I have started re-reading Skidelsky's majestic biography of Keynes (for about 4th or 5th time, always such a pleasure) - the majestic first volume: it is such a fireworks of intellectual and personal history, and connecting the two in a hugely masterful way. And such a familiar feeling about the exotic submerging into Moore's upgrade of Sidgwick's ethics. It all seems so irrelevant, ridiculously highminded, ridiculously impractical. Benthamite utilitarianism is such a montrosity, so no wonder they all felt the need to get rid of its crudities. But why bother in the first place? So strange.
Though Keynes himself is surely one of the wonders of the modern world - and he took this curious, abstract discourse seriously for all his life, even if somewhat tempered by the horrors of his era. The later horrors that is, as the beginning in the pre-Great War Cambridge was surely one of the most civilized, most privileged and most liberal times and places in the history of humanity. Such a wild ride. Keynes was such a rounded character, his supple, practical, powerful mind choosing always the middle road, never erring into revolution or reaction, never into passivity or into dreary, soulless do-goodery. The greatest intellectual of hero of mine.
But the company he kept though brilliant and refreshingly eccentric was largely totally incapable of action or function in the real world outside the ivory towers of Cambridge and Bloomsbury. There were many exceptions of course but often the effect to an outsider is a certain feeling of suffocation, of narrowness. I do sympathize with D.H. Lawrence, with his rage against the brittleness and the irony. Though in reality that irony was often very sharply wielded weapon - and he was quite in need of it himself. Strange lives, the most shining of them must be Keynes' though, the man for all seasons.
