The Sea, The Sea

by Iris Murdoch

Shakespeare cries out in agony, he writhes, he dances, he laughs, he shrieks, and he makes us laugh and shriek ourselves out of hell.... What redeems us is that speech is ultimately divine.

The theatre is a place of obsession. It is not a soft dreamland. Unemployment, poverty, disappointment, racking indecision (take this now and miss that later) grind reality into one’s face; and, as in family life, one soon learns the narrow limitations of the human soul.

The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.

I have neglected her, I have even been cruel, though that could be called a sign of love and the neglect a sign of trust.

What suits me best is the drama of separation, of looking forward to assignations and rendezvous. I cannot prefer the awful eternal presence of marriage to the magic of meetings and partings.

On n’aime qu’une fois, la première.

I must try to describe Hartley. Oh, my darling, how clearly I can see you now. Surely this is perception, not imagination. The light in the cavern is daylight, not fire. Perhaps it is the only true light in my life, the light that reveals the truth. No wonder I feared to lose the light and to be left in the darkness forever. All a child’s blind fear was there, the fear that my mother so early inspired in me: the kiss withheld, the candle taken.

Hartley made a permanent metaphysical crisis of my life by refusing me for moral reasons. Did this lead me to make immorality my mask?

If even a dog’s tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth.

I had decided by now that Titus was a simpler character than I had imagined at first; or perhaps, faced with horrors, he had chosen simplicity.

‘There is nothing more I can do.’ How long, how infinitely expansible, a second is when it contains this thought, which is an effigy of death. A complete fall into the void, something which I had often imagined on aeroplanes, is of course the most terrible thing of all. Hands, feet, muscles, all the familiar protective mechanisms of the body are suddenly useless. The enmity of matter is unleashed against the frail breakable crushable animal form, always perhaps an alien in this hard mineral gravitational scene.

If you had looked more stricken I would have felt more guilty.

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.

Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face.

Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?