Initially, a simple phrase chased round and round in Cecilia’s thoughts: Of course, of course. How had she not seen it? Everything was explained. The whole day, the weeks before, her childhood. A lifetime. It was clear to her now. Why else take so long to choose a dress, or fight over a vase, or find everything so different, or be unable to leave? What had made her so blind, so obtuse?
Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They’re not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they’ll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want.
This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer – a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight.
Worth remembering the world was never how she anxiously dreamed it.
Dearest Cecilia, the story can resume. The one I had been planning on that evening walk. I can become again the man who once crossed the surrey park at dusk, in my best suit, swaggering on the promise of life. The man who, with the clarity of passion, made love to you in the library. The story can resume. I will return. Find you, love you, marry you and live without shame.
The thing about Satan is that he’s amazingly sophisticated. He puts a stupid idea like satanic whatever, abuse, into people’s minds, then he lets it get disproved so everyone thinks that he doesn’t exist after all, and then he’s free to do his worst.
I’ve heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness... Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self... God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.
Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.
I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.
This was still the era – it would end later in that famous decade – when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.
She was not in love, or out of love – she felt nothing. She just wanted to be here alone in the dusk against the bulk of her giant tree.
The nineteenth century was closer than most women thought.
Only two sexes. I was disappointed. If human bodies, minds, fates are so complex, if we are free like no other mammal, why limit the range?
The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry’s view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.
When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh.
To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.
Factory settings – a contemporary synonym for fate.
As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires.
The smile of a deceiver is flawed, insufficient. But can we see these muscles resting there inert when there’s so much local variation in faces, pads of fat, odd concavities, differences of bone structure? Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a deliberate liar is to persuade himself he’s sincere. And once he’s sincere, all deception vanishes.
In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She’ll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning.