Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu by Lawrence Durrell Page A
Authors: Lawrence Durrell
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well as the most moving adjective in all literature. Despite several dawns Zarian has not yet agreed with his friend upon this subject.
The Count is a philosopher—“a philosopher,” he will tell you deprecatingly in his faultless English or lapidary French, “a philosopher who only sits and listens.” He speaks always with the most casual frankness about his own life and interests, his rather fine dark eyes fixed calmly upon his audience. He is filled with what Zarian (who is a born hero-worshipper and who finds a philosopher under every stone) calls “a speculative calm.” It is rather the calm of one in whom the romantic is dead; and in whom the harder cutting-edge of experience has reached the inner man. Despite the sweetness and repose he is a prey to metaphysical incertitudes such as the artist only encounters; this you may guess from the fine sets of much-thumbed European philosophers which line his bedroom. “Philosophy,” he said once, “is a doubt which lives in one like hookworm, causing pallor and lack of appetite. Suddenly one day you awake and realize with complete certainty that ninety-five per cent of the activities of the human race—to which you supposed you belonged—have no relevance whatsoever for you. What is to become of you?”
On another occasion he said:
I am popularly supposed to have retired here because of the death of my wife. It is convenient but not true. Two years before she died I woke up one morning, dressed very swiftly, and stood at the window of my room looking down on the harbor. I was visited by an extraordinary idea. I have had, I thought to myself, all the women I could want, and all the amusement I can possibly bear. Something has changed. I could not analyze the change—was it in me, or in the disposition of the world around me? It was a kind of detachment—an idea not born within the conceptual apparatus but lodged in the nervous system itself. I had become different as a person. Anyone else would have gone away and written a book about it; but I did not want to bring this personal discovery within the range of the conceptual apparatus, and thereby spoil it by consciousness. I retired, it is true, but you will see from my life as it lies around me, that what I am after is not the interpretation of the Principle of x, as I call it; but I wish to interpret the ordinary world of prescribed loyalties and little acts like shooting or lying or sleeping through the Principle. It is the oblique method of dealing with the platonic fire, after all, that betrays experience. Therefore if you come to me, like Zarian, and ask me why I am not writing down thesediscoveries, I can only reply that that is not what I mean by philosophy. I am enduring, and that is enough.
It is for these remarkable flights that Zarian admires him so; and not the less for his gravity and the charm of his address. “If only he would write a book,” says Zarian, the thirsty literary man, “it would be a work of genius.” Then he adds rather more slowly: “and if he can live without the thought of suicide.…”
But the Count has, by an imaginative detour, avoided the impasse in which people too heavily endowed with sensibility or the need for expressing it, find themselves. The old house with its Venetian family portraits and tarnished silver radiates an absolute calm. Greek terra cottas lie piled in dusty cupboards—broken jars and oil-dips, all relics of the plough from this fertile valley.
We dine late by candlelight; light almost as yellow as the moon outside the great windows of the dining-room; portraits of Venetian ancestors stare pallidly at us from the walls in their moldering frames. The floors are full of dry-rot.
After the dinner the Count takes up a branch of candles and leads the way to the wine-covered terrace by the white southern wall on which the dapple of leaves silhouetted by moonlight stand out unmoving. Here we sit and talk away the greater part of the night. In the
The Count is a philosopher—“a philosopher,” he will tell you deprecatingly in his faultless English or lapidary French, “a philosopher who only sits and listens.” He speaks always with the most casual frankness about his own life and interests, his rather fine dark eyes fixed calmly upon his audience. He is filled with what Zarian (who is a born hero-worshipper and who finds a philosopher under every stone) calls “a speculative calm.” It is rather the calm of one in whom the romantic is dead; and in whom the harder cutting-edge of experience has reached the inner man. Despite the sweetness and repose he is a prey to metaphysical incertitudes such as the artist only encounters; this you may guess from the fine sets of much-thumbed European philosophers which line his bedroom. “Philosophy,” he said once, “is a doubt which lives in one like hookworm, causing pallor and lack of appetite. Suddenly one day you awake and realize with complete certainty that ninety-five per cent of the activities of the human race—to which you supposed you belonged—have no relevance whatsoever for you. What is to become of you?”
On another occasion he said:
I am popularly supposed to have retired here because of the death of my wife. It is convenient but not true. Two years before she died I woke up one morning, dressed very swiftly, and stood at the window of my room looking down on the harbor. I was visited by an extraordinary idea. I have had, I thought to myself, all the women I could want, and all the amusement I can possibly bear. Something has changed. I could not analyze the change—was it in me, or in the disposition of the world around me? It was a kind of detachment—an idea not born within the conceptual apparatus but lodged in the nervous system itself. I had become different as a person. Anyone else would have gone away and written a book about it; but I did not want to bring this personal discovery within the range of the conceptual apparatus, and thereby spoil it by consciousness. I retired, it is true, but you will see from my life as it lies around me, that what I am after is not the interpretation of the Principle of x, as I call it; but I wish to interpret the ordinary world of prescribed loyalties and little acts like shooting or lying or sleeping through the Principle. It is the oblique method of dealing with the platonic fire, after all, that betrays experience. Therefore if you come to me, like Zarian, and ask me why I am not writing down thesediscoveries, I can only reply that that is not what I mean by philosophy. I am enduring, and that is enough.
It is for these remarkable flights that Zarian admires him so; and not the less for his gravity and the charm of his address. “If only he would write a book,” says Zarian, the thirsty literary man, “it would be a work of genius.” Then he adds rather more slowly: “and if he can live without the thought of suicide.…”
But the Count has, by an imaginative detour, avoided the impasse in which people too heavily endowed with sensibility or the need for expressing it, find themselves. The old house with its Venetian family portraits and tarnished silver radiates an absolute calm. Greek terra cottas lie piled in dusty cupboards—broken jars and oil-dips, all relics of the plough from this fertile valley.
We dine late by candlelight; light almost as yellow as the moon outside the great windows of the dining-room; portraits of Venetian ancestors stare pallidly at us from the walls in their moldering frames. The floors are full of dry-rot.
After the dinner the Count takes up a branch of candles and leads the way to the wine-covered terrace by the white southern wall on which the dapple of leaves silhouetted by moonlight stand out unmoving. Here we sit and talk away the greater part of the night. In the
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