Williams and Community

The reading for today dealt with two separate storylines:  Stanhope bears Pauline's fear and Wentworth fabricates a world all his own.  There are other small moments that happen as well:  Margaret Anstruther communicates salvation to a man long dead and Lily offers Pauline happiness without responsibility to others.  

Relationships.  Community.  This theme carries throughout this book.  

We already discussed how Pauline and Stanhope discuss the nature of bearing one another's burdens.  Whatever Williams is actually recommending we do for each other, this is a much greater, stronger thing than what we usually consider it to be.  Beyond the action itself, bearing someone else's burdens necessitates that we ourselves must come to rely on others to bear our burdens.  

Rather than open up oneself to the judgment and gossip of others, however, Lily proposes a much cleaner, opposite path: self-reliance.  By ignoring others and their needs, Lily suggests that one can be entirely content.  

Wentworth walks this path.  Rather than engage in what little relationship he has with the actual Adella Hunt, his mind creates its own Adella.  Wentworth rejects the actual world, the actual Battle Hill, the actual Adella, all for his own version of reality.  Wentworth bars himself from all community, all relationship by creating his own fictional society.

Williams's views on co-inherence bleed through this theme.  Sharing burdens necessitates an interchange of vulnerability between people.  Rejecting community for a personal version of reality is safer, perhaps, but the ultimate truth is that this existence is hell.  Williams's narrative makes it aboundingly clear that we were meant to live life together.