Sunday, August 22, 2010

An entirely different place

"".......He (Somerset Maugham) became convinced, like Zola and Dreiser, that what we call character has a physical basis, that its origin goes back to that of the individual organism, and that physical conditions, especially environment, influence it after birth.

It is very hard that a person through no fault of his own should possess a character, perverse and difficult, which condemns him to an unhappy life. Accidents of the body can shape one's 'soul'- one's consciousness of oneself, the 'I' in the personality which is me.

He notes that some novelists are evidently unconscious of the importance of physical traits and their effect on character.

The world is an entirely different place to the man of 5 foot 7 from what it is to the man of 6 foot 2 ".

From 'Somerset Maugham- A Biographical and Critical Study' by Richard Albert Cordell & William Somerset Maugham

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