Why? But I want to know just why it’s impossible for an American to be gracefully idle” – his words gathered conviction – “it astonishes me. It – it – I don’t understand why people think that every young man ought to go down-town and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work, certainly not altruistic work.
This is inevitable; Virginians and Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.
In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant.
It became established among his Harvard intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that year looked him up and discovered with him, on many moonlight excursions, much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or indeed than the republic. Maury Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance, remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free. Not.
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.
He liked his barber shop.
Two out of every three professional officers considered that wars were made for armies and not armies for wars.
I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. ‘I suppose she talks, she eats, and everything.
The diplomats were at their customary business of making the world safe for new wars.
The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows – the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back.
But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up to two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.
Afterwards he remembered one reply of hers to something he had asked her. He remembered it in this form – perhaps he had unconsciously arranged and polished it.
I did not think – I was a battleground for the thoughts of many men.
I like these streets... I always feel as though it’s a performance being staged for me; as though the second I’ve passed they’ll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad.
No, I’m thinking about myself – my black old inside self, the real one, with the fundamental honesty that keeps me from being absolutely wicked by making me realize my own sins.
But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered – by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life.
By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever.
Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.
That’s quite different. I told you I wouldn’t want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin’ generalities.
Sleep – real sleep, the dear, the cherished one, the lullaby. So deep and warm the bed and the pillow enfolding me, letting me sink into peace, nothingness – my dreams now, after the catharsis of the dark hours, are of young and lovely people doing young, lovely things, the girls I knew once, with big brown eyes, real yellow hair.