The things that are important in life creep up on one unawared, one doesn’t expect them, one hasn’t given them shape in one’s mind. One recognizes them, when they’ve appeared, that’s all.
Perhaps it is not correct to say that she read it, for unfortunately the number of people who actually read magazines, papers or even books is very small indeed.
I don’t think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It’s only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.
It is individuals who change societies, give birth to ideas, who, standing out against tides of opinions, change them. This is as true in open societies as it is in oppressive societies.
I do think that only a very rigid and conforming society could have produced the ideas of an eccentric in the first place.
Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway so soon after they are born – and yet in each child, every one, has all the potentiality, has it still, and completely, to leap from his low half-animal state to true humanity. Each one of them with this potential, and yet so few can be reached, to make the leap.
I wonder if you have to spend your whole life suddenly understanding facts that were perfectly obvious all the time.
You must admit he radiates an atmosphere of the suburbs. Odd. But they all do – I mean those tycoons, they all did. One could positively see the labour-saving devices and the kiddies all in their slumber-wear, coming down to kiss daddy good night. Bloody complacent swine they all are.
Why haven’t you been seeing me? A little bird told me that you were all mixed up with the local Reds, and that won’t do you any good, Matty dear. Did you know the police go to their meetings? They’ll put you in prison one of these days.
They’re a bunch of Jews, too,’ said Donovan gracefully. ‘After knowing me for so long, you should have learned discrimination.
She was surprised, in short, that athletes were not intellectual, for somewhere within her was still a notion that famous people must necessarily be brilliant in every way.
But all the pressures go the other way, towards learning only what is immediately useful, what is functional. More and more the demand is for people to be educated to function in an almost certainly temporary stage of technology. Educated for the short term.
Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is.
He looked like his father. That is to say he was a closely-welded, round youth, dark, like his father, with not a trace of Molly’s dash and vivacity. But unlike Richard, whose tenacious obstinacy was open, smouldering in his dark eyes and displayed in every impatient efficient movement, Tommy had a look of being buttoned in, a prisoner of his own nature. He.
We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we’re moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who’s to stop it – us?
Sitting there I had a vision of the world with nations, systems, economic blocks, hardening and consolidating; a world where it would become increasingly ludicrous even to talk about freedom, or the individual conscience.
Choose? When do I ever choose? Have I ever chosen?
These might work, fight, even commit crimes to get “their” representatives into power, but after that they did not consider they had any responsibility for their choices. For a feature, perhaps a predominant feature of the inhabitants of this planet, was that their broken minds allowed them to hold, and act on – even forcibly and violently – opinions and sets of mind that a short time later – years, a month, even a few minutes – they might utterly repudiate.
There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless.
Y’know, there’s a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything’s cracking up. That lot of tycoons; they don’t believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa. They used to say, ‘Well, of course the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years time’. They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, ‘We know that what we’re doing is wrong.