"Poor Sebastian! ... It's too pitiful. How will it end?""I think I can tell you exactly how, Charles. I've seen others like him, and I believe they are very
near and dear to God. He'll live on, half in, half out of, the community, a familiar figure pottering
round with his broom and his bunch of keys. He'll be a great favourite with the old fathers....
Everyone will know about his drinking.... Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he'll be
picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they
give him the last sacraments. It's not such a bad way of getting through one's life."Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1951The miserable people are those who resist God in one way or another (with the possible exception of
Bridey, who's just pompous but also, in a way, endearing). The mother can't rely on God's grace-she
wants to micro manage everything. Sebastian remains a believer who at the same time wants to fight God,
and God lets him take his own course while never letting him go. (Cordelia says that maybe Sebastian is
fortunate in that in his last days, he will provide monks with an occasion to serve a seemingly wasted
life.) Julia denies her faith-lives as if it's false-but can't really shake free of it. Charles is the "agnostic"
around whose ankle God has a rope. With a "twitch on the thread" God will bring Charles around. It will
feel like a painful yank at the time. But as Charles reflects in the chapel at the end of the story, he sees the
freedom he has found-the last line of the movie and the book has a soldier saying to Charles, "You're
looking unusually cheerful today."
But what of Julia and Charles's breakup? Is that cruel of God to require? Charles doesn't think so. He
says to Julia, "I hope your heart may break; but I do understand." If he really loves Julia-before this time
does Charles really love anything?-then he couldn't ask her to set up, in Julia's words, "a rival good to
God's."
Charles demonstrates his love for Julia by recognizing that he can't ask her to give up the most
important thing in her life. Maybe there's another way, but Julia doesn't see it: "The worse I am, the more I
need God. I can't shut myself out from his mercy. That is what it would mean," she says to Charles,
"starting a life with you, without him." Charles, we know, finds (for the first time) a sense of peace after
the breakup. OfJulia we have no word. But the book's really about Charles.
There's that famous quote from Vietnam-"To save the village we had to destroy it." For obvious
reasons, the quote is ludicrous. And yet it conveys something true about life. Muscles are built up only
after being broken down. Marathoners succeed only after miles of sweat. Great punk bands are built on
the foundations of unpleasant experiences (the famous-infamous?second album). As you say, "Our
evolution didn't hinge on passivity."
I have a student who thinks highly of her writing ability. She is an English major-ergo, she must be a
great writer! Yes, she has some talent, but her writing needs a lot of work, and she is quite unhappy with
me for refusing to agree with her lofty self-assessment. Apparently I'm tougher on her writing than her
other professors.
INQUIRY BOX
Evelyn Waugh wrote that the theme of Brideshead Revisited is "the operation of divine grace on a
group of diverse but closely connected characters." The theological meaning of the word grace,