Michael’s Reviews > Pied Piper of Lovers > Status Update

‘“Don’t confuse it with wanting to become an artist or get any clap-trap into your head about Higher Things. You’re the kind of person that would be quite happy as a cabinet-maker or an iron-founder. You simply want your own little job to do. You don’t want to contribute to the output of an organization where no single production will be your own.”’

‘“My dear Walsh,” and his dogmatic emphasis was somehow comforting, “My good as, I know exactly what it is. Everyone goes through it, only the majority let themselves be flung by the pants into the garbage-head of breadwinning before they’ve made up their own mind about anything. It’s not a question of being a slacker. What you want to do, to put it simply, is to make. Sounds pompous, but it’s true. […]

‘It was painful to remember the old laughing Brenda, who had shared his interests and allowed him to centre his whole experience and knowledge in his intimacy with her, and in her whole-hearted zeal for his enthusiasms; painful to see her become haggard and perplexed in a service that degraded her mind and senses, and left her nothing but a premature old age in a land of decay and emptiness.’

‘The only thing common to all forms of the disease is the one fixed conviction that authority is actually stupid. Beyond this point to the various movements in the interests of those who begot them were vague and diffused.’

‘In some people, intelligence signifies a tepid taste in Rupert Brooke, longer hair at the back, and a craving for the green shirt banned by authority; in others (the classical scholars) it is generally manifested in the throwing down of the altars of God and the erection of altars (in private) to Apollo, Aphrodite, or another, in a morbid reluctance to attend chapel.’

‘since its own peering, inquisitive, spectacled mind is for ever forced to prime among mysteries, seeking it knows not what, finding omega handful of nothin', and being for ever constrained to remember the awful undiscovered space beyond it.’

‘Is it possible to refrain from coercing a child? Then why not mass-coercion? Why not a type? In an irrational world, dependent mostly on standards which do not exist, it seems logical that we spend our lives upholding, justifying them: humanity must have something to do: must prime itself with the wine of these happy illusions as a condemned man about to mount the scaffold, […]

Brenda, Walsh's aunt, treats the matter of beating servants as a duty. Whereas Clifton, Walsh's father, felt enormous guilt at his beating Walsh. In the previous chapter, Brenda even seems to sympathise with his guilt-feeling.

There is also the juxtaposition of the death of those insects and Walsh's own mortality.

Later Walsh is invited to see Mr. Sowerby’s collection of butterflies, of which he does not appear proud. The scene comes after a brief discussion of England, and some reminiscence in Walsh. The butterflies are dead, pinned. After all those twenty years, the butterflies had been pinned one by one until this collection is formed, as if Walsh's own freedom might have come to nothing if he kept looking for butterflies.