Thursday, February 24, 2005

More Fowles

Well, I've had to resort to a second quote by the mystery author at Readerville. Let's see if this one turns out to be a dead giveaway--I think it will.

"To most Englishmen of his age such an intuition of Sarah's real nature would have been repellent; and it did very faintly repel--or at least shock--Charles. He shared enough of his contemporaries' prejudices to suspect sensuality in any form; but whereas they would, by one of those terrible equations that take place at the behest of the superego, have made Sarah vaguely responsible for being born as she was, he did not. For that we can thank his scientific hobbies. Darwinism, as its shrewder opponents realized, let open the flood gates to something far more serious than the undermining of the Biblical account of the origins of man; its deepest implications lay in the direction of determinism and behaviorism, that is, toward philosophies that reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw hut in a hurricane. I do not mean that Charles- completely exonerated Sarah; but he was far less inclined to blame her than she might have imagined. "

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