We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective.
Boredom, the numbing, annual predictability of life hung over the staff like a cloud. And it was real boredom, not my modish ennui. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect that they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility.
We are not even living in the past here. We are in the pluperfect.
They did not kiss. They could not. How can you mercilessly imprison all natural sexual instinct for twenty years and then not expect the prisoner to be racked by sobs when the doors are thrown open?
She would give herself violently, then yawn at the wrongest moment. She would spend all one day cleaning up the flat, cooking, ironing. Then, pass the next three or four Boheminanly on the floor in front of the fire, reading Lear, women’s magazines, a detective story, Hemingway. Not all at the same time, but bits of all in the same afternoon. She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.
Beware of the waiting room.” He closed the door at once, as if he had rehearsed that moment. I opened it quickly, and leaned out to call after him, “The what?” He turned, but only to give a sharp wave, the Trafalgar Square crowd swallowed him up. I couldn’t get the smile on his face out of my mind, it secreted an omission. Something he’d saved up, a mysterious last word. Waiting room. Waiting room. Waiting room. It went round in my head all that evening.
Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience; as if, faced with ruins, we must turn architects, not archeologists.
Never take another human being literally. He added. Even when they are so ignorant that they don’t know what ‘literally’ means.
If I could put a starving child before him and give it food and let him watch it grow well, I know he’d give money. But everything beyond what he pays for and sees himself get is suspicious to him. He doesn’t believe in any other world but the one he lives in and sees. He’s the one in prison; in his own hateful narrow present world.
I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing, I love being to the full.
Their fear of the open and of the naked. Hide reality, shut out nature. The revolutionary art movement of Charles’s day was of course the Pre-Raphaelite. They, at least, were making an attempt to admit nature and sexuality.
Under the silver nailparing of a moon. I felt, though without any melancholy at all, that sense of existential solitude, the being and being alone in a universe, that still nights sometimes give.
Another thing I said to Caliban the other day-we were listening to Jazz- I said, don’t you just dig this? And he says, in the garden. I said he was so square he was hardly credible. Oh, that, he said. Like rain, endless dreary rain. Color-killing.
I think intelligence is terrible. It magnifies all one’s faults. Complicates things that ought to be simple.
Oh, you’re like mercury. You won’t be picked up.
She felt the speed of her fall accelerate. When the cruel ground rushes up, when the fall is from such a height, what use are precautions?
It poured with rain the day I left. But I was filled with excitement, a strange exuberant sense of taking wing. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language; and although I couldn’t have put it into words then, I needed a new mystery.
It was no good my knowing that old men have conned young ones like that ever since time began. I still fell for it, as one still falls for the oldest literary devices in the right hands and contexts.
It may have something to do with intelligence, but I am certain it has nothing to do with knowledge – I mean that there are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations as Indian peasants can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. And I craved her approval.
Again, I had no feeling of the supernatural, no belief that this was more than another nasty twist in the masque, a black inversion of the scene on the beach. That does not mean I was not frightened. I was, and very frightened; but my fear came from a knowledge that anything might happen. That there were no limits in this masque, no normal social laws or conventions.