Rosie the Epicurean

Note: I think his didactic use of ethics-lite is why Maugham has been popular with middle-brow readers (like me!) for going on a century now. In the parables The Razor's Edge, The Painted Veil, and The Moon and Sixpence, he's giving implicit advice on how to live a flourishing life.  Where else will busy people be exposed to Epicureanism? Life is short, so live and let live, and seek out delight as often as you can. 

Cakes and Ale - W. Somerset Maugham 

I looked at Rosie now, with angry, hurt, resentful eyes; she smiled at me, and I wish I knew how to describe the sweet kindliness of her beautiful smile; her voice was exquisitely gentle. 

‘Oh, my dear, why d’you bother your head about any others? What harm does it do to you? Don’t I give you a good time! Aren’t you happy when you’re with me?’

‘Awfully.’

‘Well, then. It’s so silly to be fussy and jealous. Why not be happy with what you can get? Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years, and what will anything matter then? Let’s have a good time while we can.’

She put her arms around my neck and pressed her lips against mine. I forgot my wrath. I only thought of her beauty and her enveloping kindness.

‘You must take me as I am, you know.’ she whispered.

‘All right,’ I said.

The narrator Willie is a young man. So in his inexperience he is angry, hurt, and resentful that Rosie is having sex with other men. She simply likes luxury, going out, good food, good sex.  In the conceit of youth, he's mortified that beautiful Rosie is sleeping with ugly old coots. Willie feels insecure and inadequate that he might be compared to older men. Willie has yet to con that the best sex ever will make you unhappy if you hope to possess your lover, body and soul, forever and always.

Pleasure-seeker Rosie reasons with his irrational jealousy. She urges him to not give any thought to her sexing with other men since he’s just making himself miserable by obsessing about her other affairs. He himself undermines the contentment he can get in the here and now by focusing on what is utterly out of his sphere. He can’t control anybody’s feelings, thoughts, or actions but his own so he had better not give them a second thought. What’s is up to him is the stance that he takes toward everything, what is not up to him is better ignored.

Her affairs don’t offer him any harms or threats. He would do well to live in the moment and just enjoy the time he spends with her, clothed and not. 

Take the long view. Sooner than a hundred years from now, everybody we know will be gone and the things we thought so important will be yesterday's quaint tantrums (waltzing? D&D? wilding? QAnon?). Nothing is so important that we need to make ourselves miserable and unhappy and discontented by fretting and stewing about it. Nothing.

Take other people as they are, Rosie advises Willie, take life as it really is. The eager acceptance of reality, both good and bad, will inspire and set you free. 

Maugham continues to be read, I think, because lots of hardcore readers in 2025 still think about the questions life asks and feel the need to, or simply like, to be reminded of things they already know.