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Thinking as a
Hobby
by William Golding
While I was still a boy, I
came to the conclusion that there were three
grades of thinking; and since
I was
later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an
even stranger conclusion - namely, that I
myself could not think at all.
I
must
have
been
an
unsatisfactory
child
for
grownups
to
deal
with.
I
remember
how
incomprehensible they
appeared to me at first, but not, of course, how I
appeared to them. It was
the
headmaster
of
my
grammar
school
who
first
brought
the
subject
of
thinking
before
me
-
though
neither in the way,
nor with the result
he intended. He had some statuettes in his study.
They stood on a high cupboard behind
his desk. One was a lady wearing nothing but a
bath towel.
She seemed frozen in an
eternal panic lest the bath towel slip down any
farther, and since she had
no arms, she
was in an unfortunate position to pull the towel
up again. Next to her, crouched the
statuette of a leopard, ready to spring
down at the top drawer of a filing cabinet labeled
A-AH. My
innocence
interpreted
this
as
the
victim's
last,
despairing
cry.
Beyond
the
leopard was
a
naked,
muscular gentleman,
who sat, looking down, with his chin on his fist
and his elbow on his knee.
He seemed
utterly miserable.
Some
time
later,
I
learned
about
these
statuettes.
The
headmaster
had
placed
them
where
they
would
face delinquent children, because they symbolized
to him to whole of life. The naked lady
was the Venus of Milo. She was Love.
She was not worried about the towel. She was just
busy
being
beautiful.
The
leopard
was
Nature,
and
he
was
being
natural.
The
naked,
muscular
gentleman was not miserable. He was
Rodin's Thinker, an image of pure thought. It is
easy to buy
small plaster models of
what you think life is like.
I had better explain that I
was a frequent visitor to the headmaster's study,
because of the latest
thing
I
had
done
or
left
undone.
As
we
now
say,
I
was
not
integrated.
I
was,
if
anything,
disintegrated;
and
I
was
puzzled.
Grownups
never
made
sense.
Whenever
I
found
myself
in
a
penal position before the headmaster's
desk, with the statuettes glimmering whitely above
him, I
would sink my head, clasp my
hands behind my back, and writhe one shoe over the
other.
The
headmaster would look opaquely at me
through flashing
spectacles.
Well, what were
they going to do with me? I would writhe my shoe
some more and stare down at
the worn
rug.
Then I would
look at the cupboard, where the naked lady was
frozen in her panic and the muscular
gentleman contemplated the hindquarters
of the leopard in endless gloom. I had nothing to
say to
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the
headmaster. His spectacles caught the light so
that you could see nothing human behind them.
There was no possibility of
communication.
No,
I
didn't
think,
wasn't
thinking,
couldn't
think
-
I
was
simply
waiting
in
anguish
for
the
interview to stop.
On one occasion
the headmaster leaped to his feet, reached up and
plonked Rodin's masterpiece
on the desk
before me.
I
surveyed the gentleman without interest or
comprehension.
Clearly there was something missing in
me. Nature had endowed the rest of the human race
with a
sixth sense and left me out.
This must be so, I mused, on my way back to the
class, since whether I
had broken a
window, or failed to remember Boyle's
Law, or been late for school,
my teachers
produced me one,
adult answer:
As I saw the case, I had
broken the window because I had tried to hit Jack
Arney with a cricket
ball and missed
him; I could not remember Boyle's Law because I
had never bothered to learn it;
and I
was late for school because I preferred looking
over the bridge into the river. In fact, I was
wicked.
Were
my
teachers,
perhaps,
so
good
that
they
could
not
understand
the
depths
of
my
depravity?
Were
they
clear,
untormented
people
who
could
direct
their
every
action
by
this
mysterious
business
of
thinking? The
whole
thing
was
incomprehensible.
In
my
earlier
years,
I
found even the statuette of the Thinker
confusing. I did not believe any of my teachers
were naked,
ever.
Like
someone
born
deaf,
but
bitterly
determined
to
find
out
about
sound,
I
watched
my
teachers to find out about thought.
There was Mr. Houghton. He
was always telling me to think. With a modest
satisfaction, he would
tell that he had
thought a bit himself. Then why did he spend so
much time drinking? Or was there
more
sense in drinking than there appeared to be? But
if not, and if drinking were in fact ruinous
to
health
-
and
Mr.
Houghton
was
ruined,
there
was
no
doubt
about
that
-
why
was
he
always
talking about the
clean life and the virtues of fresh air? He would
spread his arms wide with the
action of
a man who habitually spent his time striding along
mountain ridges.
Sometimes, exalted by his
own oratory, he would leap from his desk and
hustle us outside into a
hideous wind.
He would stand
before us, rejoicing in his perfect health, an
open-air man. He would put his hands
on
his waist and take a tremendous breath. You could
hear the wind trapped in the cavern of his
chest and struggling with all the
unnatural impediments. His body would reel with
shock and his
ruined
face
go
white
at
the
unaccustomed
visitation.
He
would
stagger
back
to
his
desk
and
collapse
there, useless for the rest of the morning.
Mr. Houghton was given to
high-minded monologues about the good life,
sexless and full of duty.
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Yet in the
middle of one of these monologues, if a girl
passed the window, tapping along on her
neat little feet, he would interrupt
his discourse, his neck would turn of itself and
he would watch
her out of sight. In
this instance, he seemed to me ruled not by
thought but by an invisible and
irresistible spring in his nape.
His neck was an object of
great interest to me. Normally it bulged a bit
over his collar. But Mr.
Houghton had
fought in the First World War alongside both
Americans and French, and had come
-
by
who
knows
what
illogic?
-
to
a
settled
detestation
of
both
countries.
If
either
country
happened to be prominent in current
affairs, no argument could make Mr. Houghton think
well of
it. He would bang the desk, his
neck would bulge still further and go red.
like,
Mr. Houghton thought with his neck.
There was Miss. Parsons. She assured us
that her dearest wish was our welfare, but I knew
even
then, with the mysterious
clairvoyance of childhood, that what she wanted
most was the husband
she never got.
There was Mr. Hands - and so on.
I have dealt at length with my teachers
because this was my introduction to the nature of
what is
commonly
called
thought.
Through
them
I
discovered
that
thought
is
often
full
of
unconscious
prejudice,
ignorance, and hypocrisy. It will lecture on
disinterested purity while its neck is being
remorselessly twisted toward a skirt.
Technically, it is about as proficient as most
businessmen's
golf,
as
honest
as
most
politician's
intentions,
or
-
to
come
near
my
own
preoccupation
-
as
coherent as
most books that get written. It is what I came to
call grade-three thinking, though more
properly, it is feeling, rather than
thought.
True,
often
there
is
a
kind
of
innocence
in
prejudices,
but
in
those
days
I
viewed
grade-
three
thinking with an intolerant
contempt and an incautious mockery. I delighted to
confront a pious
lady who hated the
Germans with the proposition that we should love
our enemies. She taught me
a
great
truth
in
dealing
with
grade-three
thinkers;
because
of
her,
I
no
longer
dismiss
lightly
a
mental process which for nine-tenths of
the population is the nearest they will ever get
to thought.
They
have
immense
solidarity.
We
had
better
respect
them,
for
we
are
outnumbered
and
surrounded. A crowd of grade-three
thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming
their hands
at the fire of their own
prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out
the contradictions in their
beliefs.
Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement
as cows will graze all the same way on
the side of a hill.
Grade-two thinking is the
detection of contradictions. I reached grade two
when I trapped the poor,
pious lady.
Grade-two thinkers do not stampede easily, though
often they fall into the other fault
and lag behind. Grade-two thinking is a
withdrawal, with eyes and ears open. It became my
hobby
and
brought
satisfaction
and
loneliness
in
either
hand.
For
grade-two
thinking
destroys
without
having
the
power
to
create.
It
set
me
watching
the
crowds
cheering
His
Majesty
the
King
and
asking myself what all
the fuss was about, without giving me anything
positive to put in the place
of
that
heady
patriotism.
But
there
were
compensations.
To
hear
people
justify
their
habit
of
hunting
foxes
and
tearing
them
to
pieces
by
claiming
that
the
foxes
like
it.
To
her
our
Prime
Minister talk about the great benefit
we conferred on India by jailing people like
Pandit Nehru and
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