The Magus

by John Fowles

The truth was I was not a cynic by nature; only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn’t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.

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.

idea of Greece, that morning in the British Council.

country. It astounded me how little I knew about it. I read and read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.

shan’t forget. I shan’t ever forget.’ ‘You will. And I will.’

Serene, superb, majestic: I tried for adjectives less used, but anything else seemed underweight. I could see for eighty miles, and all pure, all noble, luminous, immense, all as it always had been. It was like a journey

Between skin and skin there is only light.

how could one compose flawless verse if one was surrounded by futile routine?

Irrités de ce premier crime, les monstres ne s’ en tinrent pas ld; ils l’ étendirent ensuite nue, á plat ventre sur une grande table, ils allumérent des cierges, ils placèrent l’ image de notre sauveur à sa tête et osèrent consommer sur les reins de cette malheureuse le plus redoutable de nos mystères. De Sade, Les Infortunes de la Vertu

the pine-needles, then swum, then made love again. I was filled with a dry sadness, a mixture of remembering and knowing; remembering what was and what might have been and knowing it was all past; at the same time knowing, or beginning to know, that other things were happily past—at least some of my illusions about myself,

‘Bonnard. He painted them both five or six years before he died.’ I stood in front of them. He said, behind me, ‘These, I paid for.’ ‘They were worth it.’ ‘Sunlight. A naked girl. A chair. A towel, a bidet. A tiled floor. A little dog. And he gives the whole of existence a reason.’ I stared at the one on the left, not the one he had inventoried. It showed a girl by a sunlit window with her back turned, apparently drying her loins and watching herself in the mirror at the same time. I was remembering Alison, Alison wandering about the flat naked, singing, like a child. It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

But I possessed that night an almost total recall of physical sensations. And these recalls, of even the simplest and least sublime things, a glass of water, the smell of frying bacon, seemed to me to surpass or at least equal the memories of the greatest art, the noblest music, even my tenderest moments with Lily. I experienced the very opposite of what the German and French metaphysicians of our century have assured us is the truth: that all that is other is hostile to the individual. To me all that is other seemed exquisite. Even that corpse, even the squealing rats. To be able to experience, never mind that it was cold and hunger and nausea, was a miracle.

‘But you and I! We live, we are this wonderful age. We are not destroyed. We did not even destroy.’

Lily was such a person. And I craved her approval.

It was as if we were locked in a torture chamber. Still in love, yet chained to opposite walls, facing each other for eternity and for eternity unable to touch.

was not in the least a literary feeling, but an intensely mysterious present and concrete feeling of excitement, of being in a situation where anything still might happen. As if the world had suddenly, during those last three days, been re-invented, and for me alone.

Aux visiteurs qui pénétraient dans l’enceinte des murs altiers de Saint-Martin s’offrait la vue délectable des bergers et bergères qui, sur les verts gazons et parmi les bosquets, dansaient et chantaient entourés de leurs blancs troupeaux. Ils ne portaient pas toujours les costumes de l’époque. Quelquefois ils étaient vêtus à la romaine ou à la grecque, et ainsi réalisait-on des odes de Théocrite, des bucoliques de Virgile. On parlait même d’évocations plus scandaleuses, de charmantes nymphes qui les nuits d’été fuyaient au clair de lune, poursuivies par d’étranges silhouettes, moitié homme, moitié chèvre…*

At once I had the impression that we were two actors with the same doubts about the director.

mise en paysage.

Indeed when the Hertford was split up, de Deukans had bought many of the best pieces in the Sackville legacy.

Mirabelle, la Maîtresse-Machine.

Theridion deukansii.

And yet it was beautiful, the shadow of the trees, the sunlight on the glade, the white roar of the little fall, the iciness, the solitude, the laughing, the nakedness; moments one knows only death will obliterate.

It is sentimental to talk of a landscape having a soul, but that one possessed a stronger character than any other I have seen, before or since.

That axe would have driven right through the skull of all our pleasure-orientated civilization. Our science, our psycho-analysis. To him all that was not the great meeting was what the Buddhists call lilas—the futile pursuit of triviality. And of course to have been concerned about his blindness would have been for him more futility.

Living is an eternal wanting more, in the coarsest grocer and in the sublimest mystic.

just mean that she’s always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen.

There is something erotic in all collusion.

If human beings could purr, I should have done so then.

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.

We kissed, but there was something torn, already too late, about it.

nocturnal echo

‘There must be something we don’t agree on.’ ‘In some other life. Not this.’

There was a wild animal in her, but a true wild animal,

felt, though without any melancholy at all, that sense of existential solitude, the being and being alone in a universe, that still nights sometimes give.

‘Mon lieutenant, violà pour moi la plus belle musique dans le monde.’

you love me (and she had not meant ‘make love to me’) it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am; and

eleutheria.

Up in the sky I saw swallows and martins. Like children playing in a house where some tragedy is taking place among the adults.

He was something that passed beyond morality but sprang out of the very essence of things—that comprehended all, the freedom to do all, and stood against only one thing—the prohibition not to do all.

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.

I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extraverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

I whispered, ‘Have you missed me?’ ‘More than it’s good for you to know.’

I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical.

‘Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, Aureli patheci et cinaedi Furi?’

Adlerian

technobourgeoisie,

Le triomphe de la philosophie serait de jeter du jour sur l’ obscurité des voies dont la providence se sert pour parvenir aux fins qu’ elle se propose sur l’homme, et de tracer d’ après cela quelque plan de conduite qui pût faire connaître à ce malheureux individu bipède, perpétuellement ballotté par les caprices de cet être qui dit-on le dirige aussi despotiquement, la manière dont il faut qu’il interprète les décrets de cette providence sur lui.

there are times when silence is a poem.

remembered that evening I had climbed them with Alison, taking her to have her bath. How many worlds had died since then?