He is a bold man who, in his writing, dares to alter – even further to distort – what he has seen and heard.
Early morning: set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day’s march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically.
Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind. He strode down the hill amid the tumult of suddenrisen vapours of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire. they streamed upwards before his anguished eyes in dense and maddening fumes and passed away above him till at last the air was clear and cold again.
He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them before all their darting quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd or even in number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. They were flying high and low but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling about a temple of air.
Damn it, I can understand a fellow being hard up but what I can’t understand is a fellow sponging. Couldn’t he have some spark of manhood about him?
He had tales of distant countries.
The mockery of it! he said gaily.
The long eyelids beat and lift: a burning needleprick stings and quivers in the velvet iris.
A form of speech: the lesser for the greater.
A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. the wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes.
He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision.
My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity – home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines.
She ate the apple and gave it also to Adam who had not the moral courage to resist her.
And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says the citizen.
Let people get fond of each other: lure them on. Then tear asunder.
Then I went to a certain nightclub. There were men there – and also women. At least, they looked like women.
If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn’t have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives’ spits.
He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set out on life’s journey they seemed weary already.
Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me.
God, these bloody English! Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You.