I’ve spent the past day or two rereading Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. It occurs to me again that one of the many reasons I am so fond of these books is that there is much about their anti-hero Guy Crouchback that I see in myself. Like him, I very often feel that I am not simpatico.
I’ll tell you a little story about this: When I was a kid, I worked out an elaborate fantasy to explain why I always seemed to be on the outside of things. Everyone is born not quite fully done, I thought. After birth, each new baby is injected with something I called “Factor X”, a serum that completes their physical, mental and emotional development and turns them into what appears to be ordinary.
When I was born, however, the doctors determined that I was so close to normal naturally that any administration of Factor X would transmogrify me into some kind of superhuman. Not wanting this to occur and thereby upset things, it was decided not to give me the injection, but instead to let me scrape along at the lower edge on my own inborn talents.
Probably not the healthiest attitude in the world, but there it is. Thank Heaven I inherited Mom’s cheerful nature or I probably would be sunk in perpetual melancholy.
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January 29, 2009 at 5:54 pm
The Abbot
I have also struggled to define my own relationship to the rest of humanity. My own personal theories included being born out of the normal relation to time. I have also considered, as does the boy in Fitzgerald’s story, that I am not the son of my own parents, but rather the son of a king.
Late in life, I’ve come to the conclusion that all of my failures to relate to the broader mass of humanity relate to the profound damage wrought on me by original sin (for this distance was apparent to me even in the age of my own innocence, say from about age 5 or so). I’m just not as I ought to be.
January 29, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Mrs. Peperium
Mr. Crouchback is my favorite male of Waugh’s…after Basil Seal, naturally….
January 31, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Sister
Would you really want to be on the inside of greater humanity? I mean seriously. I am grateful there are people who question things, who feel uneasy with the status quo, and who say this is the way things are but by gum they are wrong. There are a lot of sheep in the world. I am grateful I am not one of them. Lonely? Yes if you happen to be as extroverted as you and the Mothe but as you say you are both naturally very cheerful. Not so much a problem for my own very introverted personality.