Jamie: Have you ever read ‘The Razor’s Edge’?
Anna: Maugham right?
Jamie: Yep.
Anna: No.
Jamie: You should read it.
Anna: Maybe. I don’t normally read book recommendations. It’s the ultimate act of superiority, putting yourself in cahoots with the author, both of you saying, I know what’s best.
Jamie: That’s not…
I think you’d like it, is all.
Anna: Why don’t you paraphrase it for me?
Jamie: I can’t remember the whole story. I read it years ago.
Anna: No, just the bit that you felt I might relate to.
Jamie: Larry… rejects society, materialism, everything, in search of some transcendent meaning to life.
Happiness, without the jewellery I guess.
I think the reader is meant to assume he finds happiness in the end. I don’t think he does, because he’s constantly onto the next thing, always looking ahead. Never in the present. I don’t think you could ever be happy, living like that.
Anna: Maybe it’s not his lifestyle, but the fact that Sophie’s dead. Perhaps he can’t be happy without her.
Jamie: What was the point of that? Cheap thrills?
Anna: Sorry. Don’t listen to me. I don’t know the first thing about literature. The only thing I know about it is most of the time, you should avoid reading it.
Jamie: Rubbish.
Anna: It doesn’t open you up, it shuts you in. You can’t think for yourself when you've got Proust, Maugham, Kerouac all in your head.
Jamie: So you’re saying you’d like to live an uninformed life.
Anna: Yes.
Jamie: With no regard as to how that would affect intolerance, religious persecution, the ability to learn from our historical mistakes…
Anna: Why not? Within reason of course. Acumen-tested.
Jamie: What? You have to be intelligent to be uninformed?
Anna: Yes.
Jamie: And in this veritable utopia, where are you?
Anna: Uninformed.
Jamie: Naturally.
(a pause)
Where am I?
Anna: Where do you want to be?
Jamie: Uninformed.
No, informed.
I don’t know.
Anna: Well, it’s irrelevant where you want to be. You wouldn’t have a choice. Imagine if people did.
Jamie: Culpability as a reason to oppose free will.
Anna: Something like that.
Posts
