I continue to listen to, and profit by the listening to, Tom Jones. I believe this is my favorite novel of all time. He is as shrewd a psychologist as story teller, and I am tempted to add it to my short list of books I think all high school students should read (Certainly: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and the Black Book of Communism).
I have reached the point where Blifil the younger has just sprung his trap on Jones. I can’t see any way out but Jones being sent off to make his fortune. It’s a long novel, and I have a long way to go. I assume Sophia will marry Blifil, but survive emotionally somehow.
Both Sophia and Jones are, in my view–and most likely in the more or less explicit intent of Fielding–examples of natural goodness. It is ironic that Jones IS the bastard, but Blifil acts like one. He is the Loki to Jones Thor.
And Fielding is attentive enough to note the Jones was loved while young, whereas Blifil was not. Blifil has what may reasonably be termed Developmental Trauma. He did not get the affection and love and attuned attention he needed, and so turned into a little and later big Shit.
Both Jones and Sophia are good hearted, and open and honest. This leads to emotions they did not plan, and which are not to their benefit. Everyone ELSE around them is manipulative, self-seeking, and, to the extent of their ability, cunning. They are cold hearted, self absorbed, and largely uninterested in doing the right thing BECAUSE it is the right thing.
And obviously Square–I think that is the spelling, but I am listening to this, which with this book is immensely more entertaining, since the reader himself is a talented actor and seeming character himself, as he himself emotes in the telling, as no doubt Fielding would have done (what a joy it must have been to have him at dinner!!)–is better than Thwackham (also a guess), because at least he feels SOMETHING. Better to be a whore monger than someone who feels entitled to beat and humiliate people responding to normal sexual urges (although that scene with Molly made me laugh so hard I had to stop listening for minute). Actually, it makes me laugh NOW, thinking about it. That book is damned funny.
[Another scene I had to stop was when the Aunt, after going on and on about her worldly guile, got the object of affection completely wrong. That was story telling genius. That dialogue was priceless too, about how women already rule the genteel class, and would rule everyone if they were physically stronger.]
But here is the point I logged on to make: Allworthy himself, although a genuinely good man, has one fatal flaw: he is naive. Because he is good, he cannot see the operations of villainy in others. Being too trusting CAN be something of a virtue, but I will ALWAYS always always argue that all good comes FIRST from extremely accurate perception, both of ones own internal states and those of others.
Goodness, within broad limits, is a natural virtue, but relies entirely on you not being stupid. Camus made this point too.
And as Fielding says more than once, you can’t see in others what you don’t possess in yourself. If you have not the slightest ability to lie or cheat or steal–expressed or latent–then you are slow to notice it in others. You are partially blinded.
But as Fielding says, Jones and Sophia are the heroes. They are the ones to admire and emulate.
It reminds me of the Bible verse: “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”
Allworthy was not as wise as serpents. And Rumi said this too. He said something like “no one who does not have both good and evil in them belongs with us.”
Life is flow. Emotions are flow. You cannot be PERFECTLY good without constricting that flow, without setting out a pattern which is inflexible, and not dancing with the world and life itself.
You cannot, in other words, be PERFECTLY good without dissociating yourself from the world and from the human community. It is a static position. It is a citadel, not a river. You have locked yourself off from the Cosmos, for an idea. You have given much, and received almost nothing but a temporary cessation of doubt and the fear of being wrong.
Yes, of course you need principles. I discuss this in my first couple paragraphs in my piece on Goodness (naively, I submitted that as a book proposal to the Dean of former Graduate School. He never answered, no doubt not least because that is not a book proposal at all. He was, by the way, one of the few people I have ever encountered in my life who made me feel dumb. He was genuinely smarter than me. I could feel it. As far as I know, he is still out there being smart somewhere. And I will add, he was not arrogant to me. Far from it. He was friendly and helpful.) But the principles have to be flexible. “you have to send whores to Newgate” is not a flexible principle. It is a means of a power elite punishing “normals”. It is a means, in other words, of punishing the powerless for crimes the powerful could commit with impunity in most places.
Those principles I use for myself are, again: 1) reject self pity; 2) persist; 3) be curious and open. I’m quite good with 2 and 3. 1 I still work on.
I will add, too, that the principle of wisdom he extols, “never buy anything at too dear a price” is really good too. As he says, a wise man can enjoy all the pleasures of life, if he doesn’t subjugate everything else to one or two.
And even in spirituality, even in religious devotion–where excesses are common–the goal is to pay the right price for something you actually achieve. Manias and obsessions are normally paying much too much for much too little. Gradualism is the path of the reasonable and sober, and in most cases the eventually successful.
But I am truly loving his commentaries on the relationship of sex and love, and of the naturalness of generosity and kindness. They are simultaneously trenchant and absurdly funny. This guy makes me laugh A LOT.
Most people are liars. Most people are hypocrites. Most people are, much of the time, ridiculous, even in their most severe and serious moments. Take the Aunt, swearing she is Sophias friend. I KNEW she shouldn’t trust her, but her abusiveness went beyond what I expected.
Or the father, the Squire, swearing he would die for his daughter one moment, then telling her in the next he wants her poverty stricken in the streets, where he would not throw her a scrap of bread to save her life.
This really is how life works, for many people. And I will point out this novel was published in 1749.
Is there really any difference in the emotional callousness of Politically Correct pseudo-culture today and the obtuse horrendousness of the Aunt when she was torturing Sophia with her abuse? I don’t think so.
We have simply had an outbreak of a very old disease. This is still the plague. It still hides in cupboards and basements, and comes out when the time is right.
Liberalism, and Liberal Education, was supposed to serve as an inoculation, as a preventative, as a means of protecting and preserving peace, freedom, tolerance, and justice. But Plague is winning right now, isn’t it? Almost everywhere.
Oh, I have some posts I will make in the next day or two, which attempt to sort all this out. I have worked out a theodicy that makes sense to me, and answers all the obvious problems even with Spiritualism.
If you are reading this, thank you for sharing in my hobby. It hit me today that I am engaged in a long game and long bet, that focusing on this sort of thing might, after some decades, bear fruit. I HAVE bet my life on it. That is the sort of thing you need to do, if you want to be an authentic human being (I wanted to say Man, but, uh, no, and not because I am obsequious to political considerations. Men have much to contribute, women likely more.)
You roll the dice. No matter what happens, if you are alert, you learn something. This world does not answer to me. I myself don’t answer to me. But the latter can be improved with the sort of work I have been undertaking for some time.
Edit: the heading is, I hope with little justice, an obvious reference to Chuang Tzu, as well, much less obviously, as Lao Tzu’s comment that we should “renounce sainthood; it will be a thousand times better for everyone.”
OK. I’m drinking beer, and am not going to resist the urge to append one more comment on a meme I saw today. It had a picture of Mount Everest that said, approximately “All the dead bodies on Mount Everest were highly motivated, too; it won’t hurt if you park it for a minute now and then.”
Apparently there is a dead person–I think a women, although it doesn’t really matter–who wore a bright jacket–orange I think–that climbers have used for some years now as a navigational aid. You go to the orange jacket, then right or left or up or down.
She had a life. She had parents. Now she is a navigational aid. There is no doubt some lesson there I won’t attempt to inflict on you tonight.
Fielding may yet help me become a full fledged human being after all, and at that, after his own decease oh so long ago. This is why culture matters. This is why preserving what is good matters so much. He has much to say to black people. To Latinos. To Asians. To homosexuals. To anyone with a heart and a dependence on oxygen. There are no human beings who could not benefit from his psychology and humanity. That is my view. And if folks want to take the best of all cultures, fantastic. Do it. We can all use wisdom and intelligence. Just don’t use racism as a means of denigrating anyone, including patrician whites from several centuries ago.
And to be clear: do you think I have a the faintest fucking clue what it is like to be born to landed gentry? Do you think I know what it is like to be tutored at home by full time teachers, or what the prospect of inheriting a fortune might feel like? I don’t. Let’s make that clear.
People are people. Rich people are people. Poor people are people, but with more stress, and in most cases more excuse. No, I think great novels written by Africans and Chinese and Arabs and others apply to ME. And I think great novels written by white people apply to them. Sex, jealousy, intrigue, greed: these are universal human emotions. As Fielding might have said, anyone who doubts this must not have felt much of anything, anywhere, at any time. You people need to stop reading, and stop commenting.