Joy Cometh in the Morning
By P. G. Wodehouse
Foreword by Joseph Bottum
(2005)
Read this one for some perspective on what’s important in life—or better, read it for sheer enjoyment.
This edition of The Trinity Forum Reading features “Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend,” a short story by P. G. Wodehouse with a Foreword by Joseph Bottum, editor of the journal First Things.
“Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend” gives us a taste of a world that never quite existed—but should have. Bottum, in his Foreword, suggests something about the power of Wodehouse’s light but perfectly crafted words, thrown in the teeth of the waste land that was the twentieth century, and claims that Wodehouse is Western civilization’s best answer to Friedrich Nietzsche.
The technical title of the orgy which broke out annually on the first Monday in August in the park of Blandings Castle was the Blandings Parva School Treat, and it seemed to Lord Emsworth, wanly watching the proceedings from under the shadow of his top hat, that if this was the sort of thing schools looked on as pleasure he and they were mentally poles apart. A function like the Blandings Parva School Treat blurred his conception of Man as Nature’s Final Word. Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend
Category: Readings (No. 39)
