A Quote by Alain de Botton
There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school trauma.
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I grew up in a very white, privileged, old-fashioned society in South Africa and went to a boarding school run by nuns.
As I said just now, the world has gone past me. I don't blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.
I have a theory that if you've got the kind of parents who want to send you to boarding school, you're probably better off at boarding school.
I had to admit that in his old-fashioned way O'Hara was still romantic about sex; like Scott Fitzgerald, he thought of it as an upper-class prerogative.
I don't know if one's more typecasting than the other, or what I am more like. But I know that the high school I went to was a private school. It was prep school. It was a boarding school. So we didn't have a shop class. We didn't have Saturday detention. We went to school on Saturday. We did have Sunday study, which you very rarely get, because then you have 13 straight days of school. Who wants that?
When I was sixteen years old, I was sentenced to two years in prison; the Swedish government changed it, so I could go to a boarding school as part of a social programme. I was in this boarding school with some of the richest kids in Sweden.
All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
We lived in Germany; my father was in the Army, and they figured I would have more consistency at boarding school. That kind of gives you a thick skin.
I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.
I'm always represented as a bit of a class warrior - a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I'm actually very fond of men and am middle-class. I even went to boarding school in Perthshire.
Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.
Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.
I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home.
I was 16 years old, attending boarding school, and I loved Pride and Prejudice. From the opening pages, I loved it. And I will say in my class, not one but two boys told me that I reminded them of Lizzy Bennet. I didn't realize it at the time but this was the nicest thing that any male would ever say to me. This was as good as it got.
Practically everyone I know now is from a middle- or upper-middle-class background, and I no longer have the huge chip on my shoulder that I carried around for so many years. I'm not sure it comes out much in the work, but coming from this kind of background is absolutely central to my identity, to my sense of who I am.
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