¶ Crisis of 1927
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Index Entry
“In 1927 I gave up forever what I thought was a fallacy of most of my contemporaries-- in fact, it seemed to me all of my contemporaries. They all said: ‘I have to earn a living.’ And that had the highest priority in what they were studying at school. The phrase ‘earning a living’ I thought was wrong. The words really meant you had to prove your right to live; you had to prove that you were worth living; in the face of Darwin and Malthus, there was nowhere near enough to go round, and survival only of the fittest. And I felt that all this was wrong, so I said in 1927: I’m going to give up forever this concept of proving my right to live. I’m going to find out what it is that I’ve experienced, that I see needs to be done, that nobody else is attending to and that my experience tells me I know how to solve. Most people were attending to very narrow things; therefore it forced me to concentrate on big things, and employ the biggest pattern-comprehending capability with which we are all born.”
¶ Citations
- RBF in “The Listener,” transcript by John Donat, 26 Sep’68
