VV (3) - Stencil's Love

[David Morris]

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(55) Work [...] far form being a means to glorify God and one's own 
godliness (as the Puritans believe) was for Stencil grim, joyless; a 
conscious acceptance of the unpleasant for no other reason than that V. was 
there to track down.
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(55) what love there was to Stencil had become directed entirely inward, 
toward this acquired sense of animatedness.
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There is a schism in these two statements.  Stencil has no love for his 
chosen task.  "Grim" & "Joyless" is his chosen mission.   Yet he does love 
his own newfound "animatedness."  He loves himself for _doing something_, 
but not for WHAT he's doing, and he surely doesn't love the actual task.  He 
loves the idea of himself as a man of action, his fictionalized self.

By choosing a motive for action an object which does not move him, a task in 
which he invests no feeling and a grail he hopes to never find he has freed 
himself from everything but himself.  His isolation is complete, unless some 
feeling manages to break through.  Stencil has succeeded in making himself 
his own automaton.

David Morris
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