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It’s one of the things I’ve never understood about Louisa; though she’s lived half her life in diplomatic society, in half the capitals of the world, she’s remained hopelessly American.”
Isabel did not speak till we reached the drugstore, and I, having nothing to say, said nothing.
“You have a lot of time to think when you’re up in the air by yourself. You get odd ideas.”
You say to yourself: ‘Who am I that I should bother my head about this, that, and the other? Perhaps it’s only because I’m a conceited prig. Wouldn’t it be better to follow the beaten track and let what’s coming to you come?’ And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun, and he’s lying dead; it’s all so cruel and so meaningless. It’s hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there’s any sense to it or whether it’s all a tragic blunder of blind fate.”
Perhaps whatever it is that happened to him during the war has left him with a restlessness that won’t let him be. Don’t you think he may be pursuing an ideal that is hidden in a cloud of unknowing—like an astronomer looking for a star that only a mathematical calculation tells him exists?”
He was absolutely without fear and when he’d escaped death by a hair’s breadth he’d grin all over his face as if it was the best joke in the world. But he was a natural-born flyer and up in the air he was cool and wary.
He was impudent and wild and irresponsible, but there was something so genuine about him that you couldn’t help liking him.
it had a calmness that was new to her; it was as though he had settled something with himself and were at ease in a way he had never been before.
You can’t imagine what a thrill it is to read the Odyssey in the original. It makes you feel as if you had only to get on tiptoe and stretch out your hands to touch the stars.”
“I’ve been reading Spinoza the last month or two. I don’t suppose I understand very much of it yet, but it fills me with exultation. It’s like landing from your plane on a great plateau in the mountains. Solitude, and an air so pure that it goes to your head like wine and you feel like a million dollars.”
when you’re up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you. You’re intoxicated by the boundless space. You feel such a sense of exhilaration that you wouldn’t exchange it for all the power and glory in the world.
They talked with inanity in a loud, metallic voice without a moment’s pause, as though afraid that if they were silent for an instant the machine would run down and the artificial construction which was all they were would fall to pieces.
Of course the little Rumanian was quite ridiculous, but he was rather sweet and even if he didn’t mean the charming things he said it was nice to listen to them.
she gave an impression of such youth, of so much enjoyment of the mere fact of being alive, that you felt half inclined to laugh with delight.
I don’t think I’d ever realized before how good a green meadow is to look at and how lovely a tree is when the leaves aren’t out yet, but the branches are veiled in a faint green mist.
And then at night, when he’d got a couple of liters of white wine inside him, 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.
“You can’t argue with a man who’s got a fist like a steam hammer and wouldn’t think twice about using it.
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.
I did not hesitate to put the question that came to the tip of my tongue. After all, if you want to know something the best way is to ask.
IN ALL BIG CITIES there are self-contained groups that exist without intercommunication, small worlds within a greater world that lead their lives, their members dependent upon one another for companionship, as though they inhabited islands separated from each other by an unnavigable strait. Of no city, in my experience, is this more true than of Paris.
There’s a moment just before sunset when the light on the marsh is lovely. He used to stand and look at it and it filled him with bliss.
the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of.
I know now that those were the happiest weeks I ever spent in my life.
“Well, Larry is, I think, the only person I’ve ever met who’s completely disinterested. It makes his actions seem peculiar. We’re not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don’t believe in.”
I was happy in the various company of my friends and, my heart filled with amiable memories of the past, I regained in spirit at least something of the glow of youth.
When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.”
I was moved and I think a few tears trickled down my cheeks. 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.
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.
“But why did you go as a deck hand?” I asked instead. “You had money.” “I wanted the experience. Whenever I’ve got water-logged spiritually, whenever I’ve absorbed all I can for the time, I’ve found it useful to do something of that sort. That winter, after Isabel and I broke off our engagement, I worked in a coal-mine near Lens for six months.”
Anyhow, I’ve never much minded if people thought me a bit of a fool.
I loved flying. I couldn’t describe the feeling it gave me, I only knew I felt proud and happy. In the air, ’way up, I felt that I was part of something very great and very beautiful. I didn’t know what it was all about, I only knew that I wasn’t alone any more, by myself as I was, two thousand feet up, but that I belonged.
When I was flying above the clouds and they were like an enormous flock of sheep below me I felt that I was at home with infinitude.”
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.
The monks told me that God had created the world for his glorification. That didn’t seem to me a very worthy object. Did Beethoven create his symphonies for his glorification? I don’t believe it. I believe he created them because the music in his soul demanded expression and then all he tried to do was to make them as perfect as he knew how.
I wondered how they could continue to pray without misgiving to their heavenly father to give them their daily bread. 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.”
It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery.
I read a lot. I don’t know that I learnt much except that my ignorance was abysmal. But I knew that before. When the spring came I went to the country and stayed at a little inn on a river near one of those beautiful old French towns where life doesn’t seem to have moved for two hundred years.”
‘A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?’
“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?”
I found something wonderfully satisfying in the notion that you can attain Reality by knowledge.
I do not think I have ever found myself in a stranger situation than when I sat on the red-plush seats of that garish restaurant for hour after hour while Larry talked of God and eternity, of the Absolute and the weary wheel of endless becoming.
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 have no descriptive talent, I don’t know the words to paint a picture; I can’t tell you, so as to make you see it, how grand the sight was that was displayed before me as the day broke in its splendor. Those mountains with their deep jungle, the mist still entangled in the treetops, and the bottomless lake far below me.
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.
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.
I had a vague notion that to see him occasionally, at least to know that he was part of her world, had been a bond of union, however tenuous, that his action had finally severed so that she knew herself forever bereft.
One of the less agreeable features of French life is that you are apt to be pressed to drink a glass of vinegary port at an unseasonable hour. You must resign yourself to it.
