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Articles

Obscurantism & The Language of Excess

Siobhan Lyons tries not to use either to explain what and why they are.

As a schoolgirl in a Catholic Primary School, I often had to attend church. In W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, the protagonist Philip Carey assumes that the greater one suffers with discomfort in prayer, the more in favour one will be with God. This would explain not only the religious habit of self-flagellation, but also why church pews are notoriously uncomfortable.

Attending an academic conference recently, I was confronted with similar discomfort in the lecture hall, whose seats remarkably resembled church pews in both look and feel.

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