CONTRA MUNDUM -- Being a short and very personal reverie concerning the tale of Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder
I first saw "Brideshead Revisited" when I was very young. I didn't understand everything in the story but for some reason I was extremely fascinated, and I remember wondering why that funny young man with the teddy bear was so unhappy. This was a great mystery to me. I saw it again years later, and I read the book. Now I could see all of the things that I couldn't understand when I was younger: Sebastian's homosexuality, his problems with alcohol, with his family, with the world in general, but even though all of these things are supposed to explain his character, the fact that he is so unhappy remains as great a mystery as ever; …show more content…
In the story we witness the world of the British aristocracy wither into the rubble of modernity, and at the same time, the world of youth, that short period between childhood and boredom, is found, fought, and mercilessly slain. In the words of Evelyn Waugh: "The languor of youth, how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of youth, all save one come and go throughout life; but languor, the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self regarding that belongs to youth, and youth alone, and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of limbo, the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the beatific vision; perhaps the beatific vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience; I, at any rate, believed myself near to heaven during those languid days at …show more content…
Being in love is always a new world. Sex is not really an issue in the story, rather fascination of a more basic, even religious, kind. The meeting with that living God who is the ultimate, beautiful and sinister, its secrets never to be fully fathomed, the unique confrontation with love. The homosexual theme becomes an illustration of the impossibility of that ecstatic love of youth to last. Reading the story as a gay manifesto would only reduce Sebastian's and Charles's experience into a subculture dilemma, or even worse, something political. If we let gender and sex get in the way of love, we shrink the story into simple
I first saw "Brideshead Revisited" when I was very young. I didn't understand everything in the story but for some reason I was extremely fascinated, and I remember wondering why that funny young man with the teddy bear was so unhappy. This was a great mystery to me. I saw it again years later, and I read the book. Now I could see all of the things that I couldn't understand when I was younger: Sebastian's homosexuality, his problems with alcohol, with his family, with the world in general, but even though all of these things are supposed to explain his character, the fact that he is so unhappy remains as great a mystery as ever; …show more content…
In the story we witness the world of the British aristocracy wither into the rubble of modernity, and at the same time, the world of youth, that short period between childhood and boredom, is found, fought, and mercilessly slain. In the words of Evelyn Waugh: "The languor of youth, how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of youth, all save one come and go throughout life; but languor, the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self regarding that belongs to youth, and youth alone, and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of limbo, the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the beatific vision; perhaps the beatific vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience; I, at any rate, believed myself near to heaven during those languid days at …show more content…
Being in love is always a new world. Sex is not really an issue in the story, rather fascination of a more basic, even religious, kind. The meeting with that living God who is the ultimate, beautiful and sinister, its secrets never to be fully fathomed, the unique confrontation with love. The homosexual theme becomes an illustration of the impossibility of that ecstatic love of youth to last. Reading the story as a gay manifesto would only reduce Sebastian's and Charles's experience into a subculture dilemma, or even worse, something political. If we let gender and sex get in the way of love, we shrink the story into simple