Tough Skin But A Soft Core

death to ironic distance

“Listen. The University of Humor—that is what it is—that prevails everywhere in England for the formation of youth provides you with nothing but a first rate means of evading reality. All English training is a system of deadening feeling, a stoic prescription—a humorous stoicism is the Anglo-Saxon philosophy. 

Many of the results are excellent: it saves from gush in many cases; in times of crisis or misfortune it is an excellent armor. The English soldier gets his special cachet from that. But for the sake of this wonderful panacea—English humor—the English sacrifice so much. It is the price of empire, if you like. It would be better to faceour imagination and our nerves without this drug. And then once this armature breaks down, the man underneath is found in many cases to have become softened by it; he is subject to shock, over-sensitiveness, and indeed many ailments not met within the more direct races. 

Their superficial sensitiveness allows of a harder core; our core is soft because of course our skin is so tough. To set against this, it is true you have the immense reserves of delicacy, touchiness, sympathy, that this envelope of cynicism has accumulated. It has served literary art in a marvelous way; but probably it is more useful for art than for practical affairs. Then the artist could always look after himself. Anyhow, the time seems to have arrived in my life, as I consider it has arrived in the life of the nation to discard this husk. I’m all for throwing off humor: life must be met on other terms than those of fun and sport now. The time has come. Otherwise—disaster!”

–Wyndham Lewis, excerpted from the novel “Tarr” (1918)