The Melancholy of Resistance

After so much gossip, so much terrifying rumour-mongering, she could now see for herself that 'it was all going down the drain', for she understood that while her own particular immediate danger was over, in 'a world where such things happen' the collapse into anarchy would inevitable follow.

He recalled various stages in his frantic efforts and the fact that even then, in what was imposing itself as a general frame of mind, he had suspected that any eventual resolution would not be due entirely to taking rational thought in the matter, a suspicion that had in the meantime become a certainty, for in divorcing the heavy artillery of his intellect (so typical of him) as he was, metaphorically, edging forward, or, in his own words, divorcing the 'ostensible fire-power of a determined general' from 'the chain of practical action and reaction', he had achieved mastery not through the application of a logical experimental process but through constant, wholly involuntary adaptations to the moment-by-moment nature of necessity; a process that no doubt reflected his intellectual bent but took no cognition of it. To judge by appearances, he summarized, the clear lesson was that the serious issue underlying this apparently insignificant task had been resolved by a persistent assault embodying a flexible attitude to permutations, the passage from 'missing the point' to 'hitting the nail on the head' so to speak, owing nothing, absolutely nothing, to concentrated logic and everything to improvisation, to an ever new set of exploratory motions, or so he had thought as he set out on his tour of inspection of the house to check whether any loose boards needed more secure fixing; there was nothing to indicate that the body's command mechanism, that well-oiled part of the human organism focused on the reality principle (he entered the kitchen) had imposed itself between the legislating mind and the executive hand and remained so well hidden that it could only be discovered, as he put it, 'between, if such a thing were possible, the dazzling object of illusion and the eye that perceives that object, a position that entailed conscious recognition of the illusory nature of the object'. It seemed it was the very freedom of choice between the range of competing ideas that actually decided the angle, the height, and experimental path between the top of the arc and the point of the nail.

He had been wrong, he decided a few steps from his house, wrong in assuming that steady decay was the essence of the situation, for that was in effect to say that some element of good persisted in it while there was no evidence of that whatsoever, and this walk had convinced him that there never could have been, not because it had been lost but because 'the present state of the area' never had the slightest shred of meaning in the first place. It was not meant to have a point; if it was meant for anything at all it was expressely [sic] for the purpose of having no point.

Seeing the whale did not mean he could grasp the full meaning of the sight, since to comprehend the enormous tail fin, the dried, cracked, steel-grey carapace and, halfway down the strangely bloated hulk, the top fin, which alone measured several metres, appeared a singularly hopeless task. It was just too big and too long, Valuska simply couldn't see it all at once, and failed even to get a proper look at its dead eyes.... [I]t was simply impossible to see the enormous head as an integral whole.

Harrer, Volent, everyone was in the same condition—not so much convinced as flattened by the sheer weight of the director's rolling, irresistible cadences, by the combined force of something that comprised statements, arguments, pleas and revelations, in fact so utterly buried were they under it they needed someone to come along and dig them out, and it was not surprising that it took them some time before they recovered all their faculties

Harrer, Volent, everyone was in the same condition—not so much convinced as flattened by the sheer weight of the director's rolling, irresistible cadences, by the combined force of something that comprised statements, arguments, pleas and revelations, in fact so utterly buried were they under it they needed someone to come along and dig them out, and it was not surprising that it took them some time before they recovered all their faculties and the numbness slowly drained from them; before the lieutenant, wounded and furious, set out to pursue the orator who had taken charge of his own fate, but glanced at the document in his hand and stopped again while Mrs Eszter and Harrer merely stared at one another; before Volent and his companions, who seemed to have turned into living statues while listening to the protestations, pulled incredulous faces, waved their arms and started speaking all together at once.(p. 275)