Kindle Notes & Highlights
A pale, mysterious sun opaquely glittered on the circlet of gold round their helmets, as armed men, ever fainter in outline and less substantial, receded into the vaporous, shining mists towards intermediate, timeless beings, at once measurably historical, yet at the same time mythically heroic: Llywarch the Old, a discontented guest at the Arthurian Table: Cunedda – though only in the female line – whose horse – men had mounted guard on the Wall.
Cleanshaven, with the severely puritanical countenance of an Ironside in a Victorian illustration to a Cavalier-and-Roundhead romance, CSM Cadwallader was not as old as he looked, nor for that matter – as I discovered in due course – nearly so puritanical.
Jones, D., had led the singing.
Surely the Welsh can do better than that.
Romantic ideas about the way life is lived are often to be found in persons themselves fairly coarse-grained.
He appeared to be trying to contemplate as objectively as possible the concept of being so totally excluded from the human family as to dislike porridge.
Even so, Vigny would say those in uniform have made the greater sacrifice by losing the man in the soldier – what he calls the warrior’s abnegation, his renunciation of thought and action.
Whatever inner processes are required for writing novels, so far as I myself was concerned, war now utterly inhibited. That was one of the many disagreeable aspects of war. It was not only physically inescapable, but morally inescapable too.
He spoke in that reminiscent, unctuous voice men use when they tell you that sort of thing more to savour an enjoyable past situation, than to impart information which might be of interest.
Buster Foxe and Dicky Umfraville, between them, brought about that state. Their really overpowering mutual detestation dominated for a moment all other local agitations.
You played a game to demonstrate that you did it better than someone else. If it came to that, I thought, how few people do anything for its own sake, from making love to practising the arts.
The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal ending.
He spoke without a vestige of interest. I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.
He had already begun to speak on the telephone when I left the room. I saw that I was now in Widmerpool’s power. This, for some reason, gave me a disagreeable, sinking feeling within.
Then, all at once, these several zigzagging angles of light would form an apex on the same patch of sky, creating a small elliptical compartment through which, once in a way, rapidly darted a tiny object, moving like an angry insect confined in a bottle.
possibly due to economic ineptitudes, or ingrained malice, of what Pennistone used later to call the ‘cluster of highly educated apes’ ultimately in charge of such matters at the Treasury.
Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep; a prescript of nature unviolated by the character of solely male-infested sleeping quarters established even in buildings hallowed by age and historical association.
However, to think one thing at one moment, another at the next, is the prescriptive right of every human being.
All the same, although the soldier might abnegate thought and action, it has never been suggested that he should abnegate grumbling.
He somewhat resembled an owl, an angry, ageing bird, recently baulked of a field-mouse and looking about for another small animal to devour.
Personal popularity is an asset easy to exaggerate in the transaction of practical affairs. Possibly it can even be a handicap.
Lovell was an odd mixture of realism and romanticism; more specifically, he was, like quite a lot of people, romantic about being a realist.
Lovell was romantic, especially, in the sense of taking things at their face value—one of the qualities that made him a good journalist.
‘I never get time to settle down to serious writing,’ he used to say, thereby making what almost amounted to a legal declaration in defining his own inclusion within an easily recognisable category of non-starting literary apprenticeship.
Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward—in contrast with love—is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for example, come between Stringham and myself.
I like gratitude, because it’s the rarest of virtues and a very difficult one to cultivate.
The power principle could almost be felt here, humming and vibrating like the drummings of the teleprinter. The sensation that resulted was oppressive, even a shade alarming.
Instead of the usual ATS tunic imposed by some higher authority anxious that the Corps should look, if not as masculine as possible, at least as Sapphic, she had managed to provide herself, as some did, with soldier’s battledress, paradoxically more adapted to the female figure.
At that period the seventeenth century particularly occupied me, so that works like Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses or Luttrell’s Brief Relation opened up vistas of the past, if not necessarily preferable to one’s own time, at least appreciably different. These historical readings could be varied with Proust.
He nodded and began to move off. I saluted—the uniform, as one was always told, rather than the man—and took the Belgian documents back to our room.
At the same time, a faint sense of disappointment superimposed on an otherwise absorbing inner experience was in its way suitably Proustian too: a reminder of the eternal failure of human life to respond a hundred per cent; to rise to the greatest heights without allowing at the same time some suggestion, however slight, to take shape in indication that things could have been even better.
In short, the will here might even be more effective from being less dramatic. It was an immense, wiry, calculated, insistent hardness, rather than a force like champagne bursting from the bottle.
One felt that a great deal of time and trouble, even intellectual effort of its own sort, had gone into producing this final result.
One wondered what had happened to him.
These paragraphs about the Allies who 'lost their birthrite' and Theoderic ending with this sentence sums up the tragedy of post-war Eastern Europe, whose fate was to be abandoned by the West for reasons of cold political realism. After all the only way to stop it would have been to take up arms against Russia and carry on the war. Something that would have been unlikely to have support amongst the populations of Western Europe or the USA. Patton wanted this, which was one of the reasons he was sidelined. But really what was the choice? To quote a great philosopher: ""Sometimes, the only choices you have are bad ones, but you still have to choose"
The sense of being present at a Great Occasion—for, if this was not a Great Occasion, then what was?—had somehow failed to take adequate shape, to catch on the wing those inner perceptions of a more exalted sort, evasive by their very nature, at best transient enough, but not altogether unknown. They were, in fact, so it seemed to me—unlike that morning in Normandy—entirely absent.
One never knew what to expect from the South Americans. Sometimes they would speak perfect English like Colonel Flores, were sophisticated to a degree; alternatively, they would know not a word of any language but their own, seemed to find any ways but their own incomprehensible.
Hymns always made me think of Stringham, addicted to quoting their imagery within the context of his own life. ‘Hymns describe people and places so well,’ he used to say. ‘Nothing else quite like them. What could be better, for example, on the subject of one’s friends and relations than: Some are sick and some are sad, And some have never loved one well, And some have lost the love they had.
Blake was as impenetrable as Isaiah; in his way, more so. It was not quite such wonderful stuff as the Prophet rendered into Elizabethan English, yet wonderful enough. At the same time, so I always felt, never quite for me. Blake was a genius, but not one for the classical taste. He was too cranky.
General Asbjørnsen certainly enjoyed singing the words. He was quite flushed in the face, like a suddenly converted Viking, joining in with the monks instead of massacring them.
‘Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit; Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art, But still I love the language of his heart.’
‘Thou with strange adultery Doest in each breast a brothel keep; Awake, all men do lust for thee, And some enjoy thee when they sleep.’
‘Now all my days are trances And all my nightly dreams Are where thy grey eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams— In what ethereal dances By what eternal streams.’
Language, pronunciation, sentiment, were always changing. There must have been advantages, moral and otherwise, in living at an outwardly less squeamish period, when the verbiage of high-thinking had not yet cloaked such petitions as those put forward in the second verse, incidentally much the best; when, in certain respects at least, hypocrisy had established less of a stranglehold on the public mind.
Such a mental picture of the past was no doubt largely unhistorical, indeed totally illusory, freedom from one sort of humbug merely implying, with human beings of any epoch, thraldom to another. The past, just as the present, had to be accepted for what it thought and what it was.
He went off, infinitely pleased with himself, bringing back forcibly the opinion once expressed by General Conyers: ‘I can see that fellow has a touch of exaggerated narcissism.’
They both looked incredibly elegant. In fact their elegance appalled one. Nobody in England had been able to get hold of any smart clothes for a long time now—except for the occasional ‘unsolicited gift’ like Matilda’s—and the sight of these two gave the impression that they had walked off the stage, or from some display of exotic fashions, into the street. Colonel Flores shouted something in Spanish.
Had she really used those words, those very unexpected expressions, she was accustomed to cry out aloud at the moment of achievement?
Very delicate phrasing Mr. Powell. Very delicate.
In the hall, a page-boy had said to another: ‘General de Gaulle’s in that room over there’. The second boy had been withering. He had simply replied: ‘Give me news, not history.’
