The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air.

The enormous pressure of the outside world weighs on us like a peine forte et dure.

in those years the sense of happiness had been a long while dying under the coming storm. One detected it in drunken people, in children, seldom elsewhere.

Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

She had often disconcerted me by the truth.

But she never played that game of make-believe,

I remember once when I was miserable at her calm assumption that one day our relations would be over, hearing with incredulous happiness, ‘I have never, never loved a man as I love you, and I never shall again.’ Well, she hadn’t known it, I thought, but she too played the same game of make-believe.

She held her hand out and said, ‘Good-bye—Maurice.’ The name was like an insult. I said ‘Good-bye’, but didn’t take her hand: I walked quickly away without looking round, trying to give the appearance of being busy and relieved to be gone, and when I heard the cough begin again, I wished I had been able to whistle a tune, something jaunty, adventurous, happy, but I have no ear for music.

When I was young not even a love affair would alter my schedule. A love affair had to begin after lunch, and however late I might be in getting to bed—so long as I slept in my own bed—I would read the morning’s work over and sleep on it.

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

The Old Testament writers were fond of using the words ‘a jealous God’, and perhaps it was their rough and oblique way of expressing belief in the love of God for man.

it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence, and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace.

The act of love itself has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace.

didn’t I know it was possible to make love in the most dangerous circumstances, if the desire were there? Distrust grows with a lover’s success.

I have never known a woman before or since so able to alter a whole mood by simply speaking on the telephone, and when she came into a room or put her hand on my side she created at once the absolute trust I lost with every separation.

Unlike the rest of us she was unhaunted by guilt. In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

She wasn’t lying even when she said, ‘Nobody else. Ever again.’ There are contradictions in time, that’s all, that don’t exist on the mathematical point. She had so much more capacity for love than I had—I couldn’t bring down that curtain round the moment, I couldn’t forget and I couldn’t not fear. Even in the moment of love, I was like a police officer gathering evidence of a crime that hadn’t yet been committed, and when more than seven years later I opened Parkis’s letter the evidence was all there in my memory to add to my bitterness.

There was one code word I did remember—‘onions’. That word had been allowed in our correspondence to represent discreetly our passion. Love became ‘onions’, even the act itself ‘onions’.

I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.

In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor. Even before the days of Mr Parkis I was trying

my self-pity and hatred walked hand in hand across the darkening Common like idiots without a keeper.

the spring like a corpse was sweet with the smell of doom,

My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

It was as if the shutters were going up on the whole world; soon we should all of us be abandoned to our own devices.

‘What were you doing on the floor?’ I asked. ‘Praying.’ ‘Who to?’ ‘To anything that might exist.’

the memory of the look of disappointment on Sarah’s face when I came into the room after the VI had fallen.

After six months I realized that I had not thought of Sarah all one day and that I had been happy.

We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It’s as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other’s misery. But I don’t even know the design.

‘Do you believe in happiness?’ ‘I don’t believe in any absolute.’

They were like bad coloured pictures in Hans Andersen: they were like bad poetry, but somebody had needed to write them, somebody who wasn’t so proud that he hid them rather than expose his foolishness.

When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food.

I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love.

If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes or cheap jewellery?

Indifference and pride look very much

‘St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. I don’t know that we can understand time any better than a child.’ ‘I didn’t mean …’

And yet one cannot do without him. I can imagine a God feeling in just that way about some of us. The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word. They stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it. But we have to be pushed around. We have the obstinacy of nonexistence. We are inextricably bound to the plot, and wearily God forces us, here and there, according to his intention, characters without poetry, without free will, whose only importance is that somewhere, at some time, we help to furnish the scene in which a living character moves and speaks, providing perhaps the saints with the opportunities for their free will.