A Defeat Better Than Victory

Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham should probably be on the reading list of every English 101 class, in every university in the English speaking world. Why?  Because it is the story of a young man’s universal search for self, and is probably one of the best written fictional works of the twentieth century.

 Although it takes place over 100 years ago, it is humanly insightful today as it was when written.  Philip’s search: his embarrassments, his feelings of inferiority, his unrelenting and incomprehensible  passion for another are all as real today as then.  For our part, it helps us see what we can become in the eyes of others:

 In Bondage, Philip, age 19 and full of the steam of youthful energy, returns home from Germany to the Parish where his aunt and uncle still live:

 Philip realized that they had done with life, these two quiet little people:  they belonged to a past generation, and they were waiting there patiently, rather stupidly, for death; and he, in his vigour and his youth, thirsting for excitement and adventure, was appalled at the waste.  They had done nothing, and when they went it would be just as if they had never been.  He felt a great pity for Aunt Louisa, and he loved her suddenly because she loved him.

To ‘have done’ with life…what a shame, what a waste, what a trap that can easily ensnare us.  How do we get to such a deplorable place?  It is not the physical act of aging alone that can trap us.  It is more that we build a cage of limited expectations.  We wake, we eat, we breathe, and in a kind of somnambulistic state we follow our dusty routine and habitual activities and then we sleep again, only to repeat the process. Day after day we ‘wait stupidly for death.’    

But where does the trap begin?  And is this simple act of two people living their aging life truly a trap?  In the conclusion of Bondage Philip considers marriage and realizes that it will mean limiting the scope of his travels and experiences.  He writes:

What did he care for Spain and its cities, Cordova, Toledo, Leon; what to him were the pagodas of Burmah and the lagoons of South Sea Islands?  America was here and now.  It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideas that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart.  Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do.

 He put all that aside now with a gesture of impatience.  He had lived always in the future, with the present always, always had slipped through his fingers.  His ideals?  He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of his life:  had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children and died was likewise the most perfect?  It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat but it was a defeat better than many victories.

The Tao would advise us to look carefully at the rock that we find in our path—it may be made of pure gold.  If we are living our dream and not the dream of some one else, "America is here and now."