How necessary this turned out to be, because in 1929 his
stunning political career suddenly came to what appeared to be an
ignominious end. Driven from political life, Churchill spent a decade
in pseudo-exile at Chartwell, while Neville Chamberlain and a
generation of British politicians appeased the growing threat of
Fascism in Europe.
Life does that to us. It kicks our ass. Everything we work for can
be taken away. All our powers can be rendered impotent in a
moment. What follows this is not just an issue of spirit or the mind,
it’s a real physical question: What do you do with your time? How
do you handle the stress of the whiplash?
Marcus Aurelius’s answer was that in these situations one must
“love the discipline you know and let it support you.” In 1915, reeling
from the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, Churchill wrote of feeling
like a “sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly
hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had
great anxiety and no means of relieving it; I had vehement
convictions and small power to give effect to them.” It was then that
he picked up painting, and in 1929, experiencing a similar loss in
cabin pressure, he returned to his discipline and his hobbies for relief
and for reflection.
Churchill didn’t know it in the middle of the 1930s, but being out
of power during Germany’s rearmament was exactly the right place
to be. It would take real strength to stay there, to not fight his way
back in, but if he had, he would have been sullied by the
incompetence of his peers in the government. Churchill was likely
one of the only British leaders to take the time to sit through and
digest Hitler’s Mein Kampf (if Chamberlain had, perhaps Hitler
could have been stopped sooner). This time allowed Churchill to
actively pursue his writing and radio careers, which made him a
beloved celebrity in America (and primed the country for its eventual
alliance with Britain). He spent time with his goldfish and his
children and his oils.
Also, he had to wait. For the first time in his life, excepting those
afternoons on the porch, he had to do nothing.
Would Churchill have been the outsider called back to lead
Britain in its finest hour had he allowed the indignity of his political
barry
(Barry)
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