I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.
Julia used to say, ‘Poor Sebastian. It’s something chemical in him.’ That was the cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. ‘There’s something chemical between them’ was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in a new form. I do not believe there was anything chemical in my friend.
I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.
Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o’clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille. Here my last love died.
He was talking very excitedly to me,” said the Vicar, “about some apparatus for warming a church in Worthing and about the Apostolic Claims of the Church of Abyssinia. I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity.
I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James’s Street in the first Autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope.
He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.
One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one’s life...
It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.
The two drinks were brought in, poured out already in the glasses, like ‘doubles’ at a bar, and all our eyes followed the tray, as though we were dogs in a dining-room smelling game.
The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth – all save this – come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged.
The way ran zigzag through a forest of pine which the bitter wind, still that morning, had turned to ice; every bough was adorned with lines of stalactite which shivered and glittered in the morning sun; every needle had a brilliant, vitreous case and when she flicked her whip at a wayside shrub she brought down a tinkling shower of ice-leaves, each the veined impression of its crisp, green counterpart.
When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating.
We think it a very promising little war. A microcosm, as you might say, of world drama.
But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening- of Browning’s renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo’s tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes, and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.
As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.
As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.
He seems to be in a very bad temper.” “Not really. He’s always like that to waiters. You see he’s a communist. Most of the staff of The Twopence are – they’re University men, you see. Pappenhacker says that every time you are polite to a proletarian you are helping to bolster up the capitalist system. He’s very clever of course, but he gets rather unpopular.
He was fortified by a memory which kept only the good things and rejected the ill. Despite his sorrows, he had had a fair share of joys and these were ever fresh and accessible.
Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf the past, present and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war.