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This, Malouf believes, is the key to our curiosity, our achievement and our discontent, which has only been exacerbated in an age when technology outstrips imagination, leaving us not with a sense of connectivity but rather with an uneasy recognition of how tenuous our connections really are.įor Malouf, the defining metaphor is that of the Earth, seen from space: “small, round, lonely-looking, out there in its far-off planetary life.” How, he wonders, could such an image lead to anything but alienation? “This was Earth,” he tells us, “which had seemed so vast in our slowly acquired knowledge and exploration of it … yet how small and unsupported-looking it was out there.” “He was led, in the act of writing itself, to speak more radically than he knew and with another meaning than he consciously intended” - making the case that one of the essential roles of government, of society, is individual fulfillment, not hedonism but destiny.Īt the same time Malouf recognizes that we are, perhaps, wired to be unsatisfied, creatures of “unrest.” To make the point, he draws from Plato’s “Protagoras,” in which humanity, with no particular physical gifts, must rely on ingenuity to survive. “It is …, one suspects, on Jefferson’s part a language act rather than a considered political one,” he explains.
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He is also a classical thinker, basing his argument in art, in literature, citing sources from Rembrandt and Rubens to Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn, and building a key part of the book on Thomas Jefferson’s invocation of “the pursuit of happiness” - he calls it a “real time bomb” - in the Declaration of Independence. Malouf, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a Man Booker finalist, is one of Australia’s most honored writers, the author of 11 novels, as well as short stories and poetry. We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.” … What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal - they know nothing of us and to the extent that we know nothing of them - cannot put a face to them, cannot find in them anything we recognize as human - we cannot deal with them. “In terms of space this means what is within sight, what is local and close within reach, within touch. “What is human is what we can keep track of,” Malouf declares.