Book talk

No time or energy for a real blog entry (I think I'm coming down with something--probably a sinus infection). So I will share with you an interesting passage from a novel I just finished with my classes, Pat Barker's Regeneration. This is from the end, when an anthropologist-turned-psychiatrist is talking with one of his good friends, telling him a story from his work with an indigenous people.

‘And I thought I’d go through my usual routine, so I started asking questions. The first question was, what would you do if you earned or found a guinea? Would you share it, and if so who would you share it with? It gets their attention because to them it’s a lot of money, and you can uncover all kinds of things about kinship structure and economic arrangements, and so on. Anyway at the end of this – we were all sitting cross-legged on the deck, miles from anywhere – they decided they’d turn the tables on me, and ask me the same questions. Starting with: What would I do with a guinea? Who would I share it with? I explained I was unmarried and that I wouldn’t necessarily feel obliged to share it with anybody. They were incredulous. How could anybody live like that? And so it went on, question after question. And it was one of those situations, you know, where one person starts laughing and everybody joins in and in the end the laughter just feeds on itself. They were rolling round the deck by the time I’d finished. And I suddenly realized that anything I told them would have got the same response. I could’ve talked about sex, repression, guilt, fear–the whole sorry caboodle–and it would’ve got exactly the same response. They wouldn’t have felt a twinge of disgust or disapproval or … sympathy or anything, because it would all have been too bizarre. And I suddenly saw that their reactions to my society were neither more nor less valid than mine to theirs. And do you know that was a moment of the most amazing freedom. I lay back and I closed my eyes and I felt as if a ton of weight had been lifted.
     ‘Sexual freedom?’
     ‘That too. But it was more than that. It was … the Great White God dethroned, I suppose. Because we did, we quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw not only that we weren’t the measure of all things, that that there was no measure.’
     ‘And yet you say nothing changed?’
     ‘Nothing changed in England. And I don’t know why. I think partly just the sheer force of other people’s expectations. You know you’re walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can’t because everybody else thinks it’s your face.’

Discuss, if you would; I'll get back to you. 

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