Tuesday, May 15, 2012

The Shipwrecked










She believed she knew : men were conditioned by their insecurity.  It was not that they envied him his money or were consciously opposed to his international purpose ; it was that increasingly they needed sensations to take their minds off their personal danger :  a murder, a war, a financial crash, even a financial success if it were sufficiently startling.  She was disturbed when she thought of the immense impersonal pressure that was exercised on any man with power, to induce him to make a sensation at the cost of security : by ulitmatum, telegrams, slogans, huge bonuses with nothing paid into the reserve. It was only a man completely out of touch with what people thought, without a private life, who could resist this pressure. And Anthony wanted to make him human. 










From: Graham Greene, England Made Me (published 1935, retitled The Shipwrecked, 1953).





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