Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

Hooper had no illusions about the Army—or rather no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe.

In the weeks that we were together Hooper became a symbol to me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting “Hooper” and seeing if they still seemed as plausible. Thus in the dark hour before reveille I sometimes pondered: “Hooper Rallies,” “Hooper Hostels,” “International Hooper Cooperation,” and “the Religion of Hooper.” He was the acid test of all these alloys.

“Rightyoh.” “And for Christ’s sake don’t say ‘rightyoh.’ ” “Sorry. I do try to remember. It just slips out.”

“Yes, Hooper, I did. I’ve been here before.” The words seemed to ring back to me enriched from the vaults of my dungeon. “Oh well, you know all about it. I’ll go and get cleaned up.” I had been there before; I knew all about it.

and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-gray smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.

“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”

that nowhere else in the world and at no other time, do a few hundred pounds, one way or the other, make so much difference to one’s importance and popularity.

It only shows what effect judicious advice can have, properly delivered at the right moment. I wish I had some for you, but I haven’t.”

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

‘Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?’ Yes. I do,”

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that gray city.

He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.

There were three Etonian freshmen, mild, elegant, detached young men who had all been to a dance in London the night before, and spoke of it as though it had been the funeral of a near but unloved kinsman.

I could tell him that all the wickedness of that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro, heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the wine, renders it undrinkable, so that it must lie in the dark, year in, year out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table. I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.

There is no candor in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity.

“In my day we used to go on what were called reading parties, always in mountainous areas. Why? Why,” he repeated petulantly, “should alpine scenery be thought conducive to study?”

Bath Oliver biscuits,

he looked at me with the expression I have seen since in the religious, of innocent wonder that those who expose themselves to the dangers of the world should avail themselves so little of its varied solace.

I have come to accept claims which then, in 1923, I never troubled to examine, and to accept the supernatural as the real.

“Who was it used to pray, ‘O God, make me good, but not yet’?”

The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly—perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless.

“It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning. In England it comes when you are almost men; I think I like that. It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl.

at length forgotten, the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the chest-of-drawers in Sebastian’s bedroom.

Did she see a sign in the red center of her cozy grate and hear it in the rattle of creeper on the window-pane, this whisper of doom?

one of those needlehooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake.

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.

“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.

Those were the kind of things he heard, mortal illness and debt, I thought.

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.

By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St. James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure...

untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on the cool edge of life;

All this I learned about Julia, bit by bit, as one does learn the former—as it seems at the time, the preparatory—life of a woman one loves, so that one thinks of oneself as having been part of it, directing it by devious ways, towards oneself.

There is proverbially a mystery among most men of new wealth, how they made their first ten thousand; it is the qualities they showed then, before they became bullies, when every man was someone to be placated, when only hope sustained them and they could count on nothing from the world but what could be charmed from it, that make them, if they survive their triumph, successful with women.

“What can the poor man have meant?” said Lady Marchmain.

Now and then one or other party would shout provocatively over the shoulder, but it is hard to come into serious conflict back to back, and the affair ended with their giving each other tall glasses of lager beer.

He had a kind of mad certainty about everything which made his decisions swift and easy.

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.

‘I caught him’ (the thief) ‘with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.’ ”

“You didn’t like her. I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated mummy.” “What do you mean by that, Cordelia?” “Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that.

But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening—of Browning’s renaissance. 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.

soared about me one gray morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl.

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.

When the water-holes were dry people sought to drink at the mirage.

I looked at my watch; it was four o’clock, but neither of us was ready to sleep, for in that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

“It’s just another jungle closing in.”

It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.

“Toast!” said my wife, as though this was something beyond the dreams of gluttony. “Do you hear that, Charles? Toast.”

And all night between dreaming and waking I thought of Julia; in my brief dreams she took a hundred fantastic and terrible and obscene forms, but in my waking thoughts she returned with her sad, starry head just as I had seen her at dinner.

she was no longer the alternate succubus and starry vision of the night before;