The Magus

by John Fowles

‘Don’t you begin to feel things about yourself you know are you? Are going to be you for ever? That’s what I feel.

But those grey, searching, always candid eyes, by their begging me not to lie, made me lie.

She was one of those rare, even among already pretty, women that are born with a natural aura of sexuality: always in their lives it will be the relationships with men, it will be how men react, that matters. And even the tamest sense it.

‘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 think we are all agreed that he has been an admirable subject for our purposes, but he has masochistic traits that will get pleasure even out of our discussion of his faults.

Our conclusion has been this: that your attachment to self-gratification is too deep to make any other than a hysterical attempt at suicide likely.