Chronicles of Wasted Time: Number 1.

Michael Wade @ Execupundit shared his top 10 list of Bios and Auto-Bios.  I dove into #1 on his list: Chronicles of Wasted Time: Number 1. The Green Stick by Malcolm Muggeridge. I had never heard of Muggeridge.

A wonderful obit in the NY Times describes Muggeridge (1903-1990) as a prolific British journalist, author, satirist and caustic social critic. “He delightedly described Cambridge, where he received a master’s degree, as “a place of infinite tedium,” and in the mid-1960’s his caustic attacks on the British monarchy (“Does England Really Need a Queen?“) lost him several writing jobs and nearly ended his career with the British Broadcasting Corporation. His opinion of world leaders was summed up pithily: “Everything that politicians say is without exception void — utterly empty”…Consistent with his egalitarian socialist beliefs, the elder Mr. Muggeridge refused to send his sons to Eton or Harrow or Charter House, but rather to local elementary and secondary schools. These were presided over, Mr. Muggeridge recalled later, by a “bizarre collection of aged and incompetent teachers” and “I emerged unscathed and largely unlettered.””

Don’t take my word for it, read a few excerpts below and tell me what you think about the quality of Michael’s recommendation:

…From the very beginning of my life I never doubted that words were mymétier. There was nothing else I ever wanted to do, except use them; no other accomplishment or achievement I ever had the slightest regard for, or desire to emulate. I have always loved words, and still love them, of their own sake. For the power and beauty of them; for the wonderful things that can be done with them.

…Surveying now this monstrous Niagara of words so urgently called for and delivered, I confess they signify to me a lost life. Possibilities vaguely envisaged but never realized. A light glimpsed, only to disappear. Something vaguely caught, as it might be distant music or an elusive fragrance; something full of enchantment and the promise of ecstasy. Far, far away, and yet near; at the very farthermost rim of time and space, and in the palm of my hand. In any case, whether strained after in the remote distance, or reached for near at hand – unattained. No light seen more enduring than a match flickering out in a dark dave. No lasting ecstasy experienced, only a door closed, and footsteps echoing ever more faintly down stone stairs.

…My years of journalism have, in any case, inculcated in me a strong and, as I consider, on the whole salutary resistance to re-reading or re-considering anything done earlier than yesterday. With a few special exceptions, I have had no wish to renew acquaintance with my past writings…I have not care to revise them, or, if the truth be told, read them. The mysterious saying Let the dead bury their dead applies, as far as I am concerned, with particular force to words, which exist like insects in the tropics, buzzing briefly round a hurricane lamp and then piling up in dead heaps on the ground.

Photograph Source: Kim Kingwall