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My Wood
E. M. Forster
Edward
Morgan
Forster
(1879-1970),
English
essayist,
novelist,
biographer,
and
literary
critic,
wrote
several
notable
works
of
fiction
dealing
with
the
constricting
effects
of
social
and
national
conventions
upon
human
relationships.
These
novels
include
A
Room
with
a
View
(1908),
Howards
End
(1910),
and
A
Passage
to
India
(1924). In addition,
his lectures on fiction, collected as
Aspects of the Novel
(1927),
remain
graceful
elucidations
of
the
genre.
In
“My
Wood”
taken
from
his
essay
collection
Abinger
Harvest
(1936), Forster writes with wit
and wisdom about effect of
property
upon human behavior---notably his own.
A few years ago I wrote a book which
dealt with in part with the difficulties of
the
English
in
India.
Feeling
that
they
would
have
had
no
difficulties
in
India
themselves, Americans
read the book freely. The more they read it the
better it made
them feel, and a cheque
to the author was the result. I bought a wood with
the cheque.
It is not a large wood----
it contains scarcely any trees, and it is
intersected, blast it by
a public
footpath. Still, it is the first property that I
have owned, so it is right that other
people should participate in my shame,
and should ask themselves, in accents that will
vary
in
horror,
this
very
important
question:
What
is
the
effect
upon
the
character?
Don’t let’s touch
the economics; the effect of private ownership
upon the community
as a whole is
another question----a more important question,
perhaps, but another one.
Let’s keep to
psychology.
If you own
things, what’s their effect on you? What’s the
effect on me of my wood?
In
the first place, it makes me feel heavy. Property
does have this effect. Property
produces
men
of
weight,
and
it
was
a
man
of
weight
who
failed
to
get
into
the
Kingdom
of Heaven. He was not wicked, that unfortunate
millionaire in the parable,
he
was
only
stout;
he
stuck
out
in
front,
not
to
mention
behind,
and
as
he
wedged
himself
this way and that in the crystalline entrance and
bruised his well-fed flanks,
he saw
beneath him a comparatively slim camel passing
through the eye of a needle
and being
woven into the robe of God. The Gospels all
through couple stoutness and
slowness.
They point out what is perfectly obvious, yet
seldom realized: that if you
have
a
lot
of
things
you
cannot
move
about
a
lot,
that
furniture
requires
dusting,
dusters require
servants, servants
require insurance
stamps,
and the whole tangle of
them makes you think twice before you
accept an invitation to dinner or go for a bathe
in
the
Jordan.
Sometimes
the
Gospels
proceed
further
and
say
with
Tolstoy
that
property
is
sinful;
they
approach
the
difficult
ground
of
asceticism
here,
where
I
cannot follow them. But as to the
immediate effects of property on people, they just
show
straightforward
logic.
It
produces
men
of
weight.
Men
of
weight
cannot,
by
definition, move like the lightning
from the East unto the West, and the ascent of a
fourteen-stone
bishop
into
a
pulpit
is
thus
the
exact
antithesis
of
the
coming
of
the
Son of
Man. My wood makes me feel heavy.
In
the second place, it makes me feel it ought to be
larger.
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