Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

“It is purely by good fortune that you do not bear the responsibility of a serious accident…”

“I’m sick of being grateful to him.”

It used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favorites of God and his saints, but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included. Wealth in pagan Rome was necessarily something cruel; it’s not anymore.”

What an interesting justification

It’s not to be expected that an ox and an ass should worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in the lives of the saints. It’s all part of the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side, of religion.”

I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enhance it; Sebastian drank to escape.

‘Marquis’s Son Unused to Wine,’ ” she quoted. “ ‘Model Student’s Career Threatened.’

He’s my guest and my only friend and I was bloody to him.”

“He’s ashamed of being unhappy,” I said.

‘Sebastian contra mundum.’

I’ve known drunkards before. One of the most terrible things about them is their deceit. Love of truth is the first thing that goes.

It needs a very strong faith to stand entirely alone and Sebastian’s isn’t strong.

Don’t you see that any idea of his being watched would be fatal?”

Protestants always think Catholic priests are spies.”

“He must feel...

“Contra mundum?” “Contra mundum.”

Sebastian feels hemmed in by his social world—the family, the customs and expectations, the natural path of his ilk. But instead of finding a way to live within that society and yet escape it, he does not see the way and turns to alcohol. But Sebastian, there is a way! A faith in Christ that is personal and passionate, not merely a symptom of one’s belonging to a family!

“I believe God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people.”

“why bring God into everything?” “I’m sorry. I forgot. But you know that’s an extremely funny question.” “Is it?” “To me. Not to you.” “No, not to me. It seems to me that without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man.”

Charles believes the problem to be religion itself, as the social tradition which hems Sebastian in. But faith has nothing to do with how his family treats him, intentionally or not.

I intend to be a painter.”

suddenly ‘discovered’ a master who fits in with that month’s aesthetic theory.

“Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?” “Great bosh.”

“Yes, I was determined to have a happy Christmas.” “Did you?” “I think so. I don’t remember it much, and that’s always a good sign, isn’t it?”

He will be quite harmless… as long as no one is so wicked as to give him any….

“D’you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense.”

I don’t understand how you can have been so nice in so many ways, and then do something so wantonly cruel. I don’t understand how we all liked you so much. Did you hate us all the time? I don’t understand how we deserved it.”

A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.

Woken from a dream

ocean bed. I had left behind me—what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, “the Young Magician’s Compendium,” that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double, and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle. “I have left behind illusion,” I said to myself. “Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses.” I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.

The illusion and dream of religion? Of forbidden romance? Of beauty?

‘It doesn’t matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.’

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his.

Then came the cognac and the proper hour for these confidences.

She was wondering, dispassionately and leagues distant from reality, whom she should marry. Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of colored chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf past, present, and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war.

Someone like that would do, Julia thought,

From that moment she shut her mind against her religion.

So the year wore on and the secret of the engagement spread from Julia’s confidantes to their confidantes,

“That’s one thing your Church can do,” he said, “put on a good show.

But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.

Maybe I risk going to hell. Well, I’ll risk it. What’s it got to do with anyone else?” “Why not?” said Julia. “I don’t believe these priests know everything. I don’t believe in hell for things like that. I don’t know that I believe in it for anything.

He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

We’ll show the dead chaps we can fight, too.”

“You know, Charles,” he said, “it’s rather a pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.”

I held back from painting, like a diver on the water’s edge; once in I found myself buoyed and exhilarated. I was normally a slow and deliberate painter; that afternoon and all next day, and the day after, I worked fast. I could do nothing wrong. At the end of each passage I paused, tense, afraid to start the next, fearing, like a gambler, that luck must turn and the pile be lost. Bit by bit, minute by minute, the thing came into being. There were no difficulties; the intricate multiplicity of light and color became a whole; the right color was where I wanted it on the palette; each brush stroke, as soon as it was complete, seemed to have been there always.

Just like writing, getting into the zone

Quomodo sedet sola civitas…

I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo’s tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.

These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me.

time curbed the artist’s pride

In such buildings England abounded, and, in the last decade of their grandeur, Englishmen seemed for the first time to become conscious of what before was taken for granted, and to salute their achievement at the moment of extinction.

Now while I had the strength I would go to the wild lands where man had deserted his post and the jungle was creeping back to its old strongholds.

“But you might change so that you didn’t love me anymore.”

So we started that day exactly where we left off two years before, with my wife in tears.

restrained from doing so by the centripetal force of our own worlds and the cold, interstellar space between them.

we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.