I recommend this essay by Gil Bailie that I ran across: http://girardianlectionary.net/res/bailie_vine-and-branches.htm.

You might be familiar with Bailie's quotation of this Virginia Wolf passage in critiquing the modern romantic value of individual autonomy:

"Now I will lean sideways as if to scratch my thigh. So I shall see Percival. There he sits, upright among the smaller fry. He breathes through his straight nose rather heavily. His blue, and oddly inexpressive eyes, are fixed with pagan indifference upon the pillar opposite... He sees nothing; he hears nothing. He is remote from us all in a pagan universe. But look -- he flicks his hands to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime. Dalton, Jones, Edgar and Bateman flick their hands to the back of their necks likewise. But they do not succeed." (25)

The irony is that Percival's successful gestures arise out stupidity, and really a lack of personality. I thought of Daisy in The Great Gatsby ( a romantic critique in novel form), for whom "personality was an unbroken series of successful gestures". I also thought of some of James Bond's gestures in the new movie. Bond's successful gestures are acted, artificed, but they are purported to arise out of a certain jadedness.

If you look up "jaded", one of the definitions is "dissipated", which happens to be a leitmotif in Bailie's essay. He explains that the prodigal son dissipates his ousia, his substance, in a way that is prophetic of modernity. Isnt it an irony that what are considered successful gestures seem to have to come from someone who is dissipated, who has in a sense lost his substance? or in the case of Pervical never really had substance? Yet, these are the people we seek substance in. And once we try to draw from their supposed substance by imitating their gestures, the success is lost because they are no longer spontaneous. The logic is nightmarish, hellish. Instead, Bailie suggests that we seek our substance in the true Vine of Life: the essay is called "The Vine and the Branches Discourse: The Gospel's Psychological Apocalypse".