What Was Forster Thinking About This Week?
E.M. Forster's letters range across numerous subjects - his day-to-day experiences and attitudes, the books he wrote and read, the times he lived in. By sifting through these, undergraduate Colette Sensier and the Cambridge Authors team have put together an unusual virtual diary of what was on Forster's mind at different times of the year. On this page you'll find what he was thinking this week; and this will change regularly. If you wish, you can receive these updates, approximately once a week, by e-mail. Just enter your email address in the box below to receive your own 'Forster's Thought for the Week'. A great variety of thought-provoking material will come through - sometimes sad, sometimes serious, sometimes quirky and even a little objectionable. Do you see things the same way he did?
WHAT WAS FORSTER THINKING ABOUT THIS WEEK?
In May 1914 he was thinking about an artist’s relationship to life. Writing to his confidante Florence Barger he described his 'vague suspicion that the human relation comes second to something else – [but] not to the divine’. Quoting the art critic Arthur Clutton-Brock, he felt like he and other artists were 'discontented with actual experience’, and that there were 'three ways of escaping from it – morally by trying to change oneself: intellectually, by withdrawing from the stream of events, artistically, by painting, etc.’ Art was the search for something 'fuller than the eye’ could give. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 16 May 1914)
