Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
Trafford brought his mind to bear upon the instances of contentment
about him. He developed an opinion that all men and many women were
potentially at least as restless as himself. A huge proportion of the
usage and education in modern life struck upon him now as being a
training in contentment. Or rather in keeping quiet and not upsetting
things. The serious and responsible life of an ordinary prosperous man
fulfilling the requirements of our social organization fatigues and
neither completely satisfies nor completely occupies. Still less does
the responsible part of the life of a woman of the prosperous classes
engage all her energies or hold her imagination. And there has grown up
a great informal organization of employments, games, ceremonies, social
routines, travel, to consume these surplus powers and excessive
cravings, which might otherwise change or shatter the whole order of
human living. He began to understand the forced preoccupation with
cricket and golf, the shooting, visiting, and so forth, to which the
young people of the economically free classes in the community are
trained. He discovered a theory for hobbies and specialized interests.
He began to see why people go to Scotland to get away from London, and
come to London to get away from Scotland, why they crowd to and fro
along the Riviera, swarm over Switzerland, shoot, yacht, hunt, and
maintain an immense apparatus of racing and motoring. Because so they
are able to remain reasonably contented with the world as it is. He
perceived, too, that a man who has missed or broken through the training
to this kind of life, does not again very readily subdue himself to the
security of these systematized distractions. His own upbringing had been
antipathetic to any such adaptations; his years of research had given
him the habit of naked intimacy with truth, filled him with a craving
for reality and the destructive acids of a relentless critical method.
He began to understand something of the psychology of vice, to
comprehend how small a part mere sensuality, how large a part the spirit
of adventure and the craving for illegality, may play, in the career of
those who are called evil livers. Mere animal impulses and curiosities
it had always seemed possible to him to control, but now he was
beginning to apprehend the power of that passion for escape, at any
cost, in any way, from the petty, weakly stimulating, competitive
motives of low-grade and law-abiding prosperity....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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