The Collector

by John Fowles

forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.

That was the day I first gave myself the dream that came true. It began where she was being attacked by a man and I ran up and rescued her. Then somehow I was the man that attacked her, only I didn’t hurt her; I captured her and drove her off in the van to a remote house and there I kept her captive in a nice way. Gradually she came to know me and like me and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything.

icky, icky, icky

Now you’ve collected me.” She seemed to think it was funny, so I said, in a manner of speaking. “No, not in a manner of speaking. Literally. You’ve pinned me in this little room and you can come and gloat over me.”

“Anyway, I couldn’t respect anyone, and especially a man, who did things just to please me. I’d want him to do them because he believed they were right.”

“We all want things we can’t have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”

But I know now I must save up my escape attempts. Outwit him. Plan ahead. Survive.

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization. But he’s so ordinary that he’s extraordinary.

I swore at him. I was my mother’s daughter. A bitch.

The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe—so long as it’s something more than belief in your own comfort.

But it made me feel, that meeting with her, that G.P. did love me (want me). That there’s a deep bond between us—his loving me in his way, my liking him very much (even loving him, but not sexually) in my way—a feeling that we’re groping towards a compromise. A sort of fog of unsolved desire and sadness between us.

Two people in a desert, trying to find both themselves and an oasis where they can live together.

I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

I’m sick of being young. Inexperienced. Clever at knowing but not at living.

If there is a God he’s a great loathsome spider in the darkness.