These are wonderful observations. Thank you and once again readers pull out things I cannot and see things I do not. In Rat and Sword, at this moment of high drama, where Tebbitt and Asim are rushing to Edmund to find out what the meaning of Susan's message is, Asim takes the time to remind Edmund of his obligation to secrecy. Tebbitt observed that the man can be really cold. He is much the same way with Susan during the deer kill. He is compassionate, but I do not see him as a warm person. He's very cool, he's a professional. I've never expressed it before in meta, but I have tried to convey this emotional distance and intellectual coolness before. When he and Tom Clark are speaking to Elizabeth Pole, Clark finally gets disgusted with Asim saying all the wrong things to a worried mother. Asim isn't unkind to Elizabeth, he knows she wants to know, but there's no warmth at all in how he relates to her. In the scene early in AW when Peter is angry and hurt at how Asim kept the information about Susan and Edmund from him, again we get Asim saying very factually why he was glad it went down as it did. He's very intellectual about it and not comforting though in the end Peter sees the wisdom of it.
He and Peter both connect on the masculinity ground -- though I typically write Peter as engaged sexually whereas Asim is, as you point out, not at all, to almost the point of asceticism.
Asim's relationship with Mary is interesting in this light too, I think, because Mary, for all her passion for things, is very comfortable with the ascetic relationship. I'm not quite sure how to express this but I think it's one reason that she and Asim get on. They are friends, they trust one another, but they are both very self contained people -- two spheres who occupy the same space rather than inter-connecting. I'll need other readers who like Mary to explain this to me. I've been thinking that Mary is rubbish at expressing herself sexually -- having been with Richard from a very young age, I think she probably talks to show she's hip and liberal but is very insecure about herself as a woman. Whatever it is, this means that she and Asim are able to co-exist without any sexuality or particular emotional intimacy getting in the way at all.
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He and Peter both connect on the masculinity ground -- though I typically write Peter as engaged sexually whereas Asim is, as you point out, not at all, to almost the point of asceticism.
Asim's relationship with Mary is interesting in this light too, I think, because Mary, for all her passion for things, is very comfortable with the ascetic relationship. I'm not quite sure how to express this but I think it's one reason that she and Asim get on. They are friends, they trust one another, but they are both very self contained people -- two spheres who occupy the same space rather than inter-connecting. I'll need other readers who like Mary to explain this to me. I've been thinking that Mary is rubbish at expressing herself sexually -- having been with Richard from a very young age, I think she probably talks to show she's hip and liberal but is very insecure about herself as a woman. Whatever it is, this means that she and Asim are able to co-exist without any sexuality or particular emotional intimacy getting in the way at all.
Thanks!