The Magus

by John Fowles

One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness.

a site for myths.

What was going to become of my life I didn’t know; but lying there that day by the sea it didn’t seem to matter much. To be was enough. I felt myself in suspension, waiting without fear for some impulse to drive me on. I turned on my stomach and made love to the memory of Alison, like an animal, without guilt or shame, a mere machine

for sensation spreadeagled on the earth. Then I ran across the burning stones into the sea.

avuncular

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.’

Only a man as blank as he would have failed to see the hollowness of my enthusiasm.

‘He had a brain capable of only one idea at a time.

mephitic

Try to imagine that one day you discover you have a sixth, a till then unimagined new sense—something not comprehended in feeling, seeing, the conventional five. But a far profounder sense, the source from which all others spring. The word “being” no longer passive and descriptive, but active… almost imperative.

‘Before the night was ended I knew that I had had what religious people would call a conversion. A light in heaven indeed shone on me, for there

were constant star-shells. But I had no sense of God. Only of having leapt a ...

Thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes—because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself—and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

‘The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.’ ‘I suppose one could say that Hitler didn’t betray his self.’

‘You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.’

hieratic

legate

‘In the greatest age of enlightenment in the history of this earth? When we have destroyed more darkness in this last fifty years than in the last five million?’

But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of

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

It is possible, even normal, to feel right in front of history and very wrong in front of those one loves.

expurgated

dehydrated rentiers, who doddered in and out of the mournful lounges of the Hotel Philadelphia.

welter

No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit

our being what we ought to be;

People don’t build cinemas for an audience of one, unless they mean to use that one for a very special purpose.

“Utram bibis? Aquam an undam?” Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?’

The world can never be better than the countries that constitute it, and the countries can never be better than the individuals that constitute them.

Alison liked the word: esychìa, esychìa, she kept on repeating.

sublimated

obsequiously

aqua into unda,

‘Whatever you call people who are made to suffer without being given the choice.’ ‘That sounds like an excellent definition of man.’

In what the Americans call “a man’s world”. That is, a world governed by brute force, humourless arrogance, illusory prestige and primeval stupidity.’

‘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 will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our e...

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 the bone.

The profoundest distances are never geographical.

There’s a card in the Tarot pack called the magus. The magician… conjuror. Two of his traditional symbols are the lily and the rose.’

inured

falconer

voluptuary,

better one Horace than ten Saint Benedicts; better one poem than ten thousand sermons.

there are times when silence is a poem.

cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet

Some translate the last lines of the book to mean “Tomorrow let him love, who has never loved; he who has loved, let him love

tomorrow.” Others translate them as “Let those love now who’ve never loved; let those who’ve loved, love yet again.”