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She stared at the ghastly apparition, at the tree lying diagonally across the dark square, then, with the knowing smile of one initiated into such things, remarked: ‘Of course. How could it be otherwise?’
the chain of cause and effect and hence the notion of predictability were both of them illusions, ‘therefore the clear light of reason was forever obscured’.
‘people are talking about apocalypse and the last judgement, because they do not know that there will be neither apocalypse nor last judgement … such things would serve no purpose since the world will quite happily fall apart by itself and go to wrack and ruin so that everything may begin again, and so proceed ad infinitum,
‘Something has to be done!’ he bellowed once the formal courtesies were done with, and when he had succeeded in freeing his hand from theirs, one of them, the hard-of-hearing Mr Mádai, whose habit it was to scream mercilessly into his victims’ ears to establish ‘an exchange of views’, kept agreeing with him, and while the other two also agreed, it seemed they strongly disagreed on the more thorny question of what precisely it was that had to be done.
The man he addressed made no reply to any of this but simply gave him a long hard stare from head to toe, then, perhaps noticing Valuska’s startled expression, smiled, slapped him on the back, pulled a bottle of cheap spirits from his pocket and offered it to him in amiable fashion. Relieved to see the relaxed smile on the man’s face after the stern silence of the preliminary inspection,
stood on tiptoe in his curiosity and held his breath so as not to miss a single word. The director was holding a cigar between his fingers and was wearing a full-length fur coat, and this, taken together with his gigantic belly, the unusually wide brim of his hat and the vast row of chins collapsing over his carefully tied silk scarf, immediately earned Valuska’s deepest respect.
it was perfect and eternal, perfect without any hint of intention, as if the only order inherent in it was that which fitted it for chaos,
‘Henceforth I will abjure all independent and lucid thought as if it were the crassest stupidity. I will deny the function of the mind, and, from this moment on, rely only on the inexpressible joy of my renunciation, on that
simply there; as far as he was concerned the process whereby the face resolved itself into a smile, or having emerged from a solemn mood brightened up again, simply revealed the fact there was nothing further to seek in it: the smile
every movement showed that they were embarking not on a new wave of destruction but on a retreat: it was as if each of them had been struck by a fatal bullet and, half collapsing, was seeking some last place of refuge where his miserable agony might be ended,
their imaginations had been inflamed, their susceptibilities and credulity stretched beyond all measure, by the rumours then put about—indeed, still being put about—that ‘our excellent colleague’ was not acting the role of a prince but really was one, a kind of ‘prince of darkness’—the director smiled piteously at the expression—who strode about the world like an avenging judge and accepted the offer of his recruits to act as executives of his justice, as if that man, said he, raising his arms heavenward in indignation, blessed with all the gifts of his profession and yet, and here he slowly
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