The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

amour propre

much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning

Good description of a writers craft and how inspiration developes

ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deep...

foolscap:

peine forte et dure.

disinter

Battersea,

Cophetua complex,

occurred to me with amazement that for ten minutes I had not thought of Sarah or of my jealousy; I had become nearly human enough to think of another person’s trouble.

Aother's problem not Sarah

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

dubiety

suppose, even at that time have been punctuated by misunderstanding and suspicion. Just as I went home that first evening with no exhilaration but only a sense of sadness and resignation, so again and again I returned home on other days with the certainty that I was only one of many men—the favourite lover for the moment.

mortmain

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time,

Eternity def

‘I have no need to write to you or talk to you, you know everything before I can speak, but when one loves, one feels the need to use the same old ways one has always used. I know I am only beginning to love, but already I want to abandon everything, everybody but you: only fear and habit prevent me.

"love note" good description of her love for him

maladroitly

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.

he ideal of what love is or the real emotional cognitive idea of love

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better.

insecurity expression of his emotionional responce to it Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

My love and fear acted like conscience. If we had believed in sin, our behaviour would hardly have differed.

This is interesting his love and fear acted like a conscience guilty of sin even tho ther are "non-believers"

can’t I find somewhere a quiet friendly marriage that would go on and on? Then perhaps I wouldn’t feel jealous because I wouldn’t love enough: I would just be secure, and my self-pity and hatred walked hand in hand across the darkening Common like idiots without a keeper.

more his thought and emotions

groundsel

Looking at her over my whisky I thought how odd it was that I felt no desire for her at all. It was as if quite suddenly after all the promiscuous years I had grown up. My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

real love kills lust

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

interesting observation

known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah’s enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn’t that what the devil is supposed to be? I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.

the ways of a devil interesting thoughts written down

surreptitious.

Hatred is very like physical love: it has its crisis and then its periods of calm.

hatred

have always felt at home in the club because there is so little likelihood of meeting a fellow writer.

ha ha1

Vienna steak—

Ground beef with added ingrediants what eventually became a hambuger

cretonne

pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good You are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.

Jesus's suffering

Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

BOOK FIVE

This Book Five is very interesting to me as a Catholic........many insights........great writing by Graham and why he is considered a Catholic writer

It’s extraordinary how empty a house can be with three people in it.

Interesting phrase

mustn’t be like Richard Smythe, I mustn’t hate, for if I were really to hate I would believe, and if I were to believe, what a triumph for You and her.

Fighting Him

timbre

tim·bre n. the character or quality of a musical sound or voice as distinct from its pitch and intensity: trumpet mutes with different timbres | a voice high in pitch but rich in timbre. <ORIGIN> mid 19th cent.: from French, from medieval Greek timbanon, from Greek tumpanon 'drum'. I like this analogy

pendulum of my desire swung tiringly to and fro, the desire to forget and to remember, to be dead and to keep alive a while longer.

I love love this

suborned

The snow mounted slowly on the sill like mould from a spade.

I thought of Sarah dead upstairs and Henry asleep with a silly smile on his face, and the lover with the spots discussing the funeral with the lover who had employed Mr Parkis to sprinkle his door-bell with powder. The tears ran down my cheeks as I laughed. Once in the blitz I saw a man laughing outside his house where his wife and child were buried.

I like this

Disbelief could be a product of hysteria just as much as belief.

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.

then I came out of the church and saw the crucifix they have there, and I thought, of course, he’s got mercy, only it’s such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment.

Mercy like a punishment.....?. interesting thought phrase

believe there’s a God—I believe the whole bag of tricks, there’s nothing I don’t believe, they could subdivide the Trinity into a dozen parts and I’d believe. They could dig up records that proved Christ had been invented by Pilate to get himself promoted and I’d believe just the same. I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love. I’ve never loved before as I love you, and I’ve never believed in anything before as I believe now. I’m sure. I’ve never been sure before about anything. When you came in at the door with the blood on your face, I became sure. Once and for all. Even though I didn’t know it at the time. I fought belief for longer than I fought love, but I haven’t any fight left.

Belief conversion process....strange how it affects people so that temporal matters mean nothing

I’m a phoney and a fake, but this isn’t phoney or fake. I used to think I was sure about myself and what was right and wrong, and you taught me not to be sure. You took away all my lies and self-deceptions like they clear a road of rubble for somebody to come along it, somebody of importance, and now he’s come, but you cleared the way yourself. When you write you try to be exact and you taught me to want the truth, and you told me when I wasn’t telling the truth. Do you really think that, you’d say, or do you only think you think it? So you see it’s all your fault, Maurice, it’s all your fault. I pray to God He won’t keep me alive like this.’

but I’m beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here. Only, like Sarah, I wish I weren’t as strong as a horse.

Interesting thoughts

I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I was tired of facing. Patronizingly in the end he would place me—probably a little above Maugham because Maugham is popular and I have not yet committed that crime—not yet, but although I retain a little of the exclusiveness of unsuccess, the little reviews, like wise detectives, can scent it on its way.

Interesting insight into a writer's thought about others commenting on his work

I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I was tired of facing. Patronizingly in the end he would place me—probably a little above Maugham because Maugham is popular and I have not yet committed that crime—not yet, but although I retain a little of the exclusiveness of unsuccess, the little reviews, like wise detectives, can scent it on its way.

Interesting thoughts by a writer concerning what others think and interpt his work