Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical, and I was never accomplished at that. ‘I.
You accept that you are English. You don’t pretend that you’d rather be French or Italian or something else.
If you feel something deeply, you’re not ashamed to show your feeling.
You don’t have any time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don’t go to silly films, even if you want to; you don’t read cheap newspapers; you don’t listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don’t waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.
Successful artistic parents seem very rarely to give birth to equally successful artistic sons and daughters, and I suspect it may be because the urge to create, which must always be partly the need to escape everyday reality, is better fostered – despite modern educational theory – not by a sympathetic and ‘creative’ childhood environment, but the very opposite, by pruning and confining natural instinct.
German is to death what Latin is to ritual religion – entirely appropriate.
I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for his sake, but for being alive’s.
He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom – that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror.
I happily forgot his little collection of crimped and cramped fruit trees in my own new world, my America of endless natural ones in Devon.
But suddenly he comprehended why her face haunted him, why he felt this terrible need to see her again: it was to possess her, to melt into her, to burn, to burn, to burn to ashes on that body and in those eyes. To postpone such a desire for a week, a month, a year, several years even, that can be done. But for eternity is when the iron bites.
The truth was I was not a cynic by nature; only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn’t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.
His name was Captain Montague. He had broken his leg some time before and so had been unfit for active service till then. A kind of phosphorescent pale elegance about his face. A delicate, gallant moustache. He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
Visitors to Lyme in the nineteenth century, if they did not quite have to undergo the ordeal facing travellers to the ancient Greek colonies -Charles did not actually have to deliver a Periclean oration plus comprehensive world news summary from the steps of the Town Hall- were certainly expected to allow themselves to be examined and spoken to.
In my opinion a lot of people who may seem happy now would do what I did or similar things if they had the money and the time. I.
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. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness.
Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking... It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.
One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness.
I’m so far from everything. From normality. From light. From everything I want to be.
The last I saw of him was of a dark blue back marching towards Shaftesbury Avenue; eternally the victor in a war where the losers win.
Why should people have money if they don’t know how to use it?