Under the Net

by Iris Murdoch

Anyhow, I count Finn as an inhabitant of my universe, and cannot conceive that he has one containing me; and this arrangement seems restful for both of us.

vocatives.

frisson.

theosophists

éclat;

I hate solitude, but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.

My fates are such that as soon as I interest myself in a thing a hundred accidents happen which are precisely relevant to that

humble yearning stupidity,

gimcrack

What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all the words fall to the ground like dead things, and the spirit that should animate them

Love is action, it is silence. It’s not the emotional straining and scheming for possession that you used to think it was.’

‘Anna, did you mean it about singing?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ said Anna, ‘it’s’ corrupt,‘

We all live in the interstices of each other’s lives, and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything.

had often known myself to be moved in the past, and little had come of

I omitted to mention earlier that I am acquainted with Belfounder. As my acquaintance with Hugo is the central theme of this book, there was little point in anticipating it.

have never met a man more destitute than Hugo of anything which could be called a meta-physic or general Weltanschauung.

‘One can’t be,’ said Hugo. ‘The only hope is to avoid saying it. As soon as I start to describe, I’m done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you ...’ ‘Touch it up?’ I suggested. ‘It’s deeper than that,’ said Hugo. “The language just won’t let you present it as it really was.‘

But it was as if his very mode of being revealed to me how hopelessly my own vision of the world was blurred by generality. I felt like a man who, having vaguely thought that flowers are all much the same, goes for a walk with a botanist.

When I tried to explain some notion of Hugo’s it sounded flat and puerile, or else quite mad, and I soon gave up the attempt.

What had seemed at first an innocent suppressio veri began to grow into a very poisonous suggestio falsi.

obscurantist’.

ad hominem

All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.

It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.

There remained the fact that Annandine was but a broken-down caricature of Hugo.

Anna’s ideas were simply an expression of Hugo in a debased medium, just as my own ideas were such an expression in yet another medium;

and the two expressions, in a curious way, had striking points of resemblance to each other rather than to the original.

The darkness hung in the air but spread out in a suspended powder which only made the vanishing colours more vivid.

empiricist,’

If ever two people were plotting something, Sadie and Sammy were.

H.K. to

Belfounder hasn’t anything on us legally; and if he starts making complaints I can make plenty of counter-complaints about the way I was treated. As for young Donaghue, we can buy him any day of the week.’

‘Oh, stop worrying, will you?’ said Sadie. ‘One translation’s just like another. If he won’t let us use his we can buy another translation overnight. All we need is to let H.K. see it now in English. As for the Frenchman, he’d sell us his grandmother for dollars.’

typescript

contingency

My despair began to give way to exasperation and I felt coming upon me that nervous impulse to act at any price which so soon overtakes me in periods of frustration.

kinaesthetic

Certain things indeed I have learnt here: for instance, that my happiness has a sad face, so sad that for years I took it for my unhappiness and drove it away.

Alors, Paris, qu‘est-ce que tu dis, toi? Paris, dis-moi ce que j’aime.

wherever the line was to be drawn between appearance and reality, what I now experienced was for me the real.

All that mattered was a vision which I had had of my own destiny and which imposed itself upon me as a command.

There was a path which awaited me and which if I failed to take it would lie untrodden forever. How

vever,

dubiety

Such intellectual work as I have ever accomplished has always left me with a sense of having achieved nothing: one looks back through the thing as through an empty shell ; but whether this is because of the nature of intellectual work as such, or whether it is because I am no good, I have never been able to decide.

‘What more do you want?’ said Hugo. ‘God is a task. God is detail. It all lies close to your hand.’

It seemed as if, for the first time, Anna really existed now as a separate being and not as a part of myself.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

He had nothing to tell me.

All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing.