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She came and sat on the sofa beside me and, slipping her arm through mine, leant over to kiss me. I withdrew my cheek. “I will not have my face smeared with lipstick,” I said. “If you want to kiss me, kiss me on the lips, which is what merciful Providence intended them for.”
The devil was sly and he came to Jesus once more and said: If thou wilt accept shame and disgrace, scourging, a crown of thorns and death on the cross, thou shalt save the human race, for greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Jesus fell. The devil laughed till his sides ached, for he knew the evil men would commit in the name of their redeemer.”
“I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn’t matter; it may be worthwhile or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling.
Sophie hardly spoke except when she was spoken to and then it seemed an effort to her. The spirit had gone out of her. You would have said that something had died in her and I asked myself if Larry wasn’t putting her to a strain greater than she could support.
“Life’s hell anyway, but if there is any fun to be got out of it, you’re only a god-damn fool if you don’t get it.”
It was lamentable to see that old man, with the grave yawning in front of him, weep like a child because he hadn’t been asked to a party: shocking and at the same time almost intolerably pathetic.
God will overlook the errors of your understanding.”
His defects were of the surface; he was generous of heart and kindly toward his fellow men.”
An old, kind friend. It made me sad to think how silly, useless, and trivial his life had been. It mattered very little now that he had gone to so many parties and had hobnobbed with all those princes, dukes, and counts. They had forgotten him already.
The sad Don Quixote of a worthless purpose.
I FEEL IT RIGHT to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worthwhile to write this book.
It’s strange how many people suffer from it. I don’t mean fear of closed spaces and fear of heights, but fear of death and, what’s worse, fear of life.
Almost all the people who’ve had most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them. It’s as if they were waiting there to be called upon when I needed them.
He surveyed me with his prominent blue eyes and there was a look in them that I can only describe as amused tenderness. I had the feeling that he found me rather ridiculous, but felt so much loving-kindness toward me that he didn’t like me any the less. Anyhow, I’ve never much minded if people thought me a bit of a fool.
I kept on asking myself what life was for. After all it was only by luck that I was alive; I wanted to make something of my life, but I didn’t know what.
‘Our wise old Church,’ he said then, ‘has discovered that if you will act as if you believed belief will be granted to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you.
I couldn’t believe, I wanted to believe, but I couldn’t believe in a God who wasn’t better than the ordinary decent man.
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.”
It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.
he thought that hell was the deprivation of God’s presence, but if that is such an intolerable punishment that it can justly be called hell, can one conceive that a good God can inflict it? After all, He created men: if He so created them that it was possible for them to sin, it was because He willed it.
I wasn’t prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn’t common sense.
‘A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?’
“The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.”
“But you see, I’m not only my spirit but my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?”
“But how can a purely intellectual conception be a solace to the suffering human race? Men have always wanted a personal God to whom they can turn in distress for comfort and encouragement.” “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. I myself think that the need to worship is no more than the survival of an old remembrance of cruel gods that had to be propitiated. I believe that God is within me or nowhere.
I’ve always felt that there was something pathetic in the founders of religion who made it a condition of salvation that you should believe in them. It’s as though they needed your faith to have faith in themselves. They remind you of those old pagan gods who grew wan and faint if they were not sustained by the burnt offerings of the devout.
I found something wonderfully satisfying in the notion that you can attain Reality by knowledge.
Though in his youth he had himself practiced very severe austerities he did not enjoin them on his disciples. He sought to wean them from the slavery of selfhood, passion, and sense, and told them that they could acquire liberation by tranquility, restraint, renunciation, resignation, by steadfastness of mind and by an ardent desire for freedom.
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.
He taught that God cannot help creating and that the world is the manifestation of his nature. When I asked how, if the world was a manifestation of the nature of a perfect being, it should be so hateful that the only reasonable aim man can set before him is to liberate himself from its bondage, Shri Ganesha answered that the satisfactions of the world are transitory and that only the Infinite gives enduring happiness.
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.
It may be that if I lead the life I’ve planned for myself it may affect others; the effect may be no greater than the ripple caused by a stone thrown in a pond, but one ripple causes another, and that one a third; it’s just possible that a few people will see that my way of life offers happiness and peace, and that they in their turn will teach what they have learnt to others.”
I must have remarked twenty times on the beauty of his smile, it was so cozy, trustful, and sweet, it reflected the candor, the truthfulness of his charming nature; but I must do so once again, for now, besides all that, there was in it something rueful and tender.
You only lack one thing to make you completely enchanting.” She smiled and waited. “Tenderness.”
But he was so kindly, so unselfish, so upright, so reliable, so unassuming that it was impossible not to like him. I had a real affection for him.
