The phrase W. Somerset Maugham used as the title for Of Human Bondage comes from Part IV of Spinoza’s Ethics, “Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions”, which treats the general inability of people to control their emotions, and thus constitutes a type of bondage. He goes on to connect beliefs to emotions of pleasure and pain and how desires evolve into plans and outcomes.  That central theme runs through the life arc of Philip Carey, a character based in part on Maugham. Orphaned at age nine and afflicted with a club foot, he is taken in by an aunt and emotionally remote uncle and soon shunted off to a boarding school. We follow his evolution through his youth, education, his awkward first loves, his difficulties in finding a vocational fit, and the heartbreaks and disappointments he encounters in his quest for meaning.  Maugham dissects the confusion and dissonance of being simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by people, objects, thoughts and events with surgical precision and cool detachment.  His descriptions reveal an artist’s eye and his conversations have a musician’s ear for pitch, tone and timbre. The result is a depiction of the complexity and ambivalence of living in the changing environment of the modern world that Theodore Dreiser called a work of genius and compared to a Beethoven symphony. It is no surprise that the Modern Library included Of Human Bondage at number 66 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20^th Century.

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