Comments on Thinking as a Hobby by William Golding
by Sharp (Huang Xin)
E-mail:huang_sharp@sohu.com, huang_sharp@tom.com


Introduction: The British novelist and essayist William Golding (born in 1911) is best known as the author of the international best seller Lord of the Flies (1954)��which describes the descent into savagery of a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983. Golding made a major contribution to English literature. His novels have been reprinted many times and are required reading at many colleges and schools. In ��Thinking as a Hobby��, he defines three grades of thinking and describes his intellectual and not so intellectual childhood, adolescence, and maturity.
Three levels of thinking: ��1At the lowest level of thinking, the thinker does not think at all but merely responds from emotion.
��2The middle grade of thinking is the one bright western adolescent reach between the ages of 16 and 20 (the obnoxious years). Mid-level thinkers are very good at tearing down other people's ideas but not so good at constructing anything themselves.
��3The highest level of thinker, according to Golding, is one who not only sees where others have gone astray but also reaches out to them in an effort to build, together, something helpful.
Irony skill: When Golding describes his "coherent system for living" in paragraph 43 (P123), is he serious or ironic? Marriage to us is a very sacred thing but people in our day and age think it lightly. I feel that this is due to the lack of proper respect for what the marriage means and entails. I do, in a very powerful statement, not bet the marriage lightly, and do not regard marriage as a meaningless ceremony with a ring? So I would not see it done away with. Without big business the economy would decrease, like Lucifer being cast out of heaven and into the eternal pits of damnation. No government, in other words, pure chaos, the complete breakdown of law and order, of civility and patriotism. No army, but if you did away with government there would be no use for an army, it would simply have no nation to defend. In essence, the nation would be divided against itself, and a nation cannot stand steadily in the word. All these will make one think that Mr. Golding must have been either crazy, or, as I think he was trying to be, ironic.
The transition form irony to seriousness takes place on Pr45 (P123) when he asks the question, ��Had the game gone too far? Was it a game any longer?�� This sounds to me like a person on the verge of insanity. It makes me think that he could no longer decide whether he was just joking or actually serious.
When Golding finishes his essay I think that he leaves it open to reader interpretation. He says ��Now you are expecting me to describe how I saw the folly of my ways and came back to the warm nest��, ��I dropped my hobby and became professional.�� Did he drop thinking as a habit and become a professional in the world he wanted to change, or did he drop the habit and pick it up again as a professional thinker? I think that he did both. A man like William Golding would never give up his love, his passion to think, not only in feel, a world with the Venus of Milo, or love, also in the sense of marriage and companionship, can a man live for so long. One must be careful how long they stay steeped in thought or the Leopard of nature will pounce.
In William Godling��s Thinking as a Hobby, he travels in a circle: he starts without the ability to think, ��As I saw the case, I had broken the window because I had tried to hit Jack Arney with a cricket ball and missed him?�� He did not THINK about the consequences of his actions. Then he discovers the wonders of thinking and gets so wrapped up in it that he looses himself, he looses the ability to think clearly; ��Had the game gone too far? Was it a game any longer?�� Was he serious about his system or not? I do not consider whether he was serious or not, I do not think that he knew up from down, he was lost in the dark without any striking match at his disposal. Finally, he finds himself-- he realizes that you must conform in some ways at least to the world because the world will not bend its will to your whims.

April 5,04