Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

I think I know a good deal about physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I

Ah, the past is filled up quicker than we know and God has little patience with remorse!

Try persuading the world not to cut its throat for half a decade or more, like me, under one name or another, and it’ll begin to dawn on you that even your behavior’s part of its plan. I ask you, what do we know?”

Yet the banality stood: that the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only in so far as that might change the future. For man, every man, Juan seemed to be telling him, even as Mexico, must ceaselessly struggle upward. What was life but a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn?

Good God, if our civilisation were to sober up for a couple of days it’d die of remorse on the third—”

And how can I be escaping from myself when I am without a place on earth? No home.

But why was it, richly endowed in a capacity for living as she was, she had never found a faith merely in “life” sufficient? If that were all! … In unselfish love—in the stars!

Life had no time to waste. Why, then, should it waste so much of everything else?

Now the Consul made this Virgin the other who had answered his prayer and as they stood in silence before her, prayed again. “Nothing is altered and in spite of God’s mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is

no explanation of my life.” Indeed there was not, nor was this what he’d meant to convey.

For him life is always just around the corner, in the form of another drink at a new bar. Yet he really wants none of these things.

He felt free to devour what remained of his life in peace.

And he saw dimly too how Yvonne’s arrival, the snake in the garden, his quarrel with Laruelle and later with Hugh and Yvonne, the infernal machine, the encounter with Señora Gregorio, the finding of the letters, and much beside, how all the events of the day indeed had been as indifferent tufts of grass he had half-heartedly clutched at or stones loosed on his downward flight, which were still showering on him from above.