You lie awake at night, tossing to and fro and brooding on it (and other wretchedness).
I did not care. I just sat on, saying, If this train were never to move again, I should not greatly mind.
On the other hand, I said, these are the horrors of home life, the dusting, sweeping, airing, scrubbing, waxing, waning, washing, mangling, drying, mowing, clipping, raking, rolling, scuffling, shoveling, grinding, tearing, pounding, banging and slamming. And the brats, the happy hearty little howling neighbour’s brats. Of all this and much more the weekend, the Saturday intermission and then the day of rest, have given you some idea. But what must it be like on a working day? A Wednesday? A Friday! And I fell to thinking of my silent, back-street, basement office, with its obliterated plate, rest couch and velvet hangings, and what it means to be buried there alive, if only from ten to five, with convenient to the one hand a bottle of light pale ale and to the other a long ice-cold fillet of hake. Nothing, I said, not even fully certified death, can ever take the place of that. It was then I noticed we were at a standstill.
Sit at home on the remnants of my bottom counting the hours – till the next meal. The very thought puts life in me!
Just cling to me and all will be well.
Do not imagine, because I am silent, that I am not present, and alive, to all that is going on.
That will do, just prop me up against the wall like a roll of tarpaulin and that will be all for the moment.
I stumble in a daze as you might say, oblivious to my coreligionists.
Don’t mind me. Don’t take any notice of me. I do not exist. The fact is well known.
Suppose I do get up? Will I ever get down?
Let us wait for a minute and this vile dust fall back upon viler worms.
It is suicide to be abroad. But what is it to be at home? A lingering dissolution.
Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher’s regular. What normal woman wants affection?
Oh I am just a hysterical old hag I know, destroyed with sorrow and pining and gentility and church-going and fat and rheumatism and childlessness.
Oh let me just flop down flat on the road like a big flat jelly out of a bowl and never move again! A great big slop thick with grit and dust and flies, they would have to scoop me up with a shovel.
Why do you not climb up on the crest of your manure and let yourself be carried along?
Poor woman. All alone in that ruinous old house.
The loneliness of this country and the impermanence of the people who huddle on a land that belongs only to itself.
You will notice that participants in disasters typically locate the “beginning” of a disaster at a point suggesting their own control over events. A plane crash retold will not begin with the pressure system over the Central Pacific that caused the instability over the Gulf that caused the wind shear at DFW but at some manageable human intersect, with for example the “funny feeling” ignored at breakfast. An account of a 6.8 earthquake will not begin with the overlap of the tectonic plates but more comfortably, at the place in London where we ordered the Spode that shattered the morning the tectonic plates shifted.
Had we just gone with the funny feeling. Had we just never ordered the Spode.
We all prefer the magical explanation.
He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.
The story of my life does not exist. Does not exist. There’s never been any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.
‘How,’ Jones asked Martin, ‘are things with your father?’
Martin shrugged and told him.
Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the masthead ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer ‘Yes’; if we are truthful we say ‘No’; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us—a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil—but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen, on a line in a gale of wind.
Sometimes I think everything I’ve done those years, everything around me in fact, I don’t know if you feel this way but everything is vaguely—what—fictitious.
She thinks she longs for rest, a carefree afternoon to decide suddenly to go to the pictures, or just to sit with the birdcages and listen to the children play in snow.
This notion of rest, it’s attractive to her, but I don’t think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn’t like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down. No fields of cowslips will rush into that opening, nor morning free of flies and heat when the sky is shy. No. Not at all. They fill their minds with soap and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage. Molten. Thick and slow-moving. Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury. Or else, into a beat of time, and sideways under their breasts, slips a sorrow they don’t know where from.
Things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can sweep up in half an hour.
She looked at me and walked out of the room. I heard the shower running across the hall and I realized I’d done it all wrong. I should have brought up the subject standing in the doorway while she was watching TV. Then I could have been the one who walks out of the room.
It’s the special skill of the adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent.
He went out to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back. This is a thing you used to hear about disappearing men. It’s the final family mystery. All the mysteries of the family reach their culmination in the final passion of abandonment.
I found the more she talked the more she owed me. But I didn’t say a word.
