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The situation was still fluid; it was more a potentiality than a situation. But any decision now would crystallize it, and the moment it began to take shape all the succeeding events would follow of themselves, moving at first with slow inevitability and then faster and faster, never to be undone. And a decision must be made, made quickly
Compulsion is the death of friendship, joy.’
this: 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.
That was his business: for the moment Jack’s world was confined to his guns: there was a comfort in subordination, in small responsibility, no decisions . . .
Some fool, Stephen of all people, had said you could not be both busy and unhappy, sad.
as Stephen is always telling me, one must not be the prisoner of words.’
Even a frigid, self-sufficing man needs something of this interchange if he is not to die in his unmechanical part:
‘Devotion is a fine thing, a moving thing to see,’ he reflected. ‘But who is going to pay for that amiable young man’s zeal? What blows, oaths, moral violence, brutalities?’
By now rank had evened out: at least one young man was as grand, royal and spreading as an admiral,
Jack was sorry for the pain, in an abstract way, though it seemed fair that one so fond of inflicting agony should feel a touch of it,
‘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.
‘How strangely I dread the event,’ he said, sitting down by his patient and counting his respirations, ‘and yet how hard I find it to wait.’
‘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.
‘What one is bound to do, one usually does with little acknowledged feeling; a vague desperation, no more,’
Then shame, unhappiness, extreme weariness put out the rest, extinguished it utterly. No rage, no fire: all gone, and nothing to take their place.
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 or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious, frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion.
But when a man puts on maturity and invulnerability, it seems that he necessarily becomes indifferent to many things that gave him joy.
