Isherwood, 1941: Thoughts on Acts

Christopher Isherwood, Diaries, Vol. 1 1939–1960, 132–133

tl;dr (Too long ; Didn't read):  Isherwood writes,

"Why do we fool ourselves that we can suddenly behave like heroes and saints...? The acts of 1941 will be the thoughts of the past ten years."

This is what I noticed soon into our Life in the Time of Corona: that in these new circumstances, we acted (and act, can only act) from the base of who we already were.

(And so, in the future, we will act as who we are becoming now. For me, that probably means dolls and bears, all the way down the line. 😊)

Here, below, is the context of the quote--Isherwood's entry for New Year's Day, 1941. (Near the end of the year, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, on December 7, and the US entered the war).

NOTE: I broke up Isherwood's long paragraphs for easier reading online.

1941

January 1.  I really must try to keep this journal more regularly. It will be invaluable to me if I do. Because this year is going to be one of the most decisive periods of the twentieth century––and even the doings and thoughts of the most remote and obscure people will reflect the image of its events.

    That's a hell of a paragraph to start off with. Why are we all so pompous on New Year's Day? Come off it––you're not Hitler or Churchill. Nobody called on you to make a statement. As a matter of fact, what did you actually do?

    [Went out with drunk friends. Went to the Hindu temple and listened to sacred readings.] . . . Then you came home and couldn't sleep, so you reread most of Wells's First Men in the Moon. [Etc.]
. . .
    People, on the whole, are ready to sacrifice their bodies in war, but most of them lack the other kind of courage––the courage by which the spirit survives––because they haven't been trained to it.
Here yoga comes in. [The Hindu Vedanta practice, not exercise classes at the Y.] It offers a technique of spiritual training.

Pacifist propaganda is useless in itself, a mere political gesture, and an ineffective one. [Isherwood was a Conscientious Objector.]
You can't make propaganda for the spiritual values. You can only demonstrate them by being. And you can only make such a demonstration after you have been properly trained. No use rushing unarmed into the struggle and trusting to luck. Gerald and the Swami are so right about this.
At the moment of action, no man is free.

Why do we fool ourselves that we can suddenly behave like heroes and saints after a lifetime of cowardly thinking, daydreaming and hate?
The acts of 1941 will be the thoughts of the past ten years.
   
[End Isherwood quote]

Last week I started  rereading Nothing Happened by Ebba Haskins (Norway, 1948). Its main character (mis)quotes Aldous Huxley saying something similar: 

“Everything that happens to one is intrinsically like oneself”.

(Huxley and Isherwood were friends. Not that this is an insight unique to them.)

Like; Don't Like

The New Year's Day quote catches some of what I like and what I don't like about Isherwood.

I like his observations, the large views mingled with the daily details; what he actually did set beside what he's thinking.

I dislike how he shames himself––"nobody called on you"––something he does for what he considers disgusting weaknesses, such as lying in bed too long.
And he doesn't question it, as if his harsh judgement were objectively true and he deserves it.

UPDATE: Later in the diaries, he does question his self-condemnation--says it's useless, egotistical self-loathing from his youth.

This makes me so uncomfortable; it's like watching someone hit themself.

So far as I've read in his diaries, he hasn't addressed this, but I'd bet his self-judgment reflects the "character building" that was taught in his English boarding school from eight years old, and the culture of the ruling classes. (He was the grandson and heir of a country squire.)
For instance, that you are morally weak and bad if you don't polish your shoes before bed.

Oh--here it is--I looked it up:

"With school friend Wystan Auden, he wrote three plays—The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938)—which clothed the psychological and political anxieties of their time in rackety schoolboy camp."
--"About Isherwood"

From an article on "Boarding School Syndrome" in the Guardian:

An American psychoanalyst who worked in a Bangkok practice, specialising in expats said,
"Middle-aged, middle-class Brits who went to your crazy private schools may just about be the most damaged social sub-group I’ve ever come across."

I get that damaged feeling from Isherwood, and it makes me squirm and want to avoid the man.
I like his observations too much to drop him, so I don't. I do wish I'd bought the paperback ed of his diaries though: a 1,048 page hardback is punishing to hold.

❧❧❧ P.S. Hey--"the doings and thoughts of the most remote and obscure people"--that's us bloggers!