The Master

by Colm Tóibín

“I have to give up everything, the house, the servants, my friends, my whole life. I will freeze to death or I will die of boredom. It will be a race between the two.”

“Could we move around the world staying in nice hotels, just we three, and writing letters home when some very witty remark is made by one of us?” Alice asked. “Could we do this forever?”

“You have asked two questions, and I will answer them separately,” Gray said. “Trollope writes with precision and feeling about love and marriage. Yes, I can assure you of that. Now, the second question is rather different. Trollope, I believe, would take the view that it is the function of the preacher and the theologian, the philosopher and perhaps the poet, but emphatically not that of the novelist, to deal with what you call ‘the great mystery of our existence.’ I would tend to agree with him.”

Henry wondered, too, what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of challenge could have dealt with a world which would inevitably attempt to confine her. His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her.

Trollope and Balzac, Zola and Dickens would, he felt, have become bitter old preachers, or mad hairy schoolmasters had they been born in New England and condemned

“I shall tell him that being partly invisible is merely a small aspect of my charm.”

“I don’t go in for change. It is not one of my subjects. I have always taken the view that noticing change is a mistake. I notice what is directly in front of me.”

Here in this cemetery, which they began to stroll around once more, the state of not-knowing and not-feeling which belonged to the dead seemed to him closer to resolved happiness than he had ever imagined possible.

Andersen was perhaps too young to know how memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.

“Mankind,” Henry found himself saying, “is a very large business.”

He turned and looked at Henry. “Did you always know that you would write all these books?” “I know the next sentence,” Henry said, “and often the next story and I take notes for novels.”

It had been easier to present a self in full possession of pride and confidence.