Happy Friday, dear reader.  Today we hoist one for the man, the myth, the Nobel laureate who probably would have that this whole digital ink-spilling ceremony was a colossal, albeit predictable, waste of time.  September 19th marks the day William Golding was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, and for that, we owe him a debt of gratitude, or at least a stiff drink and a moment of profoundly uncomfortable silence.

Here’s to Uncle Willie, the patron saint of “I told you so,” the literary maestro who looked at the optimistic, stiff-upper-lip adventure stories of his day, stories full of plucky British schoolboys making the best of a bad situation, and presumably, after a long, soul-searching bender, asked a question of sublime and terrifying simplicity: But what if they were all just malignant little monsters?

And thus, Lord of the Flies landed like a fragmentation grenade in the pristine, manicured garden of mid-century literature.  Is there a more perfect allegory for the thin veneer we call “civilization”?  A more brutal refutation of the idea that we are inherently good, noble creatures who just need a bit of structure and a conch shell to get along?  I, for one, dear reader, have attended enough literary society mixers and holiday family dinners to know that the conch is a lie and Piggy is always, always getting his glasses smashed.  It’s the natural order of things.

Golding’s genius wasn’t just in the premise, which, let’s be honest, is top-shelf, Hall of Fame stuff.  It was in the execution – the slow, inexorable slide from well-intentioned order to face-painting, pig-sticking barbarism.  He held up a mirror that was simultaneously cracked, unflattering, and so brutally clear you couldn’t look away.  He saw the beastie in all of us, the primal fear and fury bubbling just beneath the school uniform, the business suit, or – in my case – the three-day-old t-shirt with B.W.W.’s Asian Zing sauce on it.

Big Willy G won the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and was knighted by the Queen, all for essentially telling humanity, in the most exquisitely crafted prose imaginable, that we are a hair’s breadth away from hunting our weakest member on a beach.  What a legend.  You have to respect that kind of high-level, existentially devastating trolling.  It’s an art form.

So, on his birthday, let’s raise a glass.  Not to the knighted Sir William, the esteemed man of letters, but to Golding the provocateur.  The guy who took our childish fantasies, threw them on a bonfire, and danced around the flames, reminding us that the darkness isn’t out there in the jungle.  It was inside us all along.

Cheers, Bill.  Thanks for the nightmares.  They were, and remain, absolutely essential.

N.P.: “Infiltrator” – Nine Inch Nails