Volume 56, Number 16 · October 22, 2009
Dreams & Duels of England
By Hilary Mantel
The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England
by Keith Thomas
Oxford University Press, 393 pp., $34.95
We live in a society basted in self- regard, our moralists tell us; fat and dozy on the lion's share of the world's resources, polluting the seas and burning fossil fuels, we gaze in loving torpor at our own reflection, and the gnat-bite of recession barely disturbs our narcissistic trance. More than any generation before us, we command the resources for self-realization—'a life well lived,' as Keith Thomas puts it. But do we want to be artists, philosophers, pioneers of the natural sciences? No: we want to be celebrities. We dream of instant, global fame. We expect it to enrich us, gratify us, but are less concerned that it outlast us. Once, priorities were different. In 1606 in London, a gang of law students stormed a London brothel and broke its windows. They wanted, they said, 'to do something that they may be spoken of when they were dead.'
Review, 3716 words
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