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“I have a hunch. Which is that the British are very ashamed of vulnerability. So what happens is whereas another culture might look back on their childhood and say, ‘God, I was so cute, I thought clouds were cotton wool,’ the British will look back and say, ‘I was so stupid, I thought clouds were cotton wool.’” –China Mieville quotes Camila Batmanghelidjh in his NYT piece on contemporary London.*
We confirm that from our experience then admit at the next possible opportunity, “I’m one of those stupid people who, in order not to think of myself as ever having been vulnerable, used to think of myself as stupid.” There’s no end to this terraced denial unless you look back over your life & own the things that happened to you. It’s not too late to exchange Britishness for humanity.
* The full version here.
Yes.
Temporary seating, a shortage of holes, and Thatcher’s commodified ghost – if that doesn’t make you feel vulnerable, nothing will.
We don’t have to lose our Britishness to become more human; there are moments in being British, or even in being English, that exactly augment our sense of being vulnerable and human: in Billy Bragg, Walter Sickert (The Miner http://www.all-art.org/art_20th_century/sickert2.html), the unabashed flesh of Stanley Spencer, and (hence) Joyce Cary in ‘The Horse’s Mouth’. Anywhere you are likely to see a vague scumbled bright dash of daffodils against the grey or red anatomy of uplands or tenements; it twists unpredictably like a primary school-yard beanbag out of the grasp of snideness that our humour has almost totally become, it asks rambling, urgently imponderable questions and it sits warm and barely foaming still in the bay windows of provincial pubs (the sly but bashful charm of ordering at the bar in a strange place). It’s being just half content with the inconsequential and the forlorn. It’s comforting but not comforted – the lingering rank smell amongst old tweeds in charity shops and abandoned brogues that hardly appear worn by their recently departed owners. In the small hollows of all these places, in our quick sentimentality and excitableness beyond crashing reserve, we remain English and vulnerable.
Americans do the same thing.
The English want be correct about everything and be in control.
Hi Will. When you say “correct”, do you mean “formal” or “right” ? Because everyone in GB is utterly terrified of being wrong. They’d rather keep schtum than be caught making a mistake about the smallest thing.
I think that conformist mindset/pack-mentality of UK literary criticism is reflective of this same “fear of vulnerability” — the fear of taking risks, making mistakes, and being singular.
I find this holds true, 1957 or 2012.