every action by thismysterious business of thinking?The whole thing was incomprehensible.In my earlier years,Ifound even the statuette of the Thinker confusing.I did not believe any of my teachers were naked,ever.Like someone born deaf,but bitterly determined to find out about sound,I watched myteachers to find out about thought.There was Mr.Houghton.He was always telling me to think.With a modest satisfaction,he wouldtell that he had thought a bit himself.Then why did he spend so much time drinking?Or was theremore sense in drinking than there appeared to be?But if not,and if drinking were in fact ruinousto health-and Mr.Houghton was ruined,there was no doubt about that-why was he alwaystalking about the clean life and the virtues of fresh air?He would spread his arms wide with theaction of a man who habitually spent his time striding along mountain ridges.Open air does me good,boys-I know it!Sometimes,exalted by his own oratory,he would leap from his desk and hustle us outside into ahideous wind.Now,boys!Deep breaths!Feel it right down inside you-huge draughts of Gods good air!He would stand before us,rejoicing in his perfect health,an open-air man.He would put his handson his waist and take a tremendous breath.You could hear the wind trapped in the cavern of hischest and struggling with all the unnatural impediments.His body would reel with shock and hisruined face go white at the unaccustomed visitation.He would stagger back to his desk andcollapse there,useless for the rest of the morning.Mr.Houghton was given to high-minded monologues about the good life,sexless and full of duty.Yet in the middle of one of these monologues,if a girl passed the window,tapping along on herneat little feet,he would interrupt his discourse,his neck would turn of itself and he would watchher out of sight.In this instance,he seemed to me ruled not by thought but by an invisible andirresistible spring in his nape.His neck was an object of great interest to me.Normally it bulged a bit over his collar.But Mr.Houghton had fought in the First World War alongside both Americans and French,and had come-by who knows what illogic?-to a settled detestation of both countries.If either countryhappened to be prominent in current affairs,no argument could make Mr.Houghton think well ofit.He would bang the desk,his neck would bulge still further and go red.You can say what youlike,he would cry,but Ive thought about this-and I know what I think!Mr.Houghton thought with his neck.There was Miss.Parsons.She assured us that her dearest wish was our welfare,but I knew eventhen,with the mysterious clairvoyance of childhood,that what she wanted most was the husbandshe never got.There was Mr.Hands-and so on.I have dealt at length with my teachers because this was my introduction to the nature of what iscommonly called thought.Through them I discovered that thought is often full of unconsciousprejudice,ignorance,and hypocrisy.It will lecture on disinterested purity while its neck is beingremorselessly twisted toward a skirt.Technically,it is about as proficient as most businessmensgolf,as honest as most politicians intentions,or-to come near my own preoccupation-ascoherent as most books that get written.It is what I came to call grade-three thinking,though moreproperly,it is feeling,rather than thought.True,often there is a kind of innocence in prejudices,but in those days I viewed grade-threethinking with an intolerant contempt and an incautious mockery.I delighted to confront a piouslady who hated the Germans with the proposition that we should love our enemies.She taught mea great truth in dealing with grade-three thinkers;because of her,I no longer dismiss lightly amental process which for nine-tenths of the population is the nearest they will ever get to thought.They have immense solidarity.We had better respect them,for we are outnumbered andsurrounded.A crowd of grade-three thinkers,all shouting the same thing,all warming their handsat the fire of their own prejudices,will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in theirbeliefs.Man is a gregarious animal,and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way onthe side of a hill.Grade-two thinking is the detection of contradictions.I reached grade two when I trapped the poor,pious lady.Grade-two thinkers do not stampede easily,though often they fall into the other faultand lag behind.Grade-two thinking is a withdrawal,with eyes and ears open.It became my hobbyand brought satisfaction and loneliness in either hand.For grade-two thinking destroys withouthaving the power to create.It set me watching the crowds cheering His Majesty the King andasking myself what all the fuss was about,without giving me anything positive to put in the placeof that heady patriotism.But there were compensations.To hear people justify their habit ofhunting foxes and tearing them to pieces by claiming that the foxes like it.To her our PrimeMinister talk about the great benefit we conferred on India by jailing people like Pandit Nehru andGandhi.To hear American politicians talk about peace in one sentence and refuse to join theLeague of Nations in the next.Yes,there were moments of delight.But I was growing toward adolescence and had to admit that Mr.Houghton was not the only onewith an irresistible spring in his neck.I,too,felt the compulsive hand of nature and began to findthat pointing out contradiction could be costly as well as fun.There was Ruth,for example,aserious and attractive girl.I was an atheist at the time.Grade-two thinking is a menace to religionand knocks down sects like skittles.I put myself in a position to be converted by her with anhypocrisy worthy of grade three.She was a Methodist-or at least,her parents were,and Ruth hadto follow suit.But,alas,instead of relying on the Holy Spirit to convert me,Ruth was foolishenough to open her pretty mouth in argument.She claimed that the Bible(King James Version)was literally inspired.I countered by saying that the Catholics believed in the literal inspiration ofSaint Jeromes Vulgate,and the two books were different.Argument flagged.At last she remarkedthat there were an awful lot of Methodists and they couldnt be wrong,could they-not all thosemillions?That was too easy,said I restively(for the nearer you were to Ruth,the nicer she was tobe near to)since there were more Roman Catholics than Methodists anyway;and they couldnt bewrong,could they-not all those hundreds of millions?An awful flicker of doubt appeared in hereyes.I slid my arm round her waist and murmured breathlessly that if we were counting heads,theBuddhists were the boys for my money.But Ruth has really wanted to do me good,because I wasso nice.The combination of my arm and those countless Buddhists was too much for her.Thatnight her father visited my father and left,red-cheeked and indignant.I was given the third degreeto find out what had happened.It was lucky we wereboth of us only fourteen.I lost Ruth andgained an undeserved reputation as a potential libertine.So grade-two thinking could be dangerous.It was in this knowledge,at the age of fifteen,that Iremember making a comment from the heights of grade two,on the limitations of grade three.Oneevening I found myself alone in the school hall,preparing it for a party.The door of theheadmasters study was open.I went in.The headmaster had ceased to thump Rodins Thinkerdown on the desk as an example to the young.Perhaps he had not found any more candidates,butthe statuettes were still there,glimmering and gathering dust on top of the cupboard.I stood on achair and rearranged them.I stood Venus in her bathtowel on the filing cabinet,so that now the topdrawer caught its breath in a gasp of sexy excitement.A-ah!The portentous Thinker I placed onthe edge of the cupboard so that he looked down at the bath towel and waited for it to slip.Grade-two thinking,though it filled life with fun and excitement,did not make for content.To findout the deficiencies of our elders bolsters the young ego but does not make for personal security.Ifound that grade two was not only the power to point out contradictions.It took the swimmersome distance from the shore and left him there,out of his depth.I decided that Pontius Pilate wasa typical grade-two thinker.What is truth?he said,a very common grade two thought,but onethat is used always as the end of an argument instead of the beginning.There is still a higher gradeof thought which says,What is truth?and sets out to find it.But these grade-one thinkers were few and far between.They did not visit my grammar school inthe flesh though they were there in books.I aspired to them partly because I was ambitious andpartly because I now saw my hobby as an unsatisfactory thing if it went no further.If you set outto climb a mountain,however high you climb,you have failed if you cannot reach the top.I did meet an undeniably grade one thinker in my first year at Oxford.I was looking over a smallbridge in Magdalen Deer Park,and a tiny mustached and hatted figure came and stood by my side.He was a German who had just fled from the Nazis to Oxford as a temporary refuge.His namewas Einstein.But Professor Einstein knew no English at that time and I knew only two words ofGerman.I beamed at him,trying wordlessly to convey by my bearing all the affection and respectthat the English felt for him.It is possible-and I have to make the admission-that I felt here weretwo grade-one thinkers standing side by side;yet I doubt if my face conveyed more than aformless awe.I would have given my Greek and Latin and French and a good slice of my Englishfor enough German to communicate.But we were divided;he was as inscrutable as myheadmaster.For perhaps five minutes we stood together on the bridge,undeniable grade-onethinker and breathless aspirant.With true greatness,Professor Einstein realized that any contactwas better than none.He pointed to a trout wavering in midstream.He spoke:Fisch.My brain reeled.Here I was,mingling with the great,and yet helpless as the veriest grade-threethinker.Desperately I sought for some sign by which I might convey that I,too,revered purereason.I nodded vehemently.In a brilliant flash I used up half of my German vocabulary.Fisch.Ja.Ja.For perhaps another five minutes we stood side by side.Then Professor Einstein,his whole figurestill conveying good will and amiability,drifted away out of sight.I,too,would be a grade-one thinker.I was irrelevant at the best of times.Political and religioussystems,social customs,loyalties and traditions,they all came tumbling down like so many rottenapples off a tree.This was a fine hobby and a sensible substitute for cricket,since you could playit all the year round.I came up in the end with what must always remain the justification forgrade-one thinking,its sign,seal,and charter.I devised a coherent system for living.It was amoral system,which was wholly logical.Of course,as I readily admitted,conversion of the worldto my way of thinking might be difficult,since my system did away with a number of trifles,suchas big business,centralized government,armies,marriage.It