(It's better to create than destroy what's unnecessary)

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Wolf Hall - pg. 94

You can't know Albino, he says, unless you can go back before Albino was thought of. You must go back before Caesar's legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay on the ground where one day London would be built. You must go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers; beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual. These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember, do believe them.

Wolf Hall - pg. 91

These are good days for him: every day a fight he can win. 'Still serving your Hebrew God, I see,' remarks Sir Thomas More. 'I mean, your idol Usury.' But when More, a scholar revered through Europe, wakes up in Chelsea to the prospect of morning prayers in Latin, he wakes up to a creator who speaks the swift patois of the markets; when More is settling in for a session of self-scourging, he and Rafe are sprinting to Lombard Street to get the day's exchange rates. Not that he sprints, quite; an old injury drags sometimes, and when he's tired a foot turns inward, as if he's walking back towards himself. People suggest it is the legacy of a sumer with Cesare Borgia. He likes the stories they tell about him. But where's Cesare now? He's dead.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Wolf Hall - pg. 71

He Thomas, also Tomos, Tommaso and Thomaes Cromwell, withdraws his past selves into his present body and edges back to where he was before. His single shadow slides against the wall, a visitor not sure of his welcome. Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you. You shy, you duck, you run; or else the past takes your fist and actuates it, without the intervention of will. Suppose you have a knife in your fist? That's how murder happens.

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