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We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.
But soliloquies in back streets soon pall. I need an audience. That is my downfall.
I cannot seat myself in some sordid eating-house and order the same glass dav after day and imbue myself entirely in one fluid—this life.
To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.
They toss their pictures, once painted, face downward on the field.
I think of people to whom I could say things; Louis; Neville; Susan; Jinny and Rhoda.
He does not look in the glass. His hair is untidy, but he does not know it. He has no perception that we differ, or that this table is his goal.
He half knows everybody; he knows nobody (I compare him with Percival).
(I am engaged),
to make one thing, not enduring—for what endures?—but seen by many eyes simultaneously.
I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago, when I heard songs by the Nile and the chained beast stamping.
I like to be with people who twist herbs, and spit into the fire and shuffle down long passages in slippers like my father.
“Here am I shedding one of my life-skins, and all they will say is, ‘Bernard is spending ten days in Rome.’
Then like a cracked bowl the fixity of my morning broke, and putting down the bag of flour I thought, Life stands round me like glass round the imprisoned reed.
We ran back panting lest we should be shot and nailed like stoats to the wall. Now I measure, I preserve.
Lifts rise and fall; trains stop, trains start as regularly as the waves of the sea. This is what has my adhesion. I am a native of this world, I follow its banners.
This is poetry if we do not write it.
I take a book and read half a page of anything.
They say that one must beat one’s wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines; the sun falls sheer into pools that are fledged with willows. (Here it is November; the poor hold out matchboxes in wind-bitten fingers.)
To read this poem one must have myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster.
There are no commas or semicolons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths. Much is sheer nonsense.
Rhoda, with her intense abstraction, with her unseeing eyes the colour of snail’s flesh,
I have tried to draw from the living flesh the stone lodged at the centre.
“Percival was flowering with green leaves and was laid in the earth with all his branches still sighing in the summer wind.
The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water.
Solitary trees marked distant hills like obelisks.
Meanwhile the shadows lengthened on the beach; the blackness deepened. The iron black boot became a pool of deep blue. The rocks lost their hardness. The water that stood round the old boat was dark as if mussels had been steeped in it. The foam had turned livid and left here and there a white gleam of pearl on the misty sand.
These papers in my private _pocket—the clamour that proves that I have passed—make a faint sound like that of a man clapping in an empty field to scare away rooks.
have stuck like a limpet to the same rock.
Yet look, Neville, whom I discredit in order to be myself,
a dwelling place made from time immemorial after an hereditary pattern.
“It was different once,” said Bernard. “Once we could break the current as we chose. How many telephone calls, how many post cards, are now needed to cut this hole through which we come together, united, at Hampton Court? How swift life runs from January to December! We are all swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shade; we make no comparisons; think scarcely ever of I or of you; and in this unconsciousness attain the utmost freedom from friction and part the weeds that grow over the mouths of sunken channels. We have to leap like fish, high in the air, in
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My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once. But Louis, wild-eyed but severe, in his attic, in his office, has formed unalterable conclusions upon the true nature of what is to be known.”
bird, ‘Love, love?’ What song do we hear?” “They vanish, towards the lake,” said Rhoda.
“But let me dip again and bring up in my spoon another of these minute objects which we call optimistically, ‘characters of our friends’—Louis.
women. I buried match after match in the turf decidedly to mark this or that stage in the process of understanding (it might be philosophy; science; it might be myself) while the fringe of my intelligence floating unattached caught those distant sensations which after a time the mind draws in and works upon; the chime of bells; general murmurs; vanishing figures; one girl on a bicycle who, as she rode, seemed to lift the corner of a curtain concealing the populous undifferentiated chaos of life which surged behind the outlines of my friends and the willow tree.
