The Magus

by John Fowles

Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes

Henri Fournier’s

Richard Jefferies’ Bevis.

Pervigilium Veneris

Un débauché de profession est rarement un homme pitoyable.

Cycladic,

Didyma

That is the smile: that what might not be, is.’

And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

Once more my mind wandered, in the grey silences of the night, not to Julie, but to Alison. Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a smudge like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper.

her death detracted, would for ever detract, from my own life.

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright

hair about th...

I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only ext...

eleutheria

always I had acted as if a third person was watching and listening and giving me marks for good or bad behaviour—a god like a novelist, to whom I turned, like a character with the power to please, the sensitivity to feel slighted, the ability to adapt himself to

whatever he believed the novelist-god wanted. This leechlike variation of the super-ego I had created myself, fostered myself, and because of it I had always been incapable of acting freely. It was not my defence; but my despot. And now I saw it, I saw it a death too late.

‘Would you be here now if…’ ‘A lift on the road one had already long been travelling explains when. Not why.’ ‘Our experiences must have varied very widely.’ ‘Why should they be similar? Are you a Catholic?’ I shook my head. ‘A Christian even?’ I shook my head again. He shrugged. He had dark shadows under his eyes, as if he was tired. ‘But I do believe in… charity?’ ‘My dear man, you don’t want charity from me. You want confessions I am not prepared to make. In my view I am being charitable in not making them. In my position you would understand.’

Why is Nick so obstinate that he couldn't have learned something from his experience? He still clings to his inflated sense of self.

because there are times when silence is a poem.

there.’

‘My daughters were nothing but a personification of your own selfishness.’

Her mouth without a cigarette was like a yacht without a mast; one presumed disaster.

Quick recce.

eternally the victor in a war where the losers win.

lit a candle to Leverrier.

shrugged. ‘That it allows

She looked at her watch.

one couldn’t have more jam, the sweetness of events, until one ate a lot more bread,

But always, at some point in the night, I sent her slopping back to her cubbyhole.

She was the strangest priest to confess before; but not the worst. For she absolved me.

Thou shalt not inflict unnecessary pain.

poodle