The Collector

by John Fowles

“Oh, clever… what’s the use of that? Are they human beings?”

I’ll never learn, I said. It’s to unlearn, he said. You’ve nearly finished the learning. The rest is luck.

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

They’re all the same, women like her. It’s not the teenagers and daughters who are different. We haven’t changed, we’re just young. It’s the silly new middle-aged people who’ve got to be young who’ve changed. This desperate silly trying to stay with us. They can’t be with us. We don’t want them to be with us. We don’t want them to wear our clothes-styles and use our language and have our interests. They imitate us so badly that we can’t respect them.

He said, the New People are still the poor people. Theirs is the new form of poverty. The others hadn’t any money and these haven’t any soul.

But God can’t hear.

As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It’s obvious, it stares you in the face. There must be a God and he can’t know anything about us.

It’s like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it’s silly. A toy I’ve played with too often.