The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

With his college chums (dressed in capes, and drunk on Rhenish wine) he would defend the merging of the classes with all the agony and vitality of the young, but he was always startled whenever he encountered it in practice.

He was disposed to like Moody simply for the reason that the other man had undertaken a pursuit about which he evidently knew very little, and from which he must expect a great return.

In his life so far he had known only the kind of doubt that is calculated and secure. He had known only suspicion, cynicism, probability—never the fearful unraveling that comes when one ceases to trust in one’s own trusting power; never the dread panic that follows this unraveling; never the dull void that follows last of all. Of

(Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers. This realization, when it came, surprised him.)

As a child he had known instinctively that it was always better to tell a partial truth with a willing aspect than to tell a perfect truth in a defensive way.

We shall here excise their imperfections, and impose a regimental order upon the impatient chronicle of the shipping agent’s roving mind; we shall apply our own mortar to the cracks and chinks of earthly recollection, and resurrect as new the edifice that, in solitary memory, exists only as a ruin.

He did not mention that his skill was as a carver. He had never sold pounamu. He would not sell pounamu. For one could not put a price upon a treasure, just as one could not purchase mana, and one could not make a bargain with a god. Gold was not a treasure—this Tauwhare knew. Gold was like all capital in that it had no memory: its drift was always onward, away from the past. “All

For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

When he was made anxious, as he had been by the inexplicable misfire of Anna’s pistol, he tended to give himself over to bursts of powerful emotion—shock, despair, anger, sorrow: emotions which he seized upon because they channeled his anxiety outward, and in a sense regulated the pressure that he felt within.

Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own. Lydia’s was a rare and old-world glamour—and Gascoigne knew it, just as if the fact had been logically proved.

Te Rau Tauwhare was a man for whom the act of love was the true religion, and the altar of this religion was one in place of which no idols could be made.

For human temperament was a volatile compound of perception and circumstance; Moody