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Divney was a strong civil man but he was lazy and idle-minded.
We were all happy enough in a queer separate way.
that it was for de Selby I committed my first serious sin. It was for him that I committed my greatest sin.
I slept with him always after that. We were friendly and smiled at each other but the situation was a queer one and neither of us liked it.
The softening and degeneration of the human race he attributes to its progressive predilection for interiors and waning interest in the art of going out and staying there. This in turn he sees as the result of the rise of such pursuits as reading, chess-playing, drinking, marriage and the like, few of which can be satisfactorily conducted in the open.
It was some change which came upon me or upon the room, indescribably subtle, yet momentous, ineffable. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye; perhaps all of these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation.
knew also that my soul was friendly, was my senior in years and was solely concerned for my own welfare. For convenience I called him Joe. I felt a little reassured to know that I was not altogether alone. Joe was helping me.
a nightmare can be as strenuous physically as the real thing.
the best thing to do was to believe what my eyes were looking at rather than to place my trust in a memory.
His voice had a peculiar jarring weight like the hoarse toll of an ancient rusty bell in an ivy-smothered tower.
everything you do is in response to a request or a suggestion made to you by some other party either inside you or outside. Some of these suggestions are good and praiseworthy and some of them are undoubtedly delightful. But the majority of them are definitely bad and are pretty considerable sins as sins go.
Thoughts which have no chance of succeeding do not take the trouble to come into your head at all.’
‘No doubt you are aware that the winds have colours,’
There are four winds and eight sub-winds, each with its own colour. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine shining silver. The north wind is a hard black and the west is amber. People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, the magic of neighbouring winds when they are inter-weaved like ribbons at a wedding. It was a better occupation than gazing at newspapers.
‘A person’s colour,’ he answered slowly, ‘is the colour of the wind prevailing at his birth.’
what is the point of knowing your colour or having a colour at all?’ ‘For one thing you can tell the length of your life from it. Yellow means a long life and the lighter the better.’
most good things in life are associated with certain disadvantages.’
He suggests that de Selby, when writing the Album, paused to consider some point of difficulty and in the meantime engaged in the absent-minded practice known generally as ‘doodling’,
‘On ne saura jamais jusqu’à quel point de Selby fut cause de la Grande Guerre, mais, sans aucun doute, ses théories excentriques – spécialement celle que nuit n’est pas un phénomène de nature, mais dans l’atmosphère un état malsain amené par un industrialisme cupide et sans pitié – auraient l’effet de produire un trouble profond dans les masses.’
The road was narrow, white, old, hard and scarred with shadow.
Roads he regards as the most ancient of human monuments, surpassing by many tens of centuries the oldest thing of stone that man has reared to mark his passing.
de Selby makes the point that a good road will have character and a certain air of destiny, an indefinable intimation that it is going somewhere, be it east or west, and not coming back from there. If you go with such a road, he thinks, it will give you pleasant travelling, fine sights at every corner and a gentle ease of peregrination that will persuade you that you are walking forever on falling ground. But if you go east on a road that is on its way west, you will marvel at the unfailing bleakness of every prospect and the great number of sore-footed inclines that confront you to make you
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thinking my own thoughts with the front part of my brain and at the same time taking pleasure with the back part in the great and widespread finery of the morning.
:)
The sun had climbed steeply out of his hiding and was now standing benignly in the lower sky pouring down floods of enchanting light and preliminary tinglings of heat.
I was now but two days from home – not more than three hours’ walking – and yet I seemed to have reached regions which I had never seen before and of which I had never even heard.
Ha!
I felt sure I was not going against the road. It was, so to speak, accompanying me.
carrying on inward conversations with my newly-found soul.
my own soul, whom nobody has ever seen on the road or standing at the counter of a public house, had apparently no difficulty in assuming a name which distinguished him from other people’s souls.
he reached the high C where heaven and earth seem married in one great climax of exaltation,
The sun was maturing rapidly in the east and a great heat had started to spread about the ground like a magic influence, making everything, including my own self, very beautiful and happy in a dreamy drowsy way.
I slept there for a long time, as motionless and as devoid of feeling as the shadow of myself which slept behind me.
You seem very contented in one way but then again you do not seem to be satisfied.
the sun is roaring in the sky and sending great tidings into our weary bones.’
if you identify life with enjoyment I am told that there is a better brand of it in the cities than in the country parts and there is said to be a very superior brand of it to be had in certain parts of France.
‘Have you a desideratum?’
‘What way will you bring it about or mature its mutandum and bring it ultimately to passable factivity?’
‘Here is a sovereign for your good luck,’ he said, ‘the golden token of your golden destiny.’
hundred and two difficult thoughts I have to think between this and my destination and the sooner the better.’
‘a journey is an hallucination’.
Human existence de Selby has defined as ‘a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief’,
‘Nearly every sickness is from the teeth.’
he had modified and assembled his various unpleasant features in some skilful way so that they expressed to me good nature, politeness and infinite patience.
‘What is your pronoun?’ he inquired. ‘I have no pronoun,’ I answered, hoping I knew his meaning.
he had a wife and ten sonnies and at that time he had the wife again in a very advanced state of sexuality.’
Ha!
he would look more like a poet than a policeman but the rest of his body looked anything but poetical.
‘The first beginnings of wisdom,’ he said, ‘is to ask questions but never to answer any. You get wisdom from asking and I from not answering.
‘You told me what the first rule of wisdom is,’ I said. ‘What is the second rule?’ ‘That can be answered,’ he said. ‘There are five in all. Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit, Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first.’
looked at me crookedly from a sidewise angle with a certain quantity of what may be called roi-s’amuse.
What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.’
I gave a frown and tried to make myself look like a wise person who was trying to comprehend something that called for all his wisdom.
