When she had gone he said, laughing: – We call it D. B. C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed Dedalus on Hamlet. Haines opened his newbought book. – I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground. of all minds that have lost their balance.
He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points.
But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?
The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire, or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.
Funny the way those newspaper men veer about when they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same breath. Wouldn’t know which to believe. One story good till you hear the next. Go for one another baldheaded in the papers and then all blows over. Hail fellow well met the next moment.
Dear Hewitt Costello, Equerry, were daylighted with our outing and are looking backwards to our unearly summers.
OMNIUM GATHERUM.
But I am curious to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of yourself?
The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions.
Reefer was a wenchman.
His words were then these as followeth: Know all men, he said, time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions. What means this? Desire’s wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman’s womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation. Omnis cam ad te veniet.
If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door.
Then, in that case, all the rest, all that I thought I thought and all that I felt I felt, all the rest before me now, in fact... O, give it up old chap! Sleep it off!
Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money.
When all things repose, do you alone Awake to hear the sweet harps play To Love before him on his way, And the night wind answering in antiphon Till night is overgone?
With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.
Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye!
It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. DIEU was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said DIEU then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying.
All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop.
We are once amore as babes awondering in a wold made fresh where with the hen in the storyaboot we start from scratch.