Sergey Kazakov: The Lotus Eater

Sergey
Why did Thomas Wilson choose to live a life of happiness and what were the consequences?

Somerset Maugham in his novel "the Lotus Eater" has aroused old philosophical question – how to live ours lives? Great majority of us, despite being unsatisfied with our lives, think that it could be only one way - as it goes. But only few of us are really trying to change it, to take our fate in our own hands. Is it possible to reach this goal? Author analyzed this not very common situation in example of Mr. Thomas Wilson, an absolutely ordinary person, who seems to be one of us. Mr. T.Wilson had tried to solve this problem by cutting off all boring things of his life. He took all advantages of time for preparation his "happy life" – he analyzed the situation from different points of views and made his decision in absolute agreement with his desires. But despite Mr.Wilson’s reasons to live a "happy life", his approach could not be regarded as absolutely successful.
Although this question had not been discussed in the novel in full details we can suggest that it was only one of many possible ways to build up a "happy life", which in the biggest way was up to Mr. Wilson’s personality and suit his mentality. His dull life in grey smoky London, his everyday boring duties went in contradiction with beauty and splendor of southern Italy – gorgeous nature, lovely weather, friendly people and atmosphere of leisure and joy. According to the story this occurred not long after his wife’s death and maybe it was his first visit abroad. He was charmed, fascinated! An other reasons which influenced his decision, had to do with his character – he was selfish. Even his daughter’s death did not disturb him a lot; despite the fact that he spoke about his wife with respect, he did not felt any remorse because of her early death; he hated and despised his mother-in-law. He was an ordinary man, "common place", as S.Maugham characterized him, without any bright abilities and without any tiny will to achieve something which needed a scruple of efforts. He did his work only for living – the only one thing which he mentioned during his long conversations was remark that he needed 37 minutes to reach his work by walking. So this ordinary, unsatisfied, unambitious person without any close relationships in the whole world had chosen his own way of living – he decided not to struggle with obstacles, but to cut them off, to build up "happy life", which totally consist of pleasurable things.
Full consequences of his decision became evident not so fast. At first he was quiet happy with his life – all had moved in accordance with his plan. He enjoyed food, his tiny living place, small measure of pleasures such as books, tobacco and wine. He did not allow anybody even women to disturb his peaceful and quiet existence. I suppose that during this period he was quite happy in his own way. But as time passed his troubles began. And the main problem was the lack of money. Consequences were dreadful –a once respectful man became a "vegetable". He lost all his dignity, self-respect. The finish was expectable – death in the dirt. I even felt a relief that this had occurred at last – it is difficult to see a man without any trace of humanity. We feel that it was reasonable – T.Wilson was not able to take into account all consequences of his idea of "happy life".
But can we be sure that it was the only one possible way of events? No. We can imagine that he would be wiser and he would not be in such kinds of troubles. Would he be successful with his idea in this case? Can "happy life" be built by this method? The supposed answer should be "No". When you are cutting some troubles from your life, other ones became troubles which you had not regarded as troubles before.