-
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.
with
you?
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
the headmaster.
His spectacles caught the light so that you could
see nothing human behind them.