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the sailor, at sea (his proper element), lives in the present. There is nothing he can do about the past at all; and, having regard to the uncertainty of the omnipotent ocean and the weather, very little about the future.
‘All the places where sailors congregate: I do not believe that this reflects their nature, however, but rather the nature of the land.’ He sank into a train of thought – man’s nature how defined? Where the constant factors of identity?
Boccherini’s Corelli sonata, a glorious texture of sound, the violin sending up brilliant jets through the ’cello’s involutions,
used to tell him over and over again, when he had Louis Durand as his cook, that he was digging his grave with his teeth: he ate far, far too much three times a day.
‘Smell is of all senses by far the most evocative: perhaps because we have no vocabulary for it – nothing but a few poverty-stricken approximations to describe the whole vast complexity of odour – and therefore the scent, unnamed and unnamable, remains pure of association; it cannot be called upon again and again, and blunted, by the use of a word; and so it strikes afresh every time, bringing with it all the circumstances of its first perception.
‘Any bastard can cowardly evade the issue by a flood of words.’ ‘You have said enough, sir,’ said Stephen, standing up. ‘Too much by far: you must withdraw.’ ‘I shall not withdraw,’ cried Jack, very pale. ‘And I will add, that when a man comes back from leave as brown as a Gibraltar Jew, and says he had delicate weather in Ireland, he lies. I will stand by that, and I am perfectly willing to give you any satisfaction you may choose to ask for.’ ‘It is odd enough,’ said Stephen, in a low voice, ‘that our acquaintance should have begun with a challenge, and that it should end with one.’
‘there are days,’ he reflected, ‘when one sees as though one had been blind the rest of one’s life. Such clarity – perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good.
Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility
The frog has neither feathers nor wool, and yet she sings.
A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thought flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations – admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting.
Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent.
That my body should be affected to this point, he said, is something beyond my experience. I have felt the great nausea before, God knows, but this want of control . . . Did the Diana I last saw at New Place ever exist in fact? A creation of my own? Can you create a unicorn by longing?
