And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.
If I call myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn’t because I have acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance.
If you’re going to be a grown-up,” said Joan, “you’ve got to start thinking about grown-up things. And number one is money.
He had discovered love; but he had also begun to discover that love, far from making him ‘what he was’, far from spreading deep content all over him like carnation oil, would make him self-conscious and indecisive. He loved Tanya most clearly when he was away from her. When they were together, there were expectations on both sides which he was either unable to identify or couldn’t respond to.
He knew what they said of him locally: Oh, he likes to keep himself to himself. The phrase was descriptive, not judgemental. It was a principle of life the English still respected. And it wasn’t just about privacy, about an Englishman’s home – even a pebbledash semi – being his castle. It was about something more: about the self, and where you kept it, and who, if anyone, was allowed to fully see it.
The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.
He felt life more clearly too – even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn’t worth the candle.
My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it’s not pointless in terms of pleasure.
He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn’t want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported.
The present looks back at some great figure of an earlier century and wonders, Was he on our side? Was he a goodie? What a lack of self-confidence this implies: the present wants both to patronise the past by adjudicating on its political acceptability, and also to be flattered by it, to be patted on the back and told to keep up the good work.
If I asked you “What is life?”, you would probably reply, in so many words, that it is all just a coincidence.
That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to.
But what helps? What do we need to know? Not everything. Everything confuses. Directness also confuses. The full-face portrait staring back at you hypnotises. Flaubert is usually looking away in his portraits and photographs. He’s looking away so that you can’t catch his eye; he’s also looking away because what he can see over your shoulder is more interesting than your shoulder.
He was too clever. If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything. You just leave common sense behind.
It is a moment when a shift in the nature of literary fame occurs. Previously, a famous writer was a writer who became famous by writing. Wilde pioneered the idea of becoming famous first, and then getting down to the writing. By the end of 1882 he was “still” only a minor poet and diligent lecturer. But he was also famous on two continents and therefore primed for a literary career.
Wilde also established another prime rule of fame in the modern age: that there is no such thing as bad publicity, there is only publicity. Success is better measured in column inches than by what those columns contain.
Have you anything to declare? Yes, I’d like to declare a small case of French flu, a dangerous fondness for Flaubert, a childish delight in French road-signs, and a love of the light as you look north. Is there any duty to pay on any of these? There ought to be.
A woman’s right to choose – yes, I believed in that, theoretically and actually. Though I also believed in a man’s right to be consulted.
We all pursue what we think is best for us, even if it means our extinction. Sometimes, especially if it means that.
For a woman, love has historically been a matter of possession followed by sacrifice: that’s to say, of being possessed and then of being sacrificed.