Page "Silenus" Paragraph 23

Professor Silenus is a Character from Evelyn Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall.

He features as the disaffected architect of King's Thursday and provides the Novel with one of its primary motifs.

In the prophetic style of the traditional Greek Silenus he informs the protagonist that life is, " a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly.

At first you sit down and watch the others.

They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh, and you laugh too.

It's great fun.

Of course at the very centre there's a point completely at rest, if one could only find it.

Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again.

But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all.

People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it.

It doesn't suit everyone.