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Thursday 19 November 2020

Thus if I laugh at you

 



Thus if I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavours in a rashly chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?—for even what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have shaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think of exorcising it.

 George Eliot - Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)

2 comments:

Sam Vega said...

That's a fine quote from Eliot, who I really need to explore. (I can't recall reading anything of her other than Middlemarch...)

In a way it's quite sobering, as it reminds us that we have the follies and pretensions of politicians we like to criticise. But more comforting, in that politicians are not the alien species we sometime see them as. I have often, in the course of my life, found myself humiliated by being out of my depth; or frightened by having taken on a project I wasn't up to. That's just what these two chancers have done. The order of magnitude is hugely different, but the ignorance and the naive confidence turning to panic are all too familiar.

A K Haart said...

Sam - to my mind she is one of the greats but it's a pity she did not write more books. It is sobering to see the ignorance and the naive confidence of these two chancers and to understand what they are. Part of that may be the open demeanour of Boris Johnson, although I think he is also hiding some grim post-coronavirus intentions.