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Prayer Book. It is a vinous, it is an amorous light. Now that our boxes are unpacked in the dormitories, we sit herded together under maps of the entire world. There are desks with wells for the ink. We shall write our exercises in ink here. But here I am nobody. I have no face. This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended. I will seek out a face, a composed, a monumental face, and will endow it with omniscience, and wear it under my dress like a talisman
The words of authority are corrupted by those who speak them.
Month by month things are losing their hardness; even my body now lets the light through; my spine is soft like wax near the flame of the candle. I dream; I dream.’
Rhoda
it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many.
‘If I could believe,’ said Rhoda, ‘that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists.
Life passes. The clouds change perpetually over our houses. I do this, do that, and again do this and then that.
‘It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue—the penalty of living in an old civilization with a notebook.
Life stands round me like a glass round the imprisoned reed.
I perceive. Beneath my eyes opens—a book; I see to the bottom; the heart—I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.
Yet like children we tell each other stories, and to decorate them we make up these ridiculous, flamboyant, beautiful phrases.
Louis was disgusted by the nature of human flesh; Rhoda by our cruelty; Susan could not share; Neville wanted order; Jinny love; and so on. We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies.
Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it.
‘It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams.
What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished.
