ONE
I WAS BORN IN THE MANSION OF THE VIRGIN in the year that preceded the declaration of the war that ended war. I write this in the year that ends the war that succeeded that war. I speak, therefore, as a person of whose life a third has been spent with violent death about it. This book has as its ulterior objective the effort to console myself and those I love—I mean you—for the insolubility of a problem about which Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in the following terms: “As to other great questions, the question, what becomes of man after death, we do not see that a highly educated European, left to his unassisted reason, is more likely to be right than a Blackfoot Indian.”
* * * *
There is a story to tell, a story that has no place in history and no real claim upon the attention of the Fates. I have a story to relate which proves that Love, with no blood on its knife, does not sleep easily, if it sleeps at all, until every one of its devotees lies dead. The great destroyer. In every bed. In every single bed. In every double bed. No, it is nothing new. It has a more formidable virtue than novelty. It is inevitable. Its virtue is that of the divine volitional victimisation. I warn you that as you lie in your bed and feel the determination of your lover slipping its blade between your ribs, this is the real consummation. “Kill me, kill me,” you murmur. But it always surprises you when you die.
* * * *
Rising one morning, I perceived that everything had changed. I cannot speak clearly enough; the change in the nature and the face of things, when, that morning, I looked out of my sleep at them, eluded me then, and still just as narrowly eludes me. It comes down, at last, to this: I was afraid.
What does one fear when one awakes in the mornings? Is it the day, with its major temptations and minor renunciations, its afternoon misdemeanours, the sins that come up sighing out of the twilight, the suicide that smiles down at one from the midday sun, the death of a favourite dog at a quarter-past three, the resolution that will get itself born at an unpropitious conjunction of monsters, stars and houses? Or is it the quite conscious foreknowledge that, everyday, like stripping the calendar, we must cumulatively die?
They can so mercilessly and so incontestably out-manoeuvre one, the hours that weigh tons— daily, nightly, devastate the capitals of our faculties.
What war is it we cannot win? Is it the war that we won when we were born; the always precarious victory in between two annihilations; the defeat that, in the end, consoles us with wreaths of suitable flowers.
* * * *
I say that I awoke and perceived a change. Existence, removing the mask of the common-place from her face, looked in at the window and smiled. I heard the paradoxes at the heart of things hushing themselves out of hysteria into sleep. I went to the window and looked out. I saw Wilhelmina Stitch being torn into pieces by archangels.
* * * *
Hitherto, Augustine, I have believed in the virtues of love. Over all of the world I sensed its supremely proper benevolence, placing the candles of its illumination in all those rooms and at all those removes where, but for its presence, nothing but the shadows of appearances and disappearances would have depredated upon each other in irreligious irresponsibility.
Hitherto, I say, I have believed in love. I perceived that in the mechanics of the cosmological engines the function of impulse was provided by this love. From the internecine copulation of beasts to the image that reflects itself on the contemplative lake inside the skull of the visionary. This love, happening, as I saw it, between all kinds of things in all kinds of conditions, so that objects in one category could never consider themselves safe from the advance of objects in higher or lower categories—this variegated love validated everything. It moved the sun, the moon, and the other stars. And
I WAS BORN IN THE MANSION OF THE VIRGIN in the year that preceded the declaration of the war that ended war. I write this in the year that ends the war that succeeded that war. I speak, therefore, as a person of whose life a third has been spent with violent death about it. This book has as its ulterior objective the effort to console myself and those I love—I mean you—for the insolubility of a problem about which Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in the following terms: “As to other great questions, the question, what becomes of man after death, we do not see that a highly educated European, left to his unassisted reason, is more likely to be right than a Blackfoot Indian.”
* * * *
There is a story to tell, a story that has no place in history and no real claim upon the attention of the Fates. I have a story to relate which proves that Love, with no blood on its knife, does not sleep easily, if it sleeps at all, until every one of its devotees lies dead. The great destroyer. In every bed. In every single bed. In every double bed. No, it is nothing new. It has a more formidable virtue than novelty. It is inevitable. Its virtue is that of the divine volitional victimisation. I warn you that as you lie in your bed and feel the determination of your lover slipping its blade between your ribs, this is the real consummation. “Kill me, kill me,” you murmur. But it always surprises you when you die.
* * * *
Rising one morning, I perceived that everything had changed. I cannot speak clearly enough; the change in the nature and the face of things, when, that morning, I looked out of my sleep at them, eluded me then, and still just as narrowly eludes me. It comes down, at last, to this: I was afraid.
What does one fear when one awakes in the mornings? Is it the day, with its major temptations and minor renunciations, its afternoon misdemeanours, the sins that come up sighing out of the twilight, the suicide that smiles down at one from the midday sun, the death of a favourite dog at a quarter-past three, the resolution that will get itself born at an unpropitious conjunction of monsters, stars and houses? Or is it the quite conscious foreknowledge that, everyday, like stripping the calendar, we must cumulatively die?
They can so mercilessly and so incontestably out-manoeuvre one, the hours that weigh tons— daily, nightly, devastate the capitals of our faculties.
What war is it we cannot win? Is it the war that we won when we were born; the always precarious victory in between two annihilations; the defeat that, in the end, consoles us with wreaths of suitable flowers.
* * * *
I say that I awoke and perceived a change. Existence, removing the mask of the common-place from her face, looked in at the window and smiled. I heard the paradoxes at the heart of things hushing themselves out of hysteria into sleep. I went to the window and looked out. I saw Wilhelmina Stitch being torn into pieces by archangels.
* * * *
Hitherto, Augustine, I have believed in the virtues of love. Over all of the world I sensed its supremely proper benevolence, placing the candles of its illumination in all those rooms and at all those removes where, but for its presence, nothing but the shadows of appearances and disappearances would have depredated upon each other in irreligious irresponsibility.
Hitherto, I say, I have believed in love. I perceived that in the mechanics of the cosmological engines the function of impulse was provided by this love. From the internecine copulation of beasts to the image that reflects itself on the contemplative lake inside the skull of the visionary. This love, happening, as I saw it, between all kinds of things in all kinds of conditions, so that objects in one category could never consider themselves safe from the advance of objects in higher or lower categories—this variegated love validated everything. It moved the sun, the moon, and the other stars. And
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