The Magus

by John Fowles

There were things, a certain emotional gentleness in my mother, an occasional euphoric jolliness in my father, I could have borne more of; but always I liked in them the things they didn’t want to be liked for.

Parents

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

Cynicism

It was a bronchial mid-afternoon, already darkening, the people, the traffic, everything fish-grey. I

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It was the least eerie, the most un-Nordic solitude in the world. Fear had never touched the island. If it was haunted, it was by nymphs, not monsters.

The silence pf the island

Goodness and beauty may be separable in the north, but not in Greece. Between skin and skin there is only light.

The physical

re-evaluated myself. I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been, and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic.

I am a fake

A warning or a luring bird? I couldn’t decide, though it was difficult not to think of it as meaningful. It scolded, fluted, screeched, jug-jugged, entranced.

Discovery

‘You know Germany?’ ‘It is not possible to know Germany. Only to endure it.’

Conchis and the Germans

Outwardly he seemed to have very little interest in me, yet he watched me; even when he was looking away, he watched me; and he waited. Right from the beginning I had this: he was indifferent to me, yet he watched and he waited.

Conchis

‘Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness. You are like a porcupine. When that animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body.’

Prickly Nicholas

had immediately the sensation that I was expected. Something had been waiting there all my life. I stood there, and I knew who waited, who expected. It was myself. I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here, like reflections of my own coming.

I

‘It is what I mean by hazard. There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.

Balance

‘If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

Are you a psychic ?

She wanted to leave it then, never to return. Like so many Greeks. And like so many Greeks she never accepted her exile. That is the cost of being born in the most beautiful and the most cruel country in the world.

Like many Jamaicans also

Suddenly even the chirping of sparrows seemed mysterious. And the singing of birds I had heard a thousand times, thrushes, blackbirds in our London garden, I heard as if I had never heard them before. Later in my life – ça sera pour un autre jour – birds led me into a very unusual experience.

I wish there were more birds in this novel.

As he began to speak again I smelt the night air, I felt the hard concrete under my feet, I touched a piece of chalk in my pocket. But a strong feeling persisted, when I swung my feet off the ground and lay back, that something was trying to slip between me and reality.

That unreal space

‘I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one’s life. Do you understand?’

Salt - the seasoning

I was not to believe in appearances … but why, why, why? Meanwhile he had started weaving his web again; and once more I flew to meet it.

The web

‘I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilization, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history or science to know then. I know now it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan – that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.’

War is random

Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.’

Hitler and his followers

The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice. It was certainly not a moment of new moral resolve, or anything like it. No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be; for all that, it felt like a step forward – and upward.

Acceptance

It was unnatural, of course. But all dandyism and eccentricity is more or less unnatural in a world dominated by the desperate struggle for economic survival.

Eccentricity

This is true of all collecting. It extinguishes the moral instinct. The object finally possesses the possessor.

Collecting

“Utram bibis? Aquam an undam?” Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?’

Water or wave ?

In short, if it was her role in the charade to seduce me, I should be seduced. I couldn’t do anything about it. I was both a sensualist and an adventurer; a failed poet, still seeking resurrection in events, if not in lines. I had to drink the wave, once offered.

Drink the wave

It seemed almost marvellous, to be so without desire; at last in my life, to be able to be so faithful.

Annoying

Because nothing can hurt you, Nicko. Deep down, where it counts. You’ve built your life so that nothing can ever reach you. So whatever you do you can say, I couldn’t help it. You can’t lose. You can always have your next adventure. Your next bloody affaire.’

Who he is

was a dark night, no moon, but the stars diffused a very faint luminescence over everything, a light like the softest sound, touch of fur on ebony.

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attainable.

Typical comment on women - attainable or not?

I stood between the two girls and felt acutely the fragility not only of the old man’s extraordinary enterprise, but of time itself. I knew I would never have another adventure like this. I would have sacrificed all the rest of my days to have this one afternoon endless, endlessly repeated, a closed circle, instead of what it was: a brief and tiny step that could never be retraced.

Cold reality of the presemt or rather the future

The scops owl called from somewhere nearby. As I returned to the gate a small black shape slipped overhead and dipped towards the sea between the pines: Conchis perhaps, the wizard as owl.

Owl

In spite of all his gnomic cant he was like so many other Europeans, quite unable to understand the emotional depths and subtleties of the English attitude to life. He thought the girls and I were green, innocents; but we could outperfidy his perfidy, and precisely because we were English: born with masks and bred to lie.

Those crafty English

was drowned in a sea of mistrust – not only of outward appearances but of deeper motives as well. For weeks I had had a sense of being taken apart, disconnected from a previous self – or the linked structures of ideas and conscious feeling that constitute self; and now it was like lying on the workshop bench, a litter of parts, the engineer gone … and not being quite sure how one put oneself together

Taken apart

What had always attracted me in the opposite sex was what they tried to hide, what provoked all the metaphorical equivalents of seducing them out of their clothes into nakedness.

Misogyny

And Julie; she now became a total necessity. Not only marriage with her, but confession to her. If she had been beside me then, I could have poured out everything, made a clean start. I needed desperately to throw myself on her mercy, to be forgiven by her. Her forgiveness was the only possible justification now. I was tired, tired, tired of deception; tired of being deceived; tired of deceiving others; and most tired of all of being self-tricked, of being endlessly at the mercy of my own loins; the craving for the best, that made the very worst of me.

Oh poor me

was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked likely to be high.

Calculating

‘Life is more complicated for human beings than for birds. And human territory is defined least of all by physical frontiers.’

Territory

‘Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women – and absurd. I will

tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.’

War

young fisherman near me picked a hibiscus and put the blood-red flower against his heart. We all knew what he meant.

This is good

One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true – they were successful because they imposed chaos on order.

Nazis

‘On the contrary. That experience made me fully realize what humour is. It is a manifestation of freedom. It is because there is freedom that there is the smile. Only a totally predetermined universe could be without it. In the end it is only by becoming the victim that one escapes the ultimate joke – which is precisely to discover that by constantly slipping away one has slipped away. One exists no more, one is no longer free. That is what the great majority of our fellow-men have always to discover. And will have always to discover.’

Freed

was thinking of Alison, and I knew I had no choice. I felt pity for her as I felt pity for that unknown German’s face on a few feet of flickering film. And perhaps an admiration, that admiration which is really envy of those who have gone farther along one’s own road: they had both despaired enough to watch no more. While mine was the moral suicide.

SUICIDE

The profoundest distances are never geographical.

True

There’s a card in the Tarot pack called the magus. The magician … conjuror. Two of his traditional symbols are the lily and the rose.’

Girls' names

was not the mask I was afraid of, because in our century we are too inured by science fiction and too sure of science reality ever to be terrified of the supernatural again; but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself.

Man himself

Western homo sapiens will become homo solitarius.

Prediction

That had been her supreme virtue: a constant reality.

Real love

But leaving the island, the light, the sea. I stared out over the olive-groves. It was suddenly a loss like that of a limb.

Leaving the island

The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity.

British