Fury Read Online Free PDF Page A

came to heckle and boo but left more quietly and thoughtfully, seduced by his deep sweetness of nature, by that same blue-eyed innocence and concomitant certainty of being heard that had roused Malik Solanka from his first-day funk.
    Times change. One morning in the mid-seventies, Solanka slipped in at the back of his friend’s lecture hall. What impressed him now was the toughness of what Dubdub was saying and the way in which his strongly contrasting, almost Pythonesque twittishness defused it. If you looked at him you saw a tweedy fop, hopelessly out of touch with what was then still being called the zeitgeist. But if you listened, you heard something very different: an enveloping Beckettian bleakness. “Expect nothing, don’t you know,” Dubdub told them, leftist radicals and beaded hairies alike, waving a crumbling copy of Candide. “That’s what the good book says. There will be no improvement in the way life is. Dreadful news, I know, but there you have it. This is as good as it gets. The perfectibility of man is just, as you might say, God’s bad joke.”
    Ten years earlier, when various utopias, marxist, hippyish, seemed just around the corner, when economic prosperity and full employment allowed the intelligent young to indulge their brilliant, idiotic fantasies of dropout or revolutionary Erewhons, he might have been lynched, or at least heckled into silence. But this was the England in the aftermath of the miners’ strike and the three-day week, a cracked England in the image of Lucky’s great soliloquy in Godot, in which man in brief was seen to shrink and dwindle, and that golden moment of optimism, when the best of all possible worlds seemed just around the bend, was fading fast. Dubdub’s Stoical take on Pangloss-rejoice in the world, warts and all, because it’s all you’ve got, and rejoicing and despair are therefore interchangeable terms-was rapidly coming into its own.
    Solanka himself was affected by it. As he struggled to formulate his thoughts on the perennial problem o£ authority and the individual, he sometimes heard Dubdub’s voice egging him on. These were statist times, and it was in part Waterford-Wajda who allowed him not to run with the crowd. The state couldn’t make you happy, Dubdub whispered in his ear, it couldn’t make you good or heal a broken heart. The state ran schools, but could it teach your children to love reading, or was that your job? There was a National Health Service, but what could it do about the high percentage of people who went to their doctors when they didn’t need to? There was state housing, sure, but neighborliness was not a government issue. Solanka’s first book; a small volume called What We Need, an account of the shifting attitudes in European history toward the state-vs.-individual problem, was attacked from both ends of the political spectrum and later described as one of the “pre/texts” of what came to be called Thatcherism. Professor Solanka, who loathed Margaret Thatcher, guiltily conceded the partial truth of what felt like an accusation. Thatcherite Conservatism was the counterculture gone wrong: it shared his generation’s mistrust of the institutions of power and used their language of opposition to destroy the old power-blocs to give the power not to the people, whatever that meant, but to a web of fat-cat cronies. This was trickle-up economics, and it was the sixties’ fault. Such reflections contributed greatly to Professor Solanka’s decision to quit the world of thought.
    By the late 1970s Krysztof Waterford-Wajda was a bit of a star. Academics had become charismatic. The victory of science, when physics would become the new metaphysics, and microbiology, not philosophy, would grapple with the great question of what it is to be human, was as yet a little way off; literary criticism was the glamour act, and its titans strode from continent to continent in seven-league boots to strut upon an ever larger international stage.