by
Henry James
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‘He does nothing. But he doesn’t like me.’
‘He’s very hard to please!’ cried Miss Stackpole. ‘Why don’t you leave him?’
‘I can’t change that way,’ Isabel said.
‘Why not, I should like to know? You won’t confess that you’ve made a mistake. You’re too proud.’
‘I don’t know whether I’m too proud. But I can’t publish my mistake. I don’t think that’s decent. I'd much rather die.’
“You won’t think so always,’ said Henrietta.
‘I don’t know what great unhappiness might bring me to; but it seems to me I shall always be ashamed. One must accept one’s deeds. I married him before all the world; I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do anything more deliberate. One can’t change that way,’ Isabel repeated.
nooo girl
Isabel took a drive alone that afternoon; she wished to be far away, under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage and tread upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter’s day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. There was no gentler nor less consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of worshippers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not have felt more intimately the sugges- tiveness of these objects nor have been more liable at such ~ moments to a spiritual visitation. [...]
wow
AS THE Countess Gemini was not acquainted with the
ancient monuments Isabel occasionally offered to introduce
her to these interesting relics and to give their afternoon drive
an antiquarian aim. The Countess, who profesed to think her
sister-in-law a prodigy of learning, never made an objection,
and gazed at masses of Roman brickwork as patiently as if
they had been mounds of modern drapery. [...]
omg stop
[...] ‘I’ve an ideal of what my wife should do and should not do. She should not travel across Europe alone, in defiance of my deepest desire, to sit at the bedside of other men. Your cousin’s nothing to you; he’s nothing to us. You smile most expressively when I talk about us, but I assure you that we, we, Mrs Osmond, is all I know. I take our marriage seriously; you appear to have found a way of not doing so. I’m not aware that we’re divorced or separated; for me we’re indissolubly united. You are nearer to me than any human creature, and I’m nearer to you. It may be a disagreeable proximity; it’s one, at any rate, of our own deliberate making. You don’t like to be reminded of that, I know; but I’m perfectly willing, because — because —’ And he paused a moment, looking as if he had something to say which would be very much to the point. ‘Because I think we should accept the consequences of our actions, and what I value most in life is the honour of a thing!’
ahh i hate him
[...] Deep in her soul — deeper than any appetite for renunciation — was the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come. And at moments there was something inspiring, almost enlivening, in the conviction. It was a proof of strength — it was a proof she should some day be happy again. It couldn’t be she was to live only to suffer; she was still young, after all, and a great many things might happen to her yet. To live only to suffer — only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged — it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn’t all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn’t it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer? It involved then perhaps an admission that one had a certain grossness; but Isabel recognised, as it passed before her eyes, the quick vague shadow of a long future. She should never escape; she should last to the end. Then the middle years wrapped her about again and the grey curtain of her indifference closed her in.
:(
At first, in rejoinder to what she had said, it seemed to her that he would break out into greater violence. But after an instant he was perfectly quiet; he wished to prove he was sane, that he had reasoned it all out. ‘I want to prevent that, and I think I may, if you’ll only for once listen to me. It’s too monstrous of you to think of sinking back into that misery, of going to open your mouth to that poisoned air. It’s you that are out of your mind. Trust me as if I had the care of you. Why shouldn’t we be happy — when it’s here before us, when it’s so easy? I’m yours for ever — for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. What have you to care about? You’ve no children; that perhaps would be an obstacle. As it is you’ve nothing to consider. You must save what you can of your life; you mustn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part. It would be an insult to you to assume that you care for the look of the thing, for what people will say, for the bottomless idiocy of the world. We’ve nothing to do with all that; we’re quite out of it; we look at things as they are. You took the great step in coming away; the next is nothing; it’s the natural one. I swear, as I stand here, that a woman deliberately made to suffer is justified in anything in life — in going down into the streets if that will help her! I know how you suffer, and that’s why I’m here. We can do absolutely as we please; to whom under the sun do we owe anything? What is it that holds us, what is it that has the smallest right to interfere in such a question as this? Such a question is between ourselves — and to say that is to settle it! Were we born to rot in our misery — were we born to be afraid? I never knew you afraid! If you’ll only trust me, how little you will be disappointed! The world’s all before us — and the world’s very big. I know something about that.’
[...] The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist’s prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to ‘grow’ with due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality. That element is but another name for the more or less close connexion of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some sincere experience. By which, at the same time, of course, one is far from contending that this enveloping air of the artist’s humanity — which gives the last touch to the worth of the work — is not a widely and wondrously varying element; being on one occasion a rich and magnificent medium and on another a comparatively poor and un- generous one. Here we get exactly the high price of the novel as a literary form — its power not only, while preserving that form with closeness, to range through ail the differences of the individual relation to its general subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on life, of disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions that are never the same from man to man (or, so far as that goes, from man to woman), but positively to appear more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould.
[...] There were also, of course, the honest folk, those who work, who ensure the effective production of wealth, also those who make sacrifices for their children—in a manner that is rather comic or, if you like, pathetic (but I was, above all, a comedian); those who have neither beauty in their youth, nor ambition later, nor riches ever; but who hold on wholeheartedly, and more sincerely than anyone, to the values of beauty, youth, wealth, ambition, and sex; those who, in some kind of way, make the sauce bind. Those people, I am afraid to say, could not constitute a subject. I did, however, include a few of them in my sketches to give diversity, and the reality effect; but I began all the same to get seriously tired. [...]
interesting
During the first phases of my rise to fortune and glory, I had occasionally tasted the joys of consumption, by which our epoch shows itself so superior to those that preceded it. You could quibble forever over whether men were more or less happy in past centuries. You could comment on the disappearance of religions, the difficulty of feeling love, discuss the disadvantages and advantages of both; you could mention the appearance of democracy, the loss of our sense of the sacred, the crumbling of social ties. I myself had done such things, in a lot of sketches, though in a humorous way. You could even question scientific and technological progress, and be under the impression, for example, that the improvement of medical techniques had been at the cost of increasing social control and an overall decrease in joie de vivre. But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the preeminence of the twentieth century was indisputable: nothing, in any other civilization, in any other epoch, could compare itself to the mobile perfection of a contemporary shopping center functioning at full tilt. I had thus consumed, with joy, shoes most notably; then, gradually, I had grown weary, and I had understood that my life, without this daily input of basic, renewable pleasures, was going to stop being simple.
That show also marked the beginning of my brief—but lucrative—movie career. I had inserted a short film into the performance; my initial project, entitled Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine!, already had that tone of light Islamophobic burlesque which was later going to contribute so much to my renown; but, on Isabelle’s advice, I had had the idea of introducing a touch of anti-Semitism, aimed at counterbalancing the rather anti-Arab nature of the show; it was a wise route to take. I therefore finally opted for a porn film, or rather a parody of a porn film—a genre that, it’s true, is easy to parody—entitled Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler). The actresses were authentic Arab immigrant girls, guaranteed to originate from the hardest Parisian suburbs—sluts but veiled, just the right type; we had filmed the outside shots at the Sea of Sand, in Ermenonville. It was comical—a rather elevated form of comedy, that’s true. People had laughed; or at least most people. In an interview with Jamel Debbouze, he described me as a “super-cool dude”; you couldn’t have asked for more. In fact, Jamel had told me just before the program: “I can’t wind you up, dude. We’ve got the same audience.” The TV presenter Marc Fogiel, who had organized the meeting, quickly realized our complicity, and began to shit his pants; I have to admit that for a long time I had been wanting to eviscerate that little prick. But I contained myself: I was very good—super-cool, in fact.
oh my god