The Book And The Brotherhood - Closing

'Gull darling, look at the time, it's our wedding day! Here's to us -- and to snail!'

'To us -- and snails, God bless them!'

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 554

'Yes. We felt we hadn't looked after them properly, either of them -- but that's superstition. Guilt is one way of attaching a meaning to a death. We want to find a meaning, it lessens the pain.'

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 520

'Absolutely,' said Duncan. 'He was terribly intense and solemn at Oxford. He and Levquist got on famously, Levquist had no sense of humor either. I think he got completely soaked in Greek mythology and never recovered. He lived all the time inside some Greek myth and saw himself as a hero.'

'Perhaps the Greeks had no sense of humor.'

'Precious little. Aristophanes isn;t really funny, there's nothing in Greek literature which is funny in the way Shakespeare is. Somehow the light that shone on them was too clear and their sense of destiny was too strong.'

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 517

The power which I derive from my Christ is debased by its passage through me. It reaches me as love, it leaves me as magic. That is why I make serious mistakes. In fact, in spite of his self-laceration, a ritual in which he indulged at intervals, the priest felt, in a yet deeper deep self, a sense of security and peace. Behind doubt there was truth, and behind the doubt that doubted that truth there was truth ... He was a sinner, but he knew that his Redeemer lived.

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 488

He sang both high and low. He promised strength through repentance, and joy through renewal of life. He exhorted her to remake herself into an instrument fir for the service of others. He used the oldest argument in the book (sometimes called the Ontological Proof) which, in Father McAlister's version, said that if with a pure passion you love God, then God exists, because He has to. After all, what your best self, your most truthful soul desires must be real, and not to worry too much about what it's called.

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 437

Duncan was well aware that Crimond had in him some sort of steely element, some pure mad self-indifferent recklessness, which Duncan, however strong his emotions, however fierce his hatred, simply lacked. Whatever the game was, Crimond was likely to win it; and Duncan even found himself relying, contemptibly, for the outcome, upon Crimond's rationality, or upon some hypothetical sense of decency which would preclude too brutal a treatment of the hated husband.

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 421

'There comes a time when a man has to be alone, really alone.'

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 296

'You've always been too frightened of talking nonsense, that's why you could never really do philosophy. I am not a utopian, I don't imagine that the state will wither away or the division of labour will cease or alienation will disappear. Nor do I think that we shall have full employment or a classless society or a world without hunger in any future that we can conceive of now. It's the wasteland next. Of course I think this society, our so-called free society, is rotten to the core - it's oppressive and corrupt and unjust, it's materialistic and ruthless and immoral, and soft, rotted with pornography and kitsch. You think this too. But you imagine that in some way all nice things will be preserved and all the nasty things will become less nasty. It can't be like that, we have to go through the fire, in an oppressive society only violence is honest. Men are half alive now, in the future they'll be puppets. Even if we don't blow ourselves up the future wil be, by your nice standards, terrible. There will be a crisis of authority, of sovereignty, technology will rule because it will have to rule. History has passed you by, everything happens fast now, we have to run to stay in the same place, let alone get a step ahead to see where we are. We've got to rethink everything --'

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 294

'Perhaps you don't mind the idea of a world without books?'

'It's inevitable, so it must be understood, it must be embraced, even loved.'

'So after all you turn out to be a historical materialist! What about your book?'

'It will perish with the rest. Plato, Shakespeare, Hegel, they'll all burn, and I shall burn too. But before that my book will have had a certain influence, that's its point, that's what I've been striving for all these years, that little bit of influence. That's what's worth doing, and it's the only thing that's worth doing now, to look at the future and make some sense of it and touch it. Look, Gerard, I don't think I'm God, I don't think I'm Hegel, I don't even think I'm Feuerbach -'"

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 167

She was finding herself, now that she was with Crimond, simply more and more in love. She was living upon love. When she was alone, she would for long times shudder and tremble with it. She had never experienced presence so vividly before, the total connection with another being, the interpenetration of bodies and souls, the intuitive absolute of mutual self-giving, the love of two gods. The obliteration of self, the dazzling blindness of the love-act which was both part and all of their lives, constitued a mystery or ritual with which she lived in a continuous present of anticipation and rememberance.

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 135

'The rainy Pleiads wester, Orion plunges prone, the stroke of midnight ceases, and I lie down alone. The rainy Pleiads of midnight ceases, and I lie down alone. The rainy Pleiads wester, and seek beyond the sea, the head that I shall dream of, and 'twill not dream of me.' This poem of A. E. Housman, a rendering of some Greek thing, was often, during these days, repeated to himself by Gulliver Ashe as a kind of liturgy, not exactly a prayer.

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 132

Jenkin disliked muddles, cupidity, lying, exercises of power, the masses of ordinary sinning, because they involved states of mind which he found uncomfortable, such as envy, resentment, remorse or hate. 'He's so healthy,' someone had said of Jenkin half scornfully, and Jenkin would have understood the element of criticism involved.

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg.61

How frail these gentle creatures are who design to share our lives, how dependent on us, how vulnerable to our ignorance, our neglect, our mistakes, and to the wordless mystery of their own mortal being.

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 23

Gerard got up and went to the shelves, knowing where to look, and as he touched the books he felt some fierce and agonising sense of the past. It's gone, he thought, the past, it is irrevocable and beyond mending and far away, and yet it is here, blowing at one like a wind, I can feel it, I can smell it, and it's so sad, so purely sad. Through the window open on the park came the distant sound of music, which he had not been aware of since he entered the room, and the wet dark odour of the meadows and the river.

The Book And The Brotherhood - Opening

PART ONE

Midsummer

'David Crimond is here in a kilt!'

'Good God, is Crimond here? Where is he?'

'Over in that tent or marquee or whatever you call it. He's with Lily Boyne.'

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permission from Faber & Faber Ltd and Random House Inc.

to quote on page 127 lines by W. H. Auden

from 'Out onthe lawn I lie in bed ...',

in The English Auden: Peoms, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-39.

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The Sea, The Sea - Closing

My God, that bloody casket has fallen on the floor! Some people were hammering in the next flat and it fell off its bracket. The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 500

The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed. Perhaps this is the final forgiveness that James spoke of.

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 350

'A rather unattractive sort of courage,' I said.
'There was a rather unattractive sort of war on,' said James.

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 325

My act, my will would create a new family.

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 291

I know what sort of person you are, I've read about you, you're a rotten man, a shit, a destroyer, you're filth.