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When male and female, after whatever vicissitudes you like, are at last brought together they have fulfilled their biological function and interest passes to the generation that is to come.
You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.
“I don’t think I shall ever find peace till I make up my mind about things,”
“His soul? It may be that he’s a little frightened of himself. It may be that he has no confidence in the authenticity of the vision that he dimly perceives in his mind’s eye.”
It’s only a chance, of course, but if I fail I shall be no worse off than a man who’s gone into business and hasn’t made a go of it.”
“My dear, Isabel’s twenty and she has a technique for telling you to mind your own business without offensiveness which I’ve always found very difficult to cope with.”
What I’m trying to tell you is that there are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can’t help themselves, they’ve got to do it. They’re prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning.”
I think Larry is one of those persons who can go no other way than their own.”
I suggest to you that whatever it was that happened to Larry filled him with a sense of the transiency of life, and an anguish to be sure that there was a compensation for the sin and sorrow of the world.”
It’s a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called but few are chosen.”
Maeterlinck’s on Ruysbroek that I’d read in Paris. But Kosti talked of Plotinus and Denis the Areopagite and Jacob Boehme the shoemaker and Meister Eckhart.
Kosti would talk in a morbid way of the flight from the Alone to the Alone, of the Dark Night of the Soul and of the final ecstasy in which the creature becomes one with the Beloved.
I thought he hated that great, uncouth body of his and wanted to torture it, and that his cheating and his bitterness and his cruelty were the revolt of his will against—oh, I don’t know what you’d call it—against a deep-rooted instinct of holiness, against a desire for God that terrified and yet obsessed him.
What was it Shelley said? ‘The world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return.’ ”
The young, devoted to the mad pursuit of pleasure, thought nothing more amusing than to go from one stuffy little night club to another, drinking champagne at a hundred francs a bottle and dancing close-packed with the riff-raff of the town until five o’clock in the morning. The smoke, the heat, the noise made Elliott’s head ache. This was not the Paris that he had accepted thirty years before as his spiritual home. This was not the Paris that good Americans went to when they died.
now I seemed to see in them a sort of puzzled dismay, and even if I hadn’t known the facts I think I might have guessed that something had occurred to destroy his confidence in himself and in the ordered course of events. I felt a kind of diffidence in him, as though he had done wrong, though unwittingly, and were ashamed. It was plain that his nerve was shaken.
I felt at peace with myself, but not lethargically, with exhilaration rather.
“Passion doesn’t count the cost.
Letters of Madame de Sévigné and bits of Saint-Simon.
We read Phèdre and Bérénice
you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable, and I made up my mind to be on my guard.”
Savonarola.
I suppose she didn’t care what became of her and flung herself into the horrible degradation of drink and promiscuous copulation to get even with life that had treated her so cruelly. She’d lived in heaven and when she lost it she couldn’t put up with the common earth of common men, but in despair plunged headlong into hell. I can imagine that if she couldn’t drink the nectar of the gods any more she thought she might as well drink bathroom gin.”
She was a modest, high-minded, idealistic child. She read everything she could get hold of and we used to talk about books.”
The devil laughed till his sides ached, for he knew the evil men would commit in the name of their redeemer.”
I couldn’t but surmise that the devil, looking at the cruel wars that Christianity has occasioned, the persecutions, the tortures Christian has inflicted on Christian, the unkindness, the hypocrisy, the intolerance, must consider the balance sheet with complacency. And when he remembers that it has laid upon mankind the bitter burden of the sense of sin that has darkened the beauty of the starry night and cast a baleful shadow on the passing pleasures of a world to be enjoyed, he must chuckle as he murmurs: give the devil his due.
I think he’s been seeking for a philosophy, or maybe a religion, and a rule of life that’ll satisfy both his head and his heart.”
There was the quick fire of the South in his aspect and I asked myself what urgent faith, what burning desire had caused him to abandon the joys of life, the pleasures of his age, and the satisfaction of his senses, to devote himself to the service of God.
The sad Don Quixote of a worthless purpose.
It was rhetoric, magnificent rhetoric, and I had a notion that it should be spoken rhetorically. I liked the regular thump of the rhymes; and the stylized gestures, handed down in a long tradition, seemed to me to suit the temper of that formal act.
Meister Eckhart
Goethe and Schiller and Heine. I read Hölderlin and Rilke.
“Like Rolla, I’ve come too late into a world too old.
Do children beseech their earthly father to give them sustenance? They expect him to do it, they neither feel nor need to feel gratitude to him for doing it, and we have only blame for a man who brings children into the world that he can’t or won’t provide for. It seemed to me that if an omnipotent creator was not prepared to provide his creatures with the necessities of existence, material and spiritual, he’d have done better not to create them.”
I’d known bad men in Paris, and when I got back to Chicago I knew more, but for the most part their badness was due to heredity, which they couldn’t help, or to their environment, which they didn’t choose: I’m not sure that society wasn’t more responsible for their crimes than they were. If I’d been God I couldn’t have brought myself to condemn one of them, not even the worst, to eternal damnation.
‘Brahma, the Creator,’ he said. ‘Vishnu the Preserver, and Siva the Destroyer. The three manifestations of the Ultimate Reality.’
A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?’
Do you know anything about Hinduism?” “Very little,” I answered. “I should have thought it would interest you. Can there be anything more stupendous than the conception that the universe has no beginning and no end, but passes everlastingly from growth to equilibrium, from equilibrium to decline, from decline to dissolution, from dissolution to growth, and so on to all eternity?”
“It may be that at some far distant day greater insight will show them that they must look for comfort and encouragement in their own souls.
He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom. He taught that it is not essential to salvation to retire from the world, but only to renounce the self. He taught that work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunities afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self.
I was so happy that it was pain and I struggled to release myself from it, for I felt that if it lasted a moment longer I should die; and yet it was such rapture that I was ready to die rather than forgo it. How can I tell you what I felt? No words can tell the ecstasy of my bliss. When I came to myself I was exhausted and trembling. I fell asleep.
Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.
I wanted to live again and again. I was willing to accept every sort of life, no matter what its pain and sorrow; I felt that only life after life, life after life could satisfy my eagerness, my vigor, and my curiosity.
Ramakrishna looked upon the world as the sport of God. ‘It is like a game,’ he said. ‘In this game there are joy and sorrow, virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil. The game cannot continue if sin and suffering are altogether eliminated from the creation.’ I would reject that with all my strength. The best I can suggest is that when the Absolute manifested itself in the world evil was the natural correlation of good. You could never have had the stupendous beauty of the Himalayas without the unimaginable horror of a convulsion of the earth’s crust. The Chinese craftsman who
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Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians
Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world’s confusion, so wishful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful, and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States.
