Quotes from OUT OF IT, by Stuart Walton
Evelyn Waugh's debut novel, Decline and Fall, concludes with its central character, Paul Pennyfeather...being apprised of the meaning of life by an avant-garde architect, the self-styled professor Otto Silenus. He is told that life is like the big wheel at Paris' Luna Park fairground, a revolving disk of polished wood with tiers of seats all round. Some people try to cling on to it and are flung centrifugally off, some inch their way to the center, where the rotation is less violent, while still others simply sit in the seats and spectate: There's generally someone in the center who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance... Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. How they all shriek and giggle! Then there are others... who sit as far out as they can and hold on for dear life and enjoy that. But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all, if you don't want to. People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit everyone. (page 304)
And neither does LSD. What cannot be written out of human development, however, is that we all have the intoxication instinct within us. In some, it may have evolved to the point where it is evanescently faint, and quite satiated with herbal tea or a festive sip of champagne. These will be Silenus' spectators. Others, perhaps a tiny minority, have so ordered their lives that they take exactly what they want when they want, know when to stop, and manage to avoid hangovers, comedowns and periods of ill health as a result of their intake. These are the dancers at the center. But for the great majority, intoxication is a case of clambering on to the wheel and being flung off again in continually renewed hilarity. There may be injuries, outbreaks of nausea, and occasional feeling that it might be nice to go on the carousel for once instead, but the wheel goes on spinning nonetheless. (page 304-305)
To the cringing world view of prohibitionism, intoxication is only ever a question of taking desperate measures to displace a grim reality. It is never allowed to be a celebration, an adventure or a laugh, and yet through the ages, it is almost exclusively this that has called us forth into that exterior space where domesticity and duty's strait-jacket hold no sway. After all obeisant lip-services have been paid to the specters of alcoholism, social disruption and the baleful neglect of responsibility, the inescapable fact is that being drunk can be supremely funny, as the comic archetype of the driveling inebriate has long attested---funnier than TV comedy certainly, and perhaps even funnier than sex--and thus profoundly psychologically therapeutic. - (page 305)
A combination of moral strictures, legal circumscription and medical admonition has reduced the experience of intoxication, our organic birthright, to the status of guilt material in an ego assailed on all sides by neurosis. We have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that there is a tragic irresolvable antagonism between the fleeting pleasures of intoxicated states and the permanently elusive goal of a genuine and lasting happiness. To be high is a waste of time, this morbid tradition has convinced us. It is too much of a temptation to excess. It is selfish, irresponsible and will make you ill. Just say No. But we make a fundamental mistake in seeing intoxication as a sad substitute for real fulfillment, instead of what it simply and irreducibly is--an integral component of a life fully lived. There may be higher things to dwell on, in the way of fine art or true love or transports of the soul, but they are not defeated by intoxication, and anyway they don't show their faces half often enough. (pages 305-306)
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Evelyn Waugh's debut novel, Decline and Fall, concludes with its central character, Paul Pennyfeather...being apprised of the meaning of life by an avant-garde architect, the self-styled professor Otto Silenus. He is told that life is like the big wheel at Paris' Luna Park fairground, a revolving disk of polished wood with tiers of seats all round. Some people try to cling on to it and are flung centrifugally off, some inch their way to the center, where the rotation is less violent, while still others simply sit in the seats and spectate: There's generally someone in the center who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance... Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. How they all shriek and giggle! Then there are others... who sit as far out as they can and hold on for dear life and enjoy that. But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all, if you don't want to. People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit everyone. (page 304)
And neither does LSD. What cannot be written out of human development, however, is that we all have the intoxication instinct within us. In some, it may have evolved to the point where it is evanescently faint, and quite satiated with herbal tea or a festive sip of champagne. These will be Silenus' spectators. Others, perhaps a tiny minority, have so ordered their lives that they take exactly what they want when they want, know when to stop, and manage to avoid hangovers, comedowns and periods of ill health as a result of their intake. These are the dancers at the center. But for the great majority, intoxication is a case of clambering on to the wheel and being flung off again in continually renewed hilarity. There may be injuries, outbreaks of nausea, and occasional feeling that it might be nice to go on the carousel for once instead, but the wheel goes on spinning nonetheless. (page 304-305)
To the cringing world view of prohibitionism, intoxication is only ever a question of taking desperate measures to displace a grim reality. It is never allowed to be a celebration, an adventure or a laugh, and yet through the ages, it is almost exclusively this that has called us forth into that exterior space where domesticity and duty's strait-jacket hold no sway. After all obeisant lip-services have been paid to the specters of alcoholism, social disruption and the baleful neglect of responsibility, the inescapable fact is that being drunk can be supremely funny, as the comic archetype of the driveling inebriate has long attested---funnier than TV comedy certainly, and perhaps even funnier than sex--and thus profoundly psychologically therapeutic. - (page 305)
A combination of moral strictures, legal circumscription and medical admonition has reduced the experience of intoxication, our organic birthright, to the status of guilt material in an ego assailed on all sides by neurosis. We have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that there is a tragic irresolvable antagonism between the fleeting pleasures of intoxicated states and the permanently elusive goal of a genuine and lasting happiness. To be high is a waste of time, this morbid tradition has convinced us. It is too much of a temptation to excess. It is selfish, irresponsible and will make you ill. Just say No. But we make a fundamental mistake in seeing intoxication as a sad substitute for real fulfillment, instead of what it simply and irreducibly is--an integral component of a life fully lived. There may be higher things to dwell on, in the way of fine art or true love or transports of the soul, but they are not defeated by intoxication, and anyway they don't show their faces half often enough. (pages 305-306)
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