The Hot Gates and other occasional pieces by Golding William

Author:Golding, William [Golding, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780571265480
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

What I am trying to do is to add together those elements, some horrible, some merely funny, but all significant, which I suppose to be the forces of off-campus history. They are a failure of human sympathy, ignorance of facts, the objectivizing of our own inadequacies so as to make a scapegoat. At moments of optimism I have felt that education and perhaps a miracle or two would be sufficient to remove their more dangerous elements. When I feel pessimistic, then they seem to constitute a trap into which humanity has got itself with a dreary inevitability much as the dinosaur trapped itself in its own useless armour. For if humanity has a future on this planet of a hundred million years, it is unthinkable that it should spend those aeons in a ferment of national self-satisfaction and chauvinistic idiocies. I was feeling pessimistic when I tried to include a sign for this thing in a fable.

The point about off-campus history is that it is always dead. It is a cloak of national prestige which the uneducated pull round their shoulders to keep off the wind of personal self-knowledge. It is a dead thing handed on, but dead though it is, it will not lie down. It is a monstrous creature descending to us from our ancestors, producing nothing but disunity, chaos. War and disorder prolong in it the ghastly and ironic semblance of life. All the marching and countermarching, the flags, the heroism and cruelty are galvanic twitches induced in its slaves and subjects by that hideous, parody thing. When I constructed a sign for it, therefore, it had to be something that was dead but had a kind of life. It had to be presented to my island of children by the world of grown-ups. There was only one way in which I could do this. First I must take the children at a moment when mature council and authority might have saved them as on so many occasions we might have saved our own children, might have been saved ourselves. Since a novelist ought not preach overtly in a fable, the situation had to be highlighted by the children having some dim knowledge that wisdom, that commonsense even, is to be found in the world of grown-ups. They must yearn for it, now they have begun to find the inadequacy of their own powers. I took a moment therefore, when they had tried to hold a council meeting to discuss ways and means but had found that other questions came up — questions which they would sooner have ignored. Finally the meeting breaks down. The children who are retrogressing more rapidly have gone off into the wardance with which they fortify their own sense of power and togetherness. It is dark. The few remainder, puzzled, anxious, surrounded by half perceived threats and mysteries; faced with a problem which once looked so simple of solution, the maintenance of a fire on the mountain, but which proved to be

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.