The following article is taken from the East Sussex News, January 30, 1903 (reproduced by kind permission of East Sussex Record Office):
'...whereby they might reject, and reject austerely,...' !
One of the reasons some critics take a sceptical view of Powys and his world, I feel, is that they fail to recognise, or perhaps to appreciate, the rich vein of humour running through all his work.
Certainly, his humour is not the superficial, obvious humour of 'jokes' or 'comedians': this is what he describes as mere facetiousness. His humour is a deeper, more genuinely humorous take on life as a whole, and is in no way incompatible with a constant concern with 'serious' matters.
His preference for the benign worldly wisdom of the Chinese sages over the metaphysics and renunciations of Buddhism; his Deist notion of the First Cause setting the world in motion and then leaving us to get on with it; his Epicurean insistence that 'chance, not destiny, rules us'; all point to, and leave room for, a fundamentally humorous approach to existence.