Ma Peter – non importa quanto fosse bella la giornata, e gli alberi e l’erba, e la fanciulla vestita di rosa – Peter non vedeva mai nulla. Se lei glielo chiedeva, si metteva gli occhiali; guardava. Ma era lo stato del mondo che gli interessava: Wagner, la poesia di Pope, il carattere della gente, e i difetti dell’anima di lei.
First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded.
And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues.
I raged, and woke to hear the rain.
But if one day you do not come after breakfast, if one day I see you in some looking-glass perhaps looking after another, if the telephone buzzes and buzzes in your empty room, I shall then, after unspeakable anguish, I shall then – for there is no end to the folly of the human heart – seek another, find another, you.
Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast.
Leaning over this parapet I see far out a waste of water. A fin turns. This bare visual impression is unattached to any line of reason, it springs up as one might see the fin of a porpoise on the horizon. Visual impressions often communicate thus briefly statements that we shall in time come to uncover and coax into words.
The iron gates have rolled back,′ said Jinny. ‘Time’s fangs have ceased their devouring. We have triumphed over the abysses of space, with rouge, with powder, with flimsy pocket-handkerchiefs.
The flowers have come, and are adorable, dusky, tortured, passionate like you.
I am rocked from side to side by the violence of my emotion.
Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in a chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that is was half-past one.
It was jealousy that was at the bottom of it – jealousy which survives every other passion of mankind...
She pitied and despised them from the bottom of her heart, as she stood on the soft carpet, looking at the old engraving of a little girl with a muff. With all this luxury going on, what hope was there for a better state of things? Instead of lying on a sofa – “My mother is resting,” Elizabeth had said – she should have been in a factory; behind a counter; Mrs. Dalloway and all the other fine ladies!
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.
I shall go gently behind her, to be at hand, with my curiosity, to comfort her when she bursts out in a rage and thinks, ‘I am alone’.
Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself.
He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.
Now I will watch and see how I resurrect.
Do you exist? Have I made you up?
But, if we now turn to human society, what chaos and confusion meet the eye! No Club has any such jurisdiction upon the breed of man. The Heralds College is the nearest approach we have to the Spaniel Club. It at least makes some attempt to preserve the purity of the human family. But when we ask what constitutes noble birth – should our eyes be light or dark, our ears curled or straight, are topknots fatal, our judges merely refer us to our coats of arms.