Walking the Wall

Looking at a world far removed from her life to that point, Kitty (from Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil) cried because “Here was Beauty” (97). It is interesting that having seen herself for all her flaws, for all her vanities and failings–she was better equipped to walk on the earth in peace than others who had not. “You see, you and I are the only people here who walk quite quietly and peaceably on solid ground. The nuns walk in heaven and your husband–in darkness” (103).

I found this book very similar in feel to Chopin’s The Awakening. In a different post about independence, I wrote of Chopin’s Edna:

Edna was a much sadder, much more human case. She had gone through so many levels of transformation, become self-realized, struggled to become an individual, but in the end she didn’t have the strength or wisdom to sustain it. She worked hard to see herself apart from being defined by society, her family, or her husband–but in the end she couldn’t live content within herself and she, like Ahab, sunk under the waves.

The Awakening was a sad book, Chopin writes: “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth”. In the Painted Veil, there is the same struggle for transformation, the same failings, but with one big difference–in the end she chose life.

Waddington, a great and interesting character of the book, says an odd thing when Kitty says she is looking for some truth but she wasn’t sure what it was, he says he knows what it is, “Tao.” But then has an odd description of it, “Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.” I certainly would disagree with Waddington’s idea that the Way leads nowhither (love that word though!), and that disagreement is exactly what gives Kitty the strength that Edna didn’t have in the end:

The sun rose, dispelling the mist, and she saw winding onwards as far as the eye could reach, among the rice-fields, across a little river and through undulating country the path they were to follow: perhaps her faults and follies, the unhappiness she had suffered, were not entirely vain if she could follow the path that now she dimly discerned before her, not the path that kind funny old Waddington had spoken of that led nowhither, but the path those dear nuns at the convent followed so humbly, the path that led to peace. (246)

The road doesn’t end nowhither, it ends in peace. All in all this was a quiet, beautiful book full of quiet pains and fears and even quiet failings and triumphs. Images of beauty tangle with images of death and somehow the quiet struggles of people give beauty even to the darkness. Waddington says:

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art. (196)