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some characterless embodiment of physical and spiritual perfection, or more accurately of the male imagination—
But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.”
“You know, as I know, that good poetry is not comfortable, however. Let me hold you, this is our night, and only the first, and therefore the nearest infinite.”
“You are in love with all the human race, Randolph Ash.” “With you. And by extension, all creatures who remotely resemble you. Which is, all creatures, for we are all part of some divine organism I do believe, that breathes its own breath and lives a little here, and dies a little there, but is eternal. And you are a manifestation of its secret perfection. You are the life of things.”
It is you who are the life of things. You stand there and draw them into you. You turn your gaze on the dull and the insipid to make them shine. And ask them to stay, and they will not, so you find their vanishing of equal interest. I love that in you. Also I fear it. I need quiet and nothingness. I tell myself I should fade and glimmer if long in your hot light.”
He thought of her momentarily as an hour-glass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live. She held his time, she contained his past and his future, both now cramped together, with such ferocity and such gentleness, into this small circumference.
Jonathan liked this
“And if we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.”
Outside our small safe place flies Mystery.
But all one long look which consumed his soul Into desire beyond the reach of hope Beyond the touch of doubt or of despair, So that he was one thing, and all he was, The fears, the contradictions and the pains, The reveller’s pleasures and the sick man’s whims, All gone, forever gone, all burned away Under the steady and essential gaze Of this pale Creature in this quiet space.
La Fontaine de la Soif, The Thirsty Fountain. Therefore, come and drink.”
All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.
It was odd to hear Maud Bailey talking wildly of madness and bliss.
“I’ll take the top.” She laughed. “Leonora would say it’s because of Lilith.” “Why Lilith?” “Lilith refused to take the inferior position. So Adam sent her away and she roamed the Arabian deserts and the dark beyond the pale. She’s an avatar of Melusina.”
He felt a great contentment, that she should be shelved there, invisible and inaccessible, but there.
But there
SABINE LUCRÈCE CHARLOTTE DE KERCOZ.
“A writer only becomes a true writer by practising his craft, by experimenting constantly with language, as a great artist may experience with clay or oils until the medium becomes second nature, to be moulded however the artist may desire.”
This daily recording, she said, would have two virtues. It would make my style flexible and my observation exact for when the time came—as it must in all lives—when something momentous should cry out—she said “cry out”—to be told. And it would make me see that nothing was in fact dull in itself, nothing was without its own proper interest.
Work written only for one pair of eyes, the writer’s, loses some of its vitality, but en revanche gains a certain freedom, and rather to my surprise, adult quality.
For one pair of eye
In storms, when the wind is in that quarter, the whole wall sings, a stony song like a pebble beach. The whole of this country is full of the song of the wind. When it blows, the people plant their feet more firmly, and so to speak, sing into it, the men deepening their bass, the women raising their tones.
“Action, not character, is the essence of tragic drama,” Aristotle said.
The language of reflection has its own pleasure and the language of narration quite a different one.
All old stories, my cousin, will bear telling and telling again in different ways. What is required is to keep alive, to polish, the simple clean forms of the tale which must be there—in this case the angry Ocean, the terrible leap of the horse, the fall of Dahud from the crupper, the engulfment etc etc. And yet to add something of yours, of the writer, which makes all these things seem new and first seen, without having been appropriated for private or personal ends. This you have done.”
Old stories
“And he was very angry at this insult to his gift, and said she must pay what it had cost her from whom he had it. And she said, “ ‘What was that?’ “And he said, ‘Sleepless nights till I come again.’
the Druid religion as he understood it had a mysticism of the centre—there was no linear time, no before and after—but a still centre—and the Happy Land of Síd—which their stone corridors imitated, pointed to. Whereas for Christianity this life was all, as the life was our testing-ground, and then there were Heaven and Hell, absolute.
have noticed that writing such things down does not exorcise them, only gives them solid life, as the witch’s wax dolls take on vitality when she warms them into shape before pricking them.
She said, in Romance, women’s two natures can be reconciled. I asked, which two natures, and she said, men saw women as double beings, enchantresses and demons or innocent angels.
“The fishtail was her freedom,” she said. “She felt, with her legs, that she was walking on knives.”
My warm your cold’s food— Your chill breath my air When our white mouths meet It mingles—there—
The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject’s life.…
Dust falls from us daily as we walk, dust of us, lives a little in the air and is Trodden—we sweep away—Parts of Ourselves—and shall all these—jots and omicra—cohaere? O we die daily—and there—is it all reckoned and gathered, husks restored to gloss and bloom?
Dust of us
As for me, I strangely hunger to hear—not assurances of Peace and Sanctification—but the True Human Voice—of wounds—and woe—and Pain—that I might share it—if it might be—as I should share it—as I would share All—with those I loved—in my earthly Life—
But I run on—maybe incomprehensibly. I have a Desire. I will not tell you what it is, for I am adamant I shall tell none—until—I have—the Substance of it. A crumb, Mrs Cropper, of living dust, in my hand. A crumb. So far denied
“He understood the nineteenth-century loss of religious faith. He wrote about history—he understood history—he saw what the new ideas about development had done to the human idea of time. He’s a central figure in the tradition of English poetry. You can’t understand the twentieth century without understanding him.”
MUMMY POSSEST
We must be artful for the spirit’s truth In which we’re tutored by them, d’you see?
‘O love, be fed with apples while you may,’
He supposed the Romance must give way to social realism, even if the aesthetic temper of the time was against it. In any case, since Blackadder and Leonora and Cropper had come, it had changed from Quest, a good romantic form, into Chase and Race, two other equally valid ones.
It is only when a person is completely in love that the main quota of libido is transferred on to the object and the object to some extent takes the place of the ego.
Ellen liked the idea of these hard, crystalline things, which were formed in intense heat beneath the “habitable surface” of the earth, and were not primeval monuments but “part of the living language of nature.”
I am in your hands.
We see it and we make it, oh my dear.
Roland was so used to the pervasive sense of failure that he was unprepared for the blood-rush of success.
He reread his letters. The world opened.
How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one’s own existence. Nothing in what he had written had changed and everything had changed.
He thought about Randolph Henry Ash. The pursuit of the letters had distanced him from Ash as they had come closer to Ash’s life.
Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else. Since our pleasant and unexpected conversation I have thought of little else.
Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex.
(What an amazing word “heady” is, en passant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera—though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.)
Think of this, as Roland thought of it, rereading The Garden of Proserpina
"Think of this" - talking to me? The reader?
