Many people know Maugham because of his masterpiece "The Moon and Sixpence", however, I like Maugham because of his "The Veil".

In my humble opinion, the most important book that girls sh

Many people know Maugham because of his masterpiece "The Moon and Sixpence", however, I like Maugham because of his "The Veil".

In my humble opinion, the most important book that girls should read is The Veil, especially when they want to step into love.

This book will tell girls that the most important, beautiful, and hardest thing in life is to learn to love, and then to love people. And before that, girls need to make some necessary preparations.

For example, the establishment of a full and rich spiritual world, to cultivate a peaceful and calm but also elegant and independent soul.

If you don't make such preparations, you will have to hastily unveil the veil of love, marriage, and life, and in the end, you will only get a bruised and battered yourself.

The Veil is a novel written around 1920, after Maugham's travels in China, which tells the story of Katie, a rich young lady from London's upper class, who follows her newlywed husband to China and goes through various experiences, and her own mind slowly gets sublimated and grows.

The novel opens with Don't unveil the colorful veil, all the people call it life ......

Maugham used this beautiful and brutal poem to set the tone of the book, calm and down-to-earth, but also sharp and penetrating.

The heroine of the novel, Katie, she was initially a beautiful and proud but snobbish and superficial girl, although she was carefully managed, beautiful and moving, but because of their own pride and snobbery, to the age of 25 have not found a satisfactory marriage partner. On the contrary, she has been sacrificed for her, the terrible figure of her sister in 18 years old to find a man of their choice.

So she chooses to rush through the whole thing, trying to get herself married off as soon as possible before her sister's wedding, and if she can get away, so much the better, to escape the cheap, boring country vacations of the recent past.

At the same time, Walter, a laconic, introverted and aloof bacteriologist who is working in Hong Kong, based in China, and will soon need to return to Hong Kong, falls for her at the ball. His situation is perfectly suited to her recent expectations that she can get married as soon as possible and still be away from her family to follow her husband to faraway China.

She agrees to his proposal. As she gets older and her mother urges her to get married, she treats it as a task that needs to be accomplished urgently, and only considers the lesser desires of her heart at the moment.

She didn't think about how she was going to spend the rest of her life with someone she didn't feel comfortable with **** after her short-lived troubles were solved by getting married, let alone talk about the deeper things of love and responsibility.

Two years into the marriage.

At first, she was impressed by his kindness and thoughtfulness, but because he was so polite and considerate, she felt uncomfortable instead, and there was no casualness between them as a couple should be.

With the close contact and life with him, his hidden moodiness and eccentricity make her uneasy, his private passionate confession, will make her a little embarrassed, the two people between the very different habits, hobbies and interests will make her feel annoyed spoiled.

The same view of some people and things, he used the objective multi-angle vision to see, rational evaluation, while in the eyes of Katie, there are only two views, like or do not like. So his rational answers are ridiculously prudish in her eyes. Her simple straightforwardness is stupidly shallow in his world.

She had also looked closely at him, his features that were ordinary in combination but exquisite when taken apart individually. She had also tried to understand him, about his work, his ancestry, his life experience before they met, his personality preferences and so on.

She took the initiative to ask questions, but his answers were always not very satisfactory to her, too simple and hard. He hates talking about himself and doesn't like to answer questions.

She came to the conclusion that they were completely unsuitable, that she couldn't understand why he had fallen in love with her, and that she couldn't think of anyone more unsuitable than her, this introverted, uninteresting, eccentric and impersonal person with a sharp, slightly sarcastic tongue.

Two people who are completely unsuitable and whose inner worlds are totally different are hard-wired together, so how will it end?

In this book, the end of the two is tragic, the hero Walter, deep love wrongly paid, and ultimately lost his life, while the heroine Katie was hurt by the love of the body, she realized her own superficiality and stupidity, hated but can not do anything about it.

After two years of marriage, Katie cheats on her lover, a married woman who thinks she has met her true love. The other party is the local colonial assistant auxiliary secretary of Hong Kong, she likes his charming smile, like he dresses fashionable and exquisite, like his words humorous and witty, like his noble status but happy to give grace to people to do good.

The book opens with the recounting of the plot: one day at noon, the two cheated on Katie's home by her husband, Walter, but Walter ultimately did not open the door into the house, but proudly left on his own, he did not care to settle the matter in a rough way.

Walter is y in love with Katie. He is outwardly cold and inarticulate, but he is only willing to show his emotionalism in front of her; he is smart and does not like gossip, but he puts up with boredom and tries his best to like the boring and ridiculous things she likes; he knows that she has agreed to marry him for the sake of trying to get a momentary benefit, but he does not care.

Even he knew that she did not love him, but he never expected to get her love, he just hoped that she would not be bored with their love is enough.

The bottom line of all this deep love, all this humility is: no betrayal. And she overstepped.

So he tore down all of Katie's initial fantasies of love in a brutal way. He and Katie showdown, when listening to Katie filed for divorce, naive and certain that his lover will also be released from the bonds of the current marriage, to marry themselves, he just with a bitter mockery of indifference to the tone of his own conditions.

He was willing to divorce her if her lover, Charlie, produced a written promise that he would divorce and marry Katie within a week. Otherwise, she would need to accompany him to Mae Ta Phu, a place where cholera was occurring at the time, and he offered to take charge of the contagious epidemic there.

When Katie confidently and calmly approached Charlie and told him the situation, Charlie told her I love you while he began to explain to her what she needed to do to prevent infection when going to the cholera place. Even though he knows that Katie's frail constitution will most likely bury her life if she goes.

All of Katie's beautiful fantasies were shattered a little bit, and she realized what her husband had done, and Walter knew exactly what Charlie was really like, vain and selfish, mean and cowardly, and cold. He knew Charlie would sacrifice her. He did it only to tear down her naive and ridiculous illusions.

But Katie still doesn't understand that Charlie, while talking about loving her and wanting nothing in the world but her, has no hesitation in abandoning her to die in order to save his own status. Why is this?

On this question, Maugham borrowed Charlie's mouth, sharp mockery to give the answer: A man may love a woman very much, but does not want to spend the rest of his life with her together ****.

In Katie's case, love takes up her whole world, and in her mind, the world of love is equal to the whole world, while in the eyes of his lover Charlie, the world of love is only a small part of the whole world.

Charlie says that he loves Katie. This is true, and it is also true when he says that he wants nothing in the world but Katie. It's just that the world in his mouth is the world of his love, and in the world of love, only Katie is wanted, only she is loved. But not the whole world as Katie thought.

So both mouths say the same words 'I love you', probably both are sincere, the problem is that each person has a different percentage of love in the whole world in their mind, and both subconsciously think that the love in their mouths is the same in the other person's world, which is not the case.

There are a lot of people who are in love, many times because of some things will cause quarrels, and then will argue about love and not love the problem, love more and less of the problem, but there is also a possibility that: he is sincere love for you, and his world of love is really full of you. However, his world is not only love this one part.

I love you is true, you are not so important is also true.

There is a love triangle theory in psychology, which suggests that love is composed of intimacy, passion, and commitment, and all three are indispensable.

Katie and Charlie's love has only passion and intimacy in it, which is generally referred to as 'romantic love'. Without commitment, passion-driven love will only be short-lived.

Because passion is fleeting. It is an explosive emotional state, and after the passion is over, the intimacy that remains without commitment simply cannot withstand any stormy wash. But wherever there is a little difficulty, the so-called love between the two will dissipate and perish on its own.

Once in a book, I read that if you really want a serious start, then you must let yourself wait a little bit, and then wait again, and then wait again, and then finally really start. If the passion for that start doesn't propel you three times, it must be an early start.

In the face of her lover's abandonment and her husband's cold retaliation, Katie finally agrees to follow him to the land of cholera.

But do you stop loving someone just because they've been treated cruelly?

Initially, Katie is on her way to the land of cholera, and realizes that even though she knows Charlie's ruthlessness, she still loves him, and she is so sad that she wants to kill herself.

At this point in time, Katie, because of the loss of an unworthy person in their own world, the cowardly want to give up all, she felt abandoned by Charlie, she even have no meaning to live.

But no one can be abandoned by anyone other than themselves, because everyone belongs only to themselves.

You can continue to love the other person even when you know he is despicable, but, definitely not give up yourself for him.

By the time they arrive in the land of cholera, Katie's husband, Walter, is leaving early in the morning and returning late at night every day, leaving Katie alone in the bungalow where they live. So she often chats with her newfound friend Waddington, a deputy customs commissioner stationed in Mae Taeng Province. In a sense, he is Katie's guide on her spiritual journey.

From Waddington, Katie learns more about her former lover, Charlie, and a different side of his wife, Dorothy.

Waddington says that Charlie is actually a foolish hypocrite, and that he made his fortune and rose through the ranks not because of his own abilities, but because he had his wife behind him to give him advice that was worth taking.

And, as Waddington bluntly and sharply mocked, what the government needs is never smart people, but people who are smooth in the world and don't poke holes in things. Because smart people get all kinds of ideas, and ideas invite a lot of unnecessary trouble.

About Charlie's wife Dorothy, the woman Katie sees as traditionally conservative in dress and politely detached in speech, it's amazing that she knows her husband is flirting around and doesn't care.

Because she knows it won't last, she adds that she would actually like to be friends with his husband's cuties, but they're so generic that she feels dishonored. Because, the women who fell in love with her husband were second rate.

The truth she learns from Waddington is embarrassing and painful for Katie, and she feels so cheap and shallow that she cries in her sleep about it.

In addition to this, on the way to Mae Taeng House, Katie encounters the chastity pagoda, which radiates dreamlike beauty, and she feels vaguely uneasy and ironic. Late at night, after living in a small bungalow in Mae Tam House, she captures the mysterious transcendence and illusory abundance of beauty of a dilapidated temple halfway up a mountain in the distance.

Katie's understanding of beauty is changing, and her interpretation of human nature has advanced to a higher level, as her transcendent mind slowly begins to awaken.

At this point in time, a terrible plague is spreading in Mae Taeng Province, and the situation is so bad that, in addition to the local governor and the garrison commander, Colonel Yu, only the Deputy Commissioner of Customs and Excise, Mr. Waddington, is left, along with a convent of Frenchwomen, who have turned the orphanage into a hospital, and the rest of the people have been evacuated early.

The local population dies in large numbers and batches every day, and some families even die at home of disease, with no one to bury them. Once, Katie in the follow Waddington out for a walk, in the roadside to see the body of the beggar died of cholera, her first close personal experience of the horror of death and the smallness of mankind, she was shocked, fearful, inexplicably grief.

One day, Katie accepts the abbot's invitation to visit the local convent. Here, her mind is further violently shocked, and she slowly senses another world of far-reaching significance under the veil of mystery. Her eyes begin to widen, and she begins to re-examine the world as she sees it.

In the convent, the nuns are naturally happy and innocent, the Mother Superior is noble and beautiful, but also has a unique temperament, and Walter, as described by the Mother Superior and the nuns, is capable of outstanding performance, is considerate and gracious in the face of the patients, and possesses a delicate and exquisite heart of love.

She realized that there was a barrier between her and them, that she was in a different world from them, that she was shut out of their mysterious spiritual world, and that she suddenly felt an unprecedented loneliness.

Katie thought back to her old self, stupid and ignorant, selfish and shallow. And then she saw in Reverend Mother a feminine beauty that she had never seen before, a dignified and gracious, humble and elegant, confident and serene quality. At the end of the visit, after walking out of the convent, she burst into tears of shame.

She desperately wished that she could go to the convent to help out, to spend time with the pure and good-hearted nuns, and she longed to be part of their world, the spiritual world of the most good and the most beautiful. Faced with a growing sense of loneliness, Katie is restless and confused.

And Reverend Mother, whose sharp, penetrating gaze seemed to recognize Katie's uneasiness, granted Katie's request and told her that one could not find peace, whether on earth or in a convent, whether at work or at play, and that peace existed only in one's soul.

Katie takes care of the orphans that the nuns take in at the convent, and slowly she realizes a strange sense of well-being, reassured by the nuns' calm demeanor in the face of the spreading cholera madness.

Later, Katie learns from one of the nuns about the love story between Customs Waddington and a Manchu princess.

Waddington was stationed in Hankow during the revolution in China, and he saved the life of a large family, whereupon one of the girls in that family fell madly in love with him, and when he left, she fled the family and abandoned everything, chasing Waddington relentlessly. Then, after sending her home several times and her going and coming back, he had to take her in. Now, they love each other y.

Learn that the Manchu princess is single-mindedly, obsessively and uniquely devoted to Waddington. Katie is perplexed and fascinated by their strange interracial love, and she is intrigued and fascinated by the Manchu princess.

She inexplicably felt that she could find in the Manchu princess something unknown that she had been searching for, and could thus realize what she was searching for.

Katie sensed a change in herself, she felt that she was growing, as to what it was she could not say.

Gradually, she realized the extraordinary qualities of her husband, Walter, his love and selflessness, his intelligence and sensibility, but also the depth and fragility of his love.

Katie feels that, although she is still incapable of feeling affection for her husband, she has long since closed her heart, and when she thinks of her former lover, Charlie, she is left with nothing but peace and disdain. She is pondering what she can do to make Walter let go of his pain and restore peace to his heart, and although there is no more love between them, they can still be friends and live in harmony.

So when Walter learns that she is pregnant, and that he intends to send her away even though he is not sure whose child it is, she chooses to refuse. She wanted to remain in the convent and with her husband. And partly because she knew she had nowhere else to go, that her mother would not welcome a daughter in this condition.

There is an easing of the icy relationship between Katie and Walter, as he confesses that his vindictiveness has long since disappeared once they arrived at Mae Taeng House, and she, after all she has been through, is slowly growing in enlightenment, and is trying to find a way to diffuse his pain in the hope of receiving his true forgiveness. Everything seems to be moving in the right direction.

However, Maugham's ultimate goal in this book, in which he unveils the layers of life in a matter-of-fact way, is to depict reality, which is often brutal, in a precise and sharp way.

Walter is infected with an epidemic, and he dies suddenly and swiftly.

Walter had left home early that day to go to work. Later that evening, Katie finally comes up with a way to perhaps gain his understanding, before she can do anything else. Late at night, she is caught off guard and straight in the face of his quick death in front of her, forever.

Walter had come to the land of cholera to take over from a local missionary doctor who had also died from the plague, even though he had vaccinated himself as well.

Since arriving in the Land of Cholera, Walter has been working frantically every day, trying to find ways to treat the sick and purify the water. When he goes home at night, he also studies late into the night in his makeshift laboratory. He searches for any way to stop the terrible plague that is spreading so badly in the area, despite the danger to himself.

Until his body couldn't take it anymore and he collapsed from exhaustion. In fact, his body has long been due to labor and labor and thinning, just, the two have their own things to do, before the relationship is also relatively rigid and other reasons, Katie has not noticed his body changes, only know that he is very busy every day.

When Katie learned that the man in the hospital bed in front of her could die at any time, she only hoped that it was not too late to ask for his forgiveness, so as to eliminate his pain, so that he could easily pass away. But in the end, Walter leaves only the words that it was the dog that died.

This is the last line of Goldsmith's Elegy. It's a poem to the effect that a dog was taken in by a good Samaritan, and then suddenly one day the dog bit the good Samaritan, and people thought that the good Samaritan was about to die, but in the end it ended up the other way around, and it was the dog that died, and the good Samaritan survived.

Walter compares himself to the dog. He put himself down from the very beginning of the relationship, once confessing to Katie: I never expected you to love me, and I never thought I would be loved. I'm grateful to be allowed to love you. I try not to let my love bother you; most husbands think of it as a power, I am prepared to accept it as a favor.

This outwardly cold, temperamental man is actually humble and vulnerable on the inside. He was affectionate and considerate, intelligent and kind, benevolent and unselfish, but it is surprising that he never thought he would be loved, as if it were a luxury for him.

But he is also proud and paranoid. His humble and deep love also has a bottom line, and when Katie crosses that one and only bottom line, he is paranoid and falls into the pain of self-imposed bondage, and he despises himself because he loves her.

When he learns that Katie has betrayed him, he says something, something that will stick in the minds of all those who have read the book The Veil, just once.

"I have no illusions about you," he says, "I know you're stupid and frivolous and clueless, but I love you. I know your aims and ideals are both vulgar and commonplace, but I love you. I know you are second-rate, but I love you. I know how afraid you are of intelligence, so I'll do my best to make you think I'm as big a fool as anyone else you know. I know you married me for a passing interest, and I love you so much that I don't care."

He applied to Mae Taung House, and everyone thought that he was getting back at Katie, even though he later admitted that was the original idea. I actually think that deep down, more than anything else, he was doing it for self-punishment.

Just because he had enshrined a beautiful rag doll in the sanctuary, and then realized it was full of sawdust, he couldn't forgive himself and wouldn't forgive her.

So some people say, this relationship, Walter also has a fault, his ideal wife, is to understand their own hearts, and their own interests, beautiful and intelligent people, is that he both want to Katie's beautiful vivacious, and get, but also do not like her ignorance of the shallow. He likes her advantages, but can not accept her shortcomings.

It doesn't seem to be the case, he knew what kind of person she was from the beginning, and what he wanted was never more than one thing, that Katie could stay by his side and allow himself to love her, and that was enough. Apparently, the only thing that was required, Katie couldn't fulfill him either. It was a painful and hopeless thing for both. His paranoia is painful more because of this thing than because of Katie's ignorant vulgarity and lack of love.

So, because of Walter's paranoia, death is actually not a relief for him.

In this book, until Walter's death, Katie still did not fall in love with him, and she concluded that she would not fall in love in the future, even though she saw all sorts of good things about him. Sometimes reality is so cruel and hopeless.

Would you fall in love with someone because they are a good person?

After experiencing the death of her husband, Katie more y appreciate the fragility of life, everyone will eventually go to death, then a lot of things seem trivial, so why bother to care about, and even lock themselves in a self-cast cage, can not break free.

At this point in time, Katie, after all the experience, bruises, but also has long grown up, slowly cultivating their soul in the tranquility, as a way to want to bravely face the future of everything.

However, the inner world she built is not yet fully complete and solid. After her husband's death, she decided to return to Hong Kong, sell her property, and return to the UK to start a new, quieter life as a pregnant woman.

But once in Hong Kong, she was once again intoxicated by the warmth of Charlie's embrace, and even though she was disgusted by it, she eventually lost out to the despicable desires of human nature!

So, the disgust she felt for herself became a driving force to accomplish the ultimate true beauty of the soul.

At this point, she really said goodbye to the ignorant and vulgar, selfish and hard to resist the temptation of Katie.

Everyone has a veil, and some people don't realize it exists, their own or others.

Katie, for example, initially she has been living in her own world under the veil, and thought that this small world is the whole world, and then she met her husband, met the nuns, and she slowly found herself as if they were cut off from them, they are in another world, they can not get into it, and so, she began to explore the entrance.

There are others who know that there are layers of veils in the world, but he chooses not to lift them, such as the hero, Walter, who hides himself in his own world, and can even say that he is imprisoned in it. His inner obsession makes him not want to lift that veil himself, even as he reinforces himself. The veil, for him, blocked his connection to a part of the world, but he accepted it.

He sees it as a hard protective shell, and he knows what the world beyond the veil is like, perhaps because he doesn't like it, perhaps because he's afraid of being hurt, or of causing problems for others. In any case, he refuses to let anyone else see his full self under the veil, even if they love him dearly.

There are still some people who choose to unveil the layers of life, and use a kind of fraternity to touch all kinds of life under the veil. The beautiful, grateful; the ugly, embraced with tolerance. For example, Reverend Mother and the nuns.

Or, like Waddington and Charlie's wife Dorothy. The world under the veil is approached with absurdity and playfulness, and those who care are taken seriously; those who are not interested are mocked and laughed at.

Everyone has their own veil, choose to unveil or not, after the unveiling of the choice to what kind of mentality face to treat. In addition, the veil is removed, whether they have the ability to support the kind of state they want to show. This is all a choice that has to be made, and it needs to be carefully considered one by one.

In the end, the veil of love, the veil of marriage, the veil of the world, the total will constitute a colorful veil, that is, life.

These veils serve as both a barrier and a protective layer for the girls to see into the other world. The world of love to which the girls curiously aspire is not only beautiful and sweet, but also countless deceptions and injuries.

To be in the world of love, to find their own beauty and joy. Only after lifting the veil of love, have the ability to face and resist, those who are not good all sorts of things.

An Austrian poet, Rilke, once wrote in a letter to a young poet: love, good; because love is difficult. To love with a human being: this is perhaps the hardest and most important thing given to us, and all other work is but a preparation for it. The essentials of love are not something of devotion, dedication, union with a second person; it is a sublime impulse for the individual to go to maturity, to complete a world within himself, to complete a world of his own for the sake of another.

So the girl who is starting everything, who is not ready for all this, cannot love yet.

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