NP Boris Slutsky

[calbert at tiac.net]

It must be synchronicity....yesterday, entirely without provocation 
or context a friend sent this:

Your man W. Somerset Maugham wrote:

(in the interest of full disclosure, I've never read WSM, the closest 
was watching the last hour of the movie version of "Of Human 
Bondage",cfa) 

"I have been more concerned with the obscure than with the 
famous. 
They are more often themselves. They have had no need to create 
a figure to 
protect themselves from the world or to impress it. Their 
idiosyncrasies 
have had more chance to develop in the limited circle of their 
activity, and 
since they have never been in the public eye it has never occurred 
to them 
that they have anything to conceal. They display their oddities 
because it 
has never struck them that they are odd. And after all it is with the 
common 
run of men that we writers have to deal; kings, dictators, 
commercial 
magnates are from our point of view very unsatisfactory. To write 
about them 
is a venture that has often tempted writers, but the failure that has 
attended their efforts shows that such beings are too exceptional to 
form a 
proper ground for a work of art. They cannot be made real. The 
ordinary is 
the writer's richer field. Its unexpectedness, its singularity, its 
infinite 
variety afford unending material. The great man is too often all of a 
piece; 
it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is 
inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has 
in store 
for you. For my part I would much sooner spend a month on a 
desert island 
with a veterinary surgeon than with a prime minister."