People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
The author shows all the deepness of his philosophical opinions in this masterpiece. He discloses to us things that we consider difficult, but he discloses them showing their simplicity. People always say that they want to hear the truth, whatever it is. But actually they want to know is only the good truth, the one that is pleasing to them. What about the bad truth, people are usually just afraid of it. They are afraid to be criticized, to be humiliated in others’ eyes; they are afraid of their own flaws. And when they ask somebody to say the opinion about them, they usually don’t mind to tell about both their pluses and minuses, but they want actually just to praise their advantages. Probably, it’s because of human’s egoism. People don’t want to know that they have the features that make them worse than others in some way.
You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.
Somerset is depicting in his novel about young Philip Carey’s searching in life, searching for sense and purpose. Philip is bound since his childhood by religious dogmas, by lack of his own opinion and by lack of freedom. Everyone tends to be free, but this concept is different for everyone. Somerset’s characters achieve their own freedom in different way. Philip reaches the understanding of freedom, which turned out to be love, but this happens only in the very end. And the entire book describes his attempts to become free.
Both freedom of thought and freedom of action don’t depend completely on a person; mostly they depend on the world around us. Thoughts cannot be grown from nothing, they are built and formed basing on others’ opinions, and freedom of action also depends on different factors, one of which is money. So maybe the complete freedom does not exist, but human’s nature tends to search for it. And if to try hard one surely can find it, as we see on Philip’s example.
