from
The Razor’s Edge
by
W. Somerset Maugham

“They want to meet you so much,” he wrote to flatter me. “Mrs. So and So is a very cultivated woman and she’s read every word you’ve written.”

Mrs. So and So would then tell me she’d so much enjoyed my book Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill and congratulate me on my play The Mollusc. The first of these was written by Hugh Walpole and the second by Hubert Henry Davies.

“You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.”

“You may be right. I don’t mind if I make mistakes. It may be that in one of the blind alleys I may find something to my purpose.”

“What is your purpose?”

He hesitated a moment.

“That’s just it. I don’t quite know it yet.”

“It must be a relief to you to think that at present we’re living in a country where every facility is afforded to sexual irregularity and every obstacle put in the way of marriage.”

“And quite rightly. Marriage is a serious matter on which rest the security of the family and the stability of the state. But marriage can only maintain its authority if extraconjugal relations are not only tolerated but sanctioned.”

“It is dedicated to St. Martin because I was lucky enough to find an old stained-glass window representing St. Martin in the act of cutting his cloak in two to give half of it to a naked beggar, and as the symbolism seemed so apt I bought it and placed it over the high altar.”

I didn’t interrupt Elliott to ask him what connection he saw between the Saint’s celebrated action and the rake-off on the pretty penny he had made by selling out in the nick of time which, like an agent’s commission, he was paying a higher power. But to a prosaic person like me symbolism is often obscure.

“I’ve got no reason for divorcing him.”

“That doesn’t prevent your countrywomen from divorcing their husbands when they have a mind to.”

She laughed.

“Why do you suppose they do it?”

“Don’t you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.”

It’s always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there’s no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.

“I think he’s been seeking for a philosophy, or maybe a religion, and a rule of life that’ll satisfy both his head and his heart.”

Isabel considered this for a moment. She sighed.

“Don’t you think it’s very strange that a country boy from Marvin, Illinois, should have a notion like that?”

“No stranger than that Luther Burbank who was born on a farm in Massachusetts should have produced a seedless orange or that Henry Ford who was born on a farm in Michigan should have invented a Tin Lizzie.”

“But those are practical things. That’s in the American tradition.”

I laughed.

“Can anything in the world be more practical than to learn how to live to best advantage?”

“I’ve been a secretary for twenty-one years, my dear sir, and I’ve made it a rule to believe all my employers as pure as the driven snow. I’ll admit that when one of my ladies found herself three months gone in the family way when his lordship had been shooting lions in Africa for six, my faith was sorely tried [...]”

“ ‘Brahma, the Creator,’ he said. ‘Vishnu the Preserver and Siva the Destroyer. The three manifestations of the Ultimate Reality.’

“ ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,’ I said.

“ ‘I’m not surprised,’ he answered, with a little smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eyes, as though he were gently mocking me. ‘A god that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?’ ”

“Do you know anything about Hinduism?”

“Very little,” I answered.

“I should have thought it would interest you. Can there be anything more stupendous than the conception that the universe has no beginning and no end, but passes everlastingly from growth to equilibrium, from equilibrium to decline, from decline to dissolution, from dissolution to growth, and so on to all eternity?”

“And what do the Hindus think is the object of this endless recurrence?”

“I think they’d say that such is the nature of the Absolute.”

“If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive towards virtue our future lives will be less afflicted. But it’s easy enough to bear our own evils, all we need for that is a little manliness; what’s intolerable is the evil, often so unmerited in appearance, that befalls others. If you can persuade yourself that it is the inevitable result of the past you may pity, you may do what you can to alleviate, and you should, but you have no cause to be indignant.”

“But why didn’t God create a world free from suffering and misery at the beginning when there was neither merit nor demerit in the individual to determine his actions?”

“The Hindus would say that there was no beginning.”

“According to the Vedantists the self, which they call the atman and we call the soul, is distinct from the body and its senses, distinct from the mind and its intelligence; it is not part of the Absolute, for the Absolute, being infinite, can have no parts, but the Absolute itself. It is uncreated; it has existed from eternity and when at last it has cast off the seven veils of ignorance will return to the infinitude from which it came. It is like a drop of water that has arisen from the sea and in a shower has fallen into a puddle, then drifts into a brook, finds its way into a stream, after that into a river, passing through mountain gorges and wide plains, winding this way and that, obstructed by rocks and fallen trees, till at last it reaches the boundless seas from which it rose.”

“But that poor little drop of water, when it has once more become one with the sea, has surely lost its individuality.”

Larry grinned.

“You want to taste sugar, you don’t want to become sugar. What is individuality but the expression of our egoism?”