The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch Page B

seemed inconceivable that Harriet should not have read the truth off his blazing face, off his trembling hands. The day after the British Museum pub, he and Emily were in bed together. It was ecstatic, sudden, total. As total as Harriet’s trust, its cataclysmic necessary counterpart. Sin was an awful private happiness blotting out all else; only it was not sin, it was glory, it was his good, his very own, manifested at last. This was the dark cupboard all right, only it was not dark, it was blazing with light and as large as the universe. Everything he had done before seemed feeble, shadowy and insincere. A combination of pure free creation and pure causality now felicitously ruled his life. The dark forces had never "been stronger or more clearly seen, but he was not their puppet. They rose into the bright air like a fountain and carried him skyward with them. He had never fretted after, never even dreamt of, a woman who could so complement his own strangeness. This was not just intense sexual bliss, it was absolute metaphysical justification. The world in its detail was revealed at last to an indubitable insight. His whole being was engaged, he was identified with his real self, he fully inhabited his own nature for the first time in his life.
    Though she had had, in a casual and unimpressed way, a good deal of varied sexual experience, Emily McHugh had never really been in love before. She had been true to her deep thing, she informed Blaise. She had remained free, she had known how to wait, she had made no compromises with society, she had not given up hope and accepted a second best! Blaise hung his head. It had indeed been a failure of faith and courage, not to wander on through the forest, not to search faithfully for his true mate, not to believe and endure. He did not ever exactly curse his marriage or curse Harriet, buj he saw it all as a pitiful and unworthy mistake. He wished with the most biting remorse that it could all be undone and made never to have been, and in this rather abstract sense he sometimes wished that Harriet could die or be somehow just spirited away for ever. In fact, when he was with Emily, Harriet seemed like a dream and tended to slip out of his consciousness altogether. As for Emily’s reproaches, he wore them like rubies. What they were even pleased to call their vices penetrated the texture of their whole life down to the minutest details of repartee and verbal wit.
    Of course Emily was not really an intellectual, but she had the style of one, she was literate and sharp and witty. Illegitimate, poor, fatherless, she had struggled into her education against great odds. How brave she is, he often thought, she does not even know how brave she is. What will and courage had carried such a girl to the length of even hearing of Merleau-Ponty! She did not however ‘live herself’ as a thinker. She had an integrated animal quality which was unlike, but complementary to, her partner’s psychological texture. She was not unconscious of her being, but wore it without the quick anxieties and awareness which formed part of Blaise’s pleasure. She found nothing odd or ridiculous in rituals which she had never except mentally performed before; and it was this deep calm priestess-like confidence which led her lover on into the land which crystallized gorgeously about them like a solidifying dream, the thunderclap blending of the fantastic and the real. The ritual aspect of their relationship proceeded with intuitive spontaneous ease and occupied them quite a lot at the start. There were objects the sight of which, or even the thought of which, could give Blaise an erection. But as they soon even more rapturously discovered, it did not really matter much what they ‘did’. All this, everything, like the earth upon the last trump, was caught up and included in the miraculous quality of their spiritual-physical grasp of each other. The particular thrilling violences resided more purely in looks and in