To be insular is to be independent. But it is also to be alone.
It is the kind of stoicism which had been seen as characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, perhaps nowhere better expressed than in ‘The Battle of Maldon’ where the most famous Saxon or English cry has been rendered – ‘Courage must be the firmer, heart the bolder, spirit must be the greater, as our strength grows less’. That combination of bravery and fatalism, endurance and understatement, is the defining mood of Arhurian legend.
The value is always in the eye of the beholder. What is worthless to one person may be very important to someone else.
It might be compared to some organism which sloughs off its old skin, or texture, in order to live again. It is a city which has the ability to dance upon its own ashes.
The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.
I asked him what he said, for there was such a mish-mash of Conversation around us that I could scarcely understand him – the frequenters of Taverns have Hearts of Curd and Souls of Milk Sop, but they have Mouths like Cannons which stink of Tobacco and their own foul Breath as they cry What News? What’s a Clock? Methinks it’s Cold to Day! Thus is it a Hospital For Fools.
Yet the stomach for war breeds an appetite for money.
Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.
There are those who say further that these are meer Dreames and no true Relations, but I say back to them: look upon my Churches in the Spittle-fields, in Limehouse, and now in the Parish of Wapping Stepney, and do you not wonder why they lead you into a darker World which on Reflection you know to be your own? Every Patch of Ground by them has its Hypochondriack Distemper and Disorder; every Stone of them bears the marks of Scorching by which you may follow the true Path of God.
When the city was described as pagan, it was partly because no one living among such urban suffering could have much faith in a god who allowed cities such as London to flourish.
Insecurity of the spirit demands completeness elsewhere.
I need to know when,′ he said, ‘In this case when is more important than how. Do you have a time-table?’ For although images of this murder now surrounded him, and the parts of the body had become emblems of pursuit, violence and flight, they were as broken and indistinct as the sounds of a quarrel in a locked room.
Who can give more heat to the fire, or joy to heaven, or pain to hell? A ring upon a nun is like a ring in a sow’s nose. Your best friend is still alive. Who is that? You. The sun is none the worse for shining on a dunghill. He must needs swim that is borne up to the chin. An hour’s cold will suck out seven years of heat.
If you look from a distance, you observe a sea of roofs, and have no more knowledge of the dark streams of people than of denizens of some unknown ocean. But the city is always a heaving and restless place, with its own torrents and billows, its foam and spray. The sound of its streets is like the murmur from a sea shell and in the great fogs of the past the citizens believed themselves to be lying on the floor of the ocean.
But didn’t you know? Everything is made up.
In the summer of that year two women were stripped and beaten with rods, their ears nailed to a wooden post, for having said that ’queen Katherine is the true queen of England.
If I were a Writer now, I would wish to thicken the water of my Discourse so that it was no longer easy or familiar. I would chuse a huge lushious Style!
Let Stone be your God and you will find God in the Stone.
He visited the country house of a goldsmith, Sir Robert Viner, where ‘he showed me a black boy that he had that died of a consumption; and being dead, he caused him to be dried in an oven, and lies there entire in a box’.
The credulity of crowds is never-ending.