I recently picked up a book from Maugham again. It is a collection of five short stories and three novels, including The Moon and Sixpence. The reason was simple: I wanted to enjoy a pleasant read. Many times I waded arduously through an abstruse vocabulary without reaching anywhere proportionally meaningful. Of course, it might have been my own lack of understanding. In any case, Maugham rarely disappoints me. In the morning flight a few days ago, I opened the unusually heavy book and finished the story The Pool.
The story is quite straightforward. Lawson, a well-educated white Scottish man with a decent job in a bank, fell in love with a beautiful "half-caste" girl Ethel on one of the colonial Samoan islands and married her. He took them back to Scottland, partly because he wanted to give them a more comfortable life and a better future for their dark-skinned son, and partly because he could not bare the island life anymore. However, Ethel grew increasingly homesick and dissatisfied and one day, she left with their son without warning. Lawson, madly in love and not being able to imagine a life without Ethel, went after her, while knowing he would detest his life there. But it was inevitable that he lost his love, his job, his dignity, his home, his health, his social status, his everything. He succumbed to alcoholism. He was despised by people around him, including Ethel. He drowned himself in the pool where he first fell in love with Ethel. Now I forgot why I thought it necessary to re-tell the story. Beside the moral of the story, I wonder, will we all be sensing that calling from home sooner or later? Will there always be a part of me that yearns to go back? The Pool was written in 1921, almost a century ago, but aren't we today still struggling for more or less the same fundamental reasons? Sometimes it feels like, the evolution of humanity resembles the growing-up of one single person - the very core of who you are was determined in the very early years of your life; later on you just change and adapt on a superficial level. What held true hundreds of years ago still holds true today. Well it's just a thought.
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