It seemed sadistic, this last wasteland of days. It was as if Conchis, with Alison’s connivance, proceeded by some outmoded Victorian dietetic morality – one couldn’t have more jam, the sweetness of events, until one ate a lot more bread, the dry stodge of time.
These question-boundaries... are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision.
Of course I looked sad. But I didn’t really feel sad. Or it wasn’t a sadness that hurt, not an all-through one. I rather enjoyed it. Beastly, but I did. I sang on the way home. The romance, the mystery of it. Living.
Accepting the sadness. Knowing that to pretend it was all gay was treachery. Treachery to everyone sad at the moment, everyone ever sad, treachery to such music, such truth.
We hardly said anything, we seemed to communicate through the chessmen, there was something very symbolic about my winning. That he wished me to feel. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know whether it was that he wanted me to see my “virtue” triumphed over his “vice” or something subtler, that sometimes losing is winning.
The collection had the eclectic impersonality of a public library.
He is ugliness. But you can’t smash human ugliness.
One of the commonest symptoms of wealth today is destructive neurosis; in his century it was tranquil boredom.
I had the same feeling I did when I had watched an imago emerge, and then to have to kill it. I mean, the beauty confuses you, you don’t know what you want to do any more, what you should do.
M. How do you think Christianity started? Or anything else? With a little group of people who didn’t give up hope.
Seeing her made me feel like I was catching a rarity, going up to it very careful, heart-in-mouth as they say.
I have hope. But it’s all an illusion.
And the sky all wild, all free, all wind and air and space and stars.
Just a golden body throwing stones aimlessly into the sea.
Evolution had turned man into a sharply isolating creature, seeing the world not only anthropocentrically but singly, mirroring the way we like to think of our private selves.
He said, in some ways you’re older than I am. You’ve never been deeply in love. Perhaps you never will be. He said, love goes on happening to you. To men. You become twenty again, you suffer as twenty suffers. All the dotty irrationalities of twenty. I may seem very reasonable at the moment, but I don’t feel it. When you telephoned I nearly peed in my pants with excitement. I’m an old man in love. Stock comedy figure. Very stale. Not even funny.
There was no art in cultures as ancient as the Egyptian and the Minoan. Conscious art did not exist for them. They wanted only to control. That is how they would want us to judge them – by how well they controlled.
He stood before the famous Rembrandt self portrait. The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas, out of the entire knowledge of his own genius and of the inadequacy of genius before human reality.
There were even times I thought I would forget her. But forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.
She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.