View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
“Yes. And, like the earth, old and dirty. I got it back in a box of ‘effects,’ as they call it, when I was in England in’45. They’d been stored in Lincolnshire, in a barn near Branston where we spent the nights before the battle.” He said, “Getting the box, opening it, I myself as next of kin receiving the pitiful leavings of the deceased. Living the experience that my mother would have otherwise endured. This coat was the first thing, folded on top: like a body. A book, a few letters, socks, handkerchiefs, my good watch, a shaving kit—irrelevant overnight stuff. Through an oversight, I was alive to take charge of these relics, only lacking the letter from the colonel commending my valour. The colonel, who in fact had died alongside me in the action. Things, Helen, the sad silly evidence of things.” He said, “We’re told that possessions are ephemeral, yet my God how they outlast us—the clock on the bedside table, the cough drops, the diary with appointments for that very day.” And the meaning ebbing out of them, visibly.
There was, for instance, the compulsion to return to the calamity of Liu’s child—to deplore it yet again, or replay it with a happy ending. Getting away with something—the narrow squeak—is, he had always realised, a strong theme of life and art: powerful because it creates suspense. One never quite loses hope that Hamlet will discard the poisoned foil, that Juliet will awake in time, Cavaradossi rise up living, and the royal family escape from Varennes. The world loves long odds—Marathon, Lepanto, the Armada; Dunkirk. As to that, he thought, I’ve had my share of rescues, first by Crindle at Florence, then from Leith in the desert. And done little enough with the reprieve. Good fortune is a prodigy whose occasion one must rise to. Unpractised in such notions, I could not rescue Liu’s child, or save myself.
What she had read had evidently made her impatient of the prime discrepancy between man as he might be, and as he was. She would impose her crude belief that there could be heroism, excellence on herself and others, until they, or she, gave in. Exceptions could arise, rare and implausible, to suggest she might be right. To those exceptions she would give her whole devotion. It was apparently for them she was reserving her humility.
When Sefton Thrale said the word "global" you felt the earth to be round as a smooth ball, or white and bland as an egg. And had to remind yourself of the healthy and dreadful shafts and outcroppings of this world. You had to think of the Alps, or the ocean, or a live volcano to set your mind at rest.
lol
He used outworn idiom: "Lombard Street to a china orange," "All round China to get to Charing Cross"; "The Old Lady"even"of Threadneedle Street": phrases outdated before his time, which he cultivated and kept going if not alive. Still spoke of Turkey as "the sick man of Europe," though the entire Continent was a casualty ward long since. His sympathies were with the manageable distances of the past rather than the extravagant reach of the future. The future had been something to talk about, one foot safely on the fender.
It was easy for youth to scent this out and condemn. Less easy to feel for what was human in it, let alone pitiful.
god
The girls heard it said that Dora was raising them. Yet it was more like sinking, and always trying to rise. In these children a vein of instinct sanity opened and flowed: a warning that every lie must be redeemed in the end. An aversion to emotion was engendered, and the belief which in Caro was to last her lifetime that those who do not see themselves as victims accept the greater stress.
It was now that Ted Tice's life began to alter aspect and direction. He was used to thinking of his life--I have done this, how could I have done that--like everybody. Barely twenty, he would have imagined he had overcome a fair amount. There was Father, loudly angered; Mother, all untidy woe. Then there was his aptitude: a teacher coming round after school, "The boy has unusual aptitude." The boy, out of all the others. His name had been printed on a list, and the award covered everything, even the books except, that is, for a coat; and the university was near the North Sea.
Due to the unearthly flatness where a city had been famously incinerated, the events he already called his life were growing inconsiderable before he had practised making them important. This derived from a sense not of proportion but of profound chaos, a welter in which his own lucky little order appeared miraculous but inconsequential; and from a revelation, nearly religious, that the colossal scale of evil could only be matched or countered by some solitary flicker of intense and private humanity.
neil
As Ted Tice saw, it was not a matter of conquering her objections. She herself required a kind of conquering. And he had begun with devotion. Her demands would before long be tested by experience, as principle is tested by adversity, and it might be that she would temporize; but for the present imagined herself transcendant over what she had not encountered.
She wished to rise to some solitary height. From ignorance she had an unobstructed view of knowledge--which she saw, on its elevation, stately, pale, pure as the Acropolis. It could not be said that hers was a harmless vanity: like any human wish for distinction, it could easily be denounced or mocked; and, in its present elemental form, was clearly short on pity. Yet, as pretensions go, it was by no means the worst.
Ted Tice already understood his attachment to Caro as intensification of his strongest qualities, if not of his strengths: not a youthful adventure, fresh and tentative, but a gauge of all effort, joy, and suffering known or imagined. The possibility that he might never, in a lifetime, arouse her love in return was a discovery touching all existence. In his desire and his foreboding, he was like a man awake who watches a woman sleeping.
"I've thought that too. I've thought there may be more collisions of the kind in life than in books. Maybe the element of coincidence is played down in literature because it seems like cheating or can't be made believable. Whereas life itself doesn't have to be fair, or convincing."
"I don't tell her a thing of that sort. It seems to recoil." Caroline Bell having discovered in childhood that achievements can be transformed to hostile weapons. ("Everything falls in your lap, why should you care about a life like mine?") A childish struggle between the wish to show, or tell, and the need to hoard silent strength had long since been resolved. She said, "I'm not sure I can explain that."