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Being a suppression, not merely a repression, it produced not frustration, but something more ominous, perhaps, in the long run: passivity.
Once he told me that, being so slow-thinking, he had to guide his acts by a general intuition of which way his “luck” was running, and that this intuition rarely failed him.
He was not discouraged. He belonged here.
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
He was an honest person, but rarely a direct one.
You can’t build up amino acids out of hydrogen atoms; a good deal of complexifying has to take place first:
But the Ice did not know how hard we worked. Why should it? Proportion is kept.
“It’s queer that daylight’s not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk.”
His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge.
Some shadows got shorter and some longer, as they say in Karhide.
He had his defeat and his revenge for it all in one.
I felt then that my heart hardened somewhat and my mind cleared. I had been all in pieces, disintegrated. Now, though tired from the easy journey, I found some strength left whole in me. Strength of habit, most likely, for here at last was a place I knew, a city I had lived in, worked in, for over a year. I knew the streets, the towers, the somber courts and ways and façades of the Palace. I knew my job here. Therefore for the first time it came plainly to me that, my friend being dead, I must accomplish the thing he died for. I must set the keystone in the arch.
I was too tired to be apprehensive, this time, and there were things on my mind that outweighed self-consciousness.
