"A Red Red Rose" -- Robert Burns 1793

O my luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June;
O my luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune:

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry --

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun --
I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run!

And fare thee weel, my only luve,
And fare thee weel, a while --
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile!

"Ae Fond Kiss" - Robert Burns 1787

"But to see her, was to love her --
Love but her, and love for ever!"

The Power and the Glory (not completed yet)

A novel by Graham Greene

“If she’s dying,” Mr Tench said, “there’s no point in a doctor seeing her.”
But the stranger had got up: unwillingly he had been summoned to an occasion he couldn’t pass by. He said sadly: “It always seems to happen. Like this.”
“You’ll have a job not to miss the boat.”
“I shall miss it,” he said. “I am meant to miss it” (22).
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The passage continues with both Mr Tench and the stranger’s admission that “she will be no more dying than I am,” as if to indicate the futility of the noble act. However, when Mr Tench replies, “You can do no good,” the stranger (the priest) challenges his remark. The passage is drenched in a sort of melancholy and acceptance allotted to this purpose, yet it cannot be more stressed that the stranger is aware of a strong sense of purpose.

“He had the kind of dwarfed dignity Mr Tench was accustomed to – the dignity of people afraid of a little pain and yet sitting down with some firmness in his chair” (23).
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The lieutenant sat down upon his bed and began to take off his boots. It was the hour of prayer. Black beetles exploded against the walls like crackers. More than a dozen crawled over the tiles with injured wings. It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy – a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.
He lay down his shirt and breeches on the bed and blew out the candles. Heat stood in the room like an enemy. But he believed against the evidence of his senses in the cold empty ether spaces. A radio was playing somewhere: music from Mexico City, or perhaps even from London or New York, filtered into this obscure neglected state. It seemed to him like a weakness: this was his own land, and he would have walled it in with steel if he could, until he had eradicated from it everything which reminded him of how it had once appeared to a miserable child. He wanted to destroy everything: to be alone without any memories at all. Life began five years ago.
The lieutenant lay on his back with his eyes open while the beetles detonated on the ceiling. He remembered the priest the Red Shirts had shot against the wall of the cemetery up the hill, another little fat man with popping eyes. He was a monsignor, and he thought that would protect him: he had a sort of contempt for the lower clergy, and right up to the last he was explaining his rank. Only at the very end had he remembered his prayers. He knelt down and they had given him time for a short act of contrition. The lieutenant had watched: he wasn’t directly concerned. Altogether they had shot about five priests – two or three had escaped, the bishop was safely in Mexico City, and one man had conformed to the Governor’s law that all priests must marry. He lived now near the river with his house-keeper. That, of course, was the best solution of all, to leave the living witness to the weakness of their faith. It showed the deception they had practised all these years. For if they really believed in heaven or hell, they wouldn’t mind a little pain now, in return for what immensities…The lieutenant, lying on his hard bed, in the damp hot dark, felt no sympathy at all with the weakness of the flesh (33-4).
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She said: “I would rather die.”
“Oh,” he said, “of course. That goes without saying. But we have to go on living” (38)
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Now they were both tired out and the mule simply sat down. The priest scrambled off and began to laugh. He was feeling happy. It is one of the strange discoveries a man makes that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration: there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.
He came cautiously out of the belt of trees into a marshy clearing: the whole state was like that, river and swamp and forest: he knelt down in the late sunlight and bathed his face in a brown pool which reflected back at him like a piece of glazed pottery the round, stubbly, and hollow features; they were so unexpected that he grinned at them – with the sly evasive untrustworthy smile of a man caught out. In the old days he often practised a gesture a long while in front of a glass so that he had come to know his own face as well as an actor does. It was a form of humility – his own natural face hadn’t seemed the right one. It was a buffoon’s face, good enough for mild jokes to women, but unsuitable at the altar rail. He had tried to change it – and indeed, he thought, indeed I have succeeded, they’ll never recognize me now, and the cause of his happiness came back to him like the taste of brandy, promising temporary relief from fear, loneliness, a lot of things. He was being driven by the presence of the soldiers to the very place where he most wanted to be. He had avoided it for six years, but now it wasn’t his fault – it was his duty to go there – it couldn’t count as sin. He went back to his mule and kicked it gently: “Up, mule, up” – a small gaunt man in torn peasant’s clothes going for the first time in many years, like any ordinary man, to his home.
In any case, even if he could have gone south and avoided the village, it was only one more surrender: the years behind him were littered with similar surrenders – feast-days and fast-days and days of abstinence had been first to go: then he had ceased to trouble more than occasionally about his breviary – and finally he had left it behind altogether at the port in one of his periodic attempts at escape. Then the altar stone went – too dangerous to carry with him. He had no business to say Mass without it: he was probably liable to suspension, but penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death. The routine of his life like a dam was cracked and forgetfulness came dribbling in, wiping out this and that. Five years ago he had given way to despair – the unforgivable sin – and he was going back now to the scene of his despair with a curious lightening of the heart. For he had got over despair too. He was a bad priest, he knew it: they had a word for his kind – a whiskey priest – but every failure dropped out of sight and out of mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret – the rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the source of grace. Until then he carried on, with spells of fear, weariness, with a shamefaced lightness of heart.
The mule splashed across the clearing and they entered the forest again. Now that he no longer despaired it didn’t mean, of course, that he wasn’t damned – it was simply that after a time the mystery became too great, a damned man putting God into the mouths of men: an odd sort of servant, that, for the devil. His mind was full of a simplified mythology: Michael dressed in armour slew a dragon, and the angels fell through space like comets with beautiful streaming hair because they were jealous, so one of the fathers had said, of what God intended for men – the enormous privilege of life – this life (81-3).
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He said gently, not looking at her, with the same embarrassed smile: “How’s Brigida?” His heart jumped at the name: a sin may have enormous consequences: it was six years since he had been – home.
“She’s as well as the rest of us. What did you expect?”
He had his satisfaction: it was connected with his crime: he had no business to feel pleasure at anything attached to that past. He said mechanically: “That’s good,” while his heart beat with its secret and appalling love. He said: “I’m very tired. The police were about near Zapata…”
“Why didn’t you make for Montecristo?”
He looked quickly up with anxiety. It wasn’t the welcome the he had expected: a small knot of people had gathered between the huts and watched him from a safe distance – there was a little decaying bandstand and a single stall for gaseosas – people had brought their chairs out for the evening. Nobody came forward to kiss his hand and ask his blessing. It was as if he had descended by means of his sin into the human struggles to learn other things besides despair and love, that a man can be unwelcomed even in his own home. He said: “The Red Shirts were there.”
“Well, father,” the woman said, “we can’t turn you away. You’d better come along.” He followed her meekly, tripping once in the long peon trousers, with the happiness wiped off his face and the smile somehow left behind like the survivor of a wreck. There were seven or eight men, two women, half a dozen children: he came among them like a beggar. He couldn’t help remembering the last time…the excitement, the gourds of spirit brought out of holes in the ground…his guilt had still been fresh, yet how he had been welcomed. It was as if he had returned to them in their vicious prison as one of themselves – an émigré who comes back to his native place enriched.
“This is father,” the woman said. Perhaps it was only that they hadn’t recognized him, he thought, and waited for their greetings. They came forward one by one and kissed his hand and then stood back and watched him. He said: “I am glad to see you…” He was going to say “my children,” but then it seemed to him that only the childless man has the right to call strangers his children. The real children were coming up now to kiss his hand, one by one, under the pressure of their parents. They were too young to remember the old days when the priests dressed in black and wore Roman collars and had soft superior patronizing hands: he could see they were mystified at the show of respect to a peasant like their parents. He didn’t look at them directly, but he was watching them closely all the same. Two were girls: a thin washed-out child – of five, six, seven? he couldn’t tell – and one who had been sharpened by hunger into an appearance of devilry and malice beyond her age. A young woman stared out of the child’s eyes. He watched them disperse again, saying nothing: they were strangers (84-6).
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He gave a little yapping cry like dog’s – the absurd shorthand of grief. The old-young child laughed. He said: “Why don’t they catch me? The fools. Why don’t they catch me?” The little girl laughed again: he stared at her sightlessly, as if he could hear the sound, but couldn’t see the face. Happiness was dead again before it had had time to breathe; he was like a woman with a stillborn child – bury it quickly and forget and begin again. Perhaps the next would live (87).
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He thought: If I go, I shall meet other priests: I shall go to confession: I shall feel contrition and be forgiven: eternal life will begin for me all over again. The Church taught that it was every man’s first duty to save his own soul. The simplest ideas of hell and heaven moved in his brain: life without books, without contact with educated men, had peeled away from his memory everything but the simplest outline of the mystery (88-9).
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If he left them, they would be safe: and they would be free from his example: he was the only priest the children could remember. It was from him they would take their ideas of the faith. But it was from him too they took God – in their mouths. When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn’t it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake, even if they were corrupted by his example? He was shaken with the enormity of the problem: he lay with his hands over his eyes: nowhere, in all the wide flat marshy land, was there a single person he could consult. He raised the brandy bottle to his mouth.
He said shyly: “And Brigida…is she…well?”
“You saw her just now.”
“No.” He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t recognized her. It was making light of his mortal sin: you couldn’t do a thing like that and then not even recognize…
“Yes, she was there.” Maria went to the door and called: “Brigida, Brigida,” and the priest turned on his side and watched her come in out of the outside landscape of terror and lust – that small malicious child who had laughed at him.
“Go and speak to the father,” Maria said. “Go on.”
He made an attempt to hide the brandy bottle, but there was nowhere…he tried to minimize it in his hands, watching her, feeling the shock of human love.
“She knows her catechism,” Maria said, “but she won’t say it….”
The child stood there, watching him with acuteness and contempt. They had spent no love in her conception: just fear and despair and half a bottle of brandy and the sense of loneliness had driven him to an act which horrified him – and this scared shamefaced overpowering love was the result. He said: “Why not? Why won’t you say it?” taking quick secret glances, never meeting her gaze, feeling his heart pounding in his breast unevenly, like an old donkey engine, with the balked desire to save her from – everything.
“Why should I?”
“God wishes it.”
“How do you know?”
He was aware of an immense load of responsibility; it was indistinguishable from love. This, he thought, must be what all parents feel: ordinary men go through life like this crossing their fingers, praying against pain, afraid (89-90).
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He caught a look in the child’s eyes which frightened him – it was again as if a grown woman was there before her time, making her plans, aware of far too much. It was like seeing his own mortal sin look back at him, without contrition (91).
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He was astonished and bit relieved by her resilience: once for five minutes seven years ago they had been lovers – if you could give that name to a relationship in which she had never used his baptismal name: to her it was just an incident, a scratch which heals completely in the healthy flesh: she was even proud of having been the priest’s woman. He alone carried a wound, as if a whole world had ended (93-4).
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He said: “One of the fathers had told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is part of joy. We are hungry and then think how we enjoy our food at last. We are thirsty…:” He stopped suddenly, with his eyes glancing away into the shadows, expecting the cruel laugh that never came. He said: “We deny ourselves so that we can enjoy. You have heard of rich men in the north who eat salted foods, so that they can be thirsty – for what they call the cocktail. Before the marriage, too, there is the long betrothal….” Again he stopped. He felt his own unworthiness like a weight at the back of the tongue. There was a smell of hot wax from where the candle drooped in the immense nocturnal heat: people shifted on the hard floor in the shadows. The smell of unwashed human beings warred with the wax. He cried out stubbornly in a voice of authority: “That is why I tell you that heaven is here; this is a part of heaven just as pain is a part of pleasure.” He said: “Pray that you will suffer more and more and more. Never get tired of suffering. The police watching you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from the jefe because you are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger…that is all part of heaven – the preparation. Perhaps without them – who can tell? – you wouldn’t enjoy heaven so much. Heaven would not be complete. And heaven. What is heaven?” Literary phrases from what seemed now to be another life altogether – the strict quiet life of the seminary – became confused on his tongue: the names of precious stones: Jerusalem the golden. But these people had never seen gold.
He went rather stumblingly on: “Heaven is where there is no jefe, no unjust laws, no taxes, no soldiers, and no hunger. Your children do not die in heaven.” The door of the hut opened and a man slipped in. There was whispering out of range of the candlelight. “You will never be afraid there – or unsafe. There are no Red Shirts. Nobody grows old. The crops never fail. Oh, it is easy to say all the things that there will not be in heaven: what is there is God. That is more difficult. Our words are made to describe what we know with our senses. We say ‘light,’ but we are thinking only of the sun, ‘love’…” It was not easy to concentrate: the police were not far away. That man had probably brought news. “That means perhaps a child…” The door opened again: he could see another day drawn across like a grey slate outside. A voice whispered urgently to him: “Father.”
“Yes?”
“The police are on the way: they are only a mile off, coming through the forest.”
This was what he was used to: the words not striking home, the hurried close, the expectation of pain coming between him and his faith. He said stubbornly: “Above all remember this – heaven is here.” Were they on horseback or on foot? If they were on foot, he had twenty minutes left to finish Mass and hide. “Here now, at this minute, your fear and my fear are part of heaven, where there will be no fear any more for ever.” He turned his back on them and began very quickly to recite the Credo. There was a time when he had approached the Canon of the Mass with actual physical dread – the first time he had consumed the body and blood of God in a state of mortal sin: but then life bred its excuses – it hadn’t after a while seemed to matter very much, whether he was damned or not, so long as these others…(94-6).
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The priest followed Maria into the hut. The bottle of brandy lay on the table: he touched it with his fingers – there wasn’t much left. He said: “My case, Maria? Where’s my case?”
“It’s too dangerous to carry that around any more,” Maria said.
“How else can I take the wine?”
“There isn’t any wine.”
“What do you mean?”
She said: “I’m not going to bring trouble on you and everyone else. I’ve broken the bottle. Even if it brings a cure…”
He said gently and sadly: “You mustn’t be superstitious. That was simply – wine. There’s nothing sacred in wine. Only it’s hard to get hold of here. That’s why I kept a store of it in Concepcion. But they’ve found that.”
“Now perhaps you’ll go – go away altogether. You’re no good any more to anyone,” she said fiercely. “Don’t you understand, father? We don’t want you any more.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I understand. But it’s not what you want – or I want…”
She said savagely: “I know about things. I went to school. I’m not like these others – ignorant. I know you’re a bad priest. That time we were together – I bet that wasn’t all you’ve done. I’ve heard things, I can tell you. Do you think God wants you to stay and die – a whiskey priest like you?” He stood patiently in front of her, as he had stood in front of the lieutenant, listening. He hadn’t known she was capable of all this thought. She said: “Suppose you die. You’ll be a martyr, won’t you? What kind of martyr do you think you’ll make? It’s enough to make people mock” (106-7).
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He was appalled by her maturity…
He prayed silently: “O God, give me any kind of death – without contrition, in a state of sin – only save this child.”
He was a man who was supposed to save souls: it had seemed quite simple once, preaching at Benediction, organizing the guilds, having coffee with elderly ladies behind barred windows, blessing new houses with a little incense, wearing black gloves…it was as easy as saving money: not it was a mystery. He was aware of his own desperate inadequacy.
…”I would give my life, that’s nothing, my soul…my dear, my dear, try to understand that you are – so important” (109-111).
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Judas – 123 – “It was too easy otherwise to idealize him as a man who fought with God – a Prometheus, a noble victim in a hopeless war.”
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why unlike Jose – 127
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God’s image – 136
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He knew it was the beginning of the end – after all these years. He began to say silently an act of contrition, while they picked the brandy bottle out of his pocket, but he couldn’t give his mind to it. That was the fallacy of the deathbed repentance – penitence was the fruit of long training and discipline: fear wasn’t enough. He tried to think of his child with shame, but he could only think of her with a kind of famished love – what would become of her? And the sin itself was so old that like an ancient picture the deformity had faded and left a kind of grace. The Red Shirt smashed the bottle on the stone paving and the smell of spirit rose all round them – not very strongly: there hadn’t really been much left (160).
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- weeps

172 - They were extraordinarily foolish over pictures. Why not burn them?
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God’s image – 177
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He began formally to pay his farewell to the world: he couldn’t put any heart into it….Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory – or for ever…Nothing in life was as ugly as death (180).
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He prayed silently: O God, send them someone more worthwhile to suffer for. It seemed to him a damnable mockery that they should sacrifice themselves for a whiskey priest with a bastard child (183).
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“For men may come and men may go. But I go on for ever."
shocked him, trite, untruth – buzzard
Jewels Five Words Long; A Treasury of English Verse – Coral Fellows

“‘Come back! Come back!’ he cried in grief
Across the stormy water,
‘And I’ll forgive your Highland chief –
My daughter, O my daughter.’”

…These words seemed to contain all that he felt himself of repentance, longing, and unhappy love (198-9).
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He could feel no meaning any longer in prayers like these – the Host was different: to lay that between a dying man’s lips was to lay God. That was a fact – something you could touch, but this was no more than a pious aspiration. Why should Anyone listen to his prayers? Sin was like a constriction which prevented their escape: he could feel his prayers like undigested food heavy in his body, unable to escape (205).
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faith could move mountains – God missed an opportunity 209
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Who was he to disbelieve in miracles (211)?
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It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin – only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it. These people went out of the stable clean: he was the only one left who hadn’t repented, confessed, and been absolved. He wanted to say to this man: “Love is not wrong, but love should be happy and open – it is only wrong when it is secret, unhappy…it can be more unhappy than anything but the loss of God. It is the loss of God. You don’t need a penance, my child, you have suffered enough,” and to this other: “Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.” But the habit of the confessional reasserted itself: it was as if he was back in the little stuffy wooden boxlike coffin in which men bury their uncleanness with their priest. He said: “Mortal sin…danger…self-control,” as if those words meant anything at all. He said: “Say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys” (231-2).
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But because it was so peaceful he was all the more aware of his own sin as he prepared to take the Elements – “Let not the participation of Thy Body, O Lord Jesus Christ, which I, though unworthy, presume to receive, turn to my judgment and condemnation.” A virtuous man can almost cease to believe in Hell; but he carried Hell about him. Sometimes at night he dreamed of it…Domine, non sum dignus…domine, non sum dignus….Evil ran like malaria in his veins…(237)
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PRIDE - 264
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God is love – 268-9
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There aren’t miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is (270).
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permission to confess – 271
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wow – 280-4
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295 – the great testing day has come
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296 – Because God had decided otherwise – Juan

The Screwtape Letters

by C.S. Lewis

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs – to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and more their will is interfered with, the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys (38-9, Letter VIII).
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Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What the real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven – a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell (50, Letter XI).
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The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction, and it is specially promising among the English, who take their “sense of humour” so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame (51, Letter XI).
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On Humility:

The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents – or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love a soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love – a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbors as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created, and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left (64-5, Letter XIV).
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But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate this horror of the Same Old Thing into a philosophy so that the nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will. It is here that the general Evolutionary or Historical character of modern European thought (partly our work) comes in so usefully. The Enemy loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions: Is it righteous? Is it prudent? Is it possible? Now, if we can keep men asking: "Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?" they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on. And great work has already been done. Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective "unchanged" we have substituted the emotional adjective "stagnant." We have trained them to think of the future as a promised land that favoured heroes attain - not as something that everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is (119, Letter XXV).
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...Don't forget to use the "Heads I win, tails you lose" argument. If the thing he prays for doesn't happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don't work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and "therefore it would have happened anyway," and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective...
...If you tried to explain to him that men's prayers today are one of the innumerable coordinates with which the Enemy harmonises the weather of tomorrow, he would reply that then the Enemy always knew men were going to make those prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so. And he would add that the weather on a given day can be traced back through its causes to the original creation of matter itself - so that the whole thing, both on the human and on the material side, is given "from the word go." What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us: that the particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two points in his temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events. Why that creative act leaves room for their free will is the problem of problems, the secret behind the Enemy's nonsense about "Love." How it does so is no problem at all; for the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it (126-8, Letter XXVII).
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The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unraveling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the Earth (132-3, Letter XXVIII).
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A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where Virtue is concerned "Experience is the mother of illusion"...(133, Letter XXVIII).
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But Hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful - horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame. To make a deep wound in his charity, you should therefore first defeat his courage.
Now this is ticklish business. We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the Enemy permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work in undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is that we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility. And in fact, in the last war, thousands of humans, by discovering their own cowardice discovered the whole moral world for the first time. In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them...the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor.
This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy's motives for creating a dangerous world - a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky (136-8, Letter XXIX).
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From “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”:

We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of that word, the political arrangement so called. Like all forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that "democracy" in the diabolical sense (I'm as good as you, Being like Folks, Togetherness) is the finest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth.
For "democracy" or the "democratic spirit" (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first hint of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be. For when such a nation meets in conflict a nation where children have been made to work at school, where talent is placed in high posts, and where the ignorant mass are allowed no say at all in public affairs, only one result is possible.
The democracies were surprised lately when they found that Russia had got ahead of them in science. What a delicious specimen of human blindness! If the whole tendency of their society is opposed to every sort of excellence, why did they expect their scientists to excel?
It is our function to encourage the behaviour, the manners, the whole attitude of mind, which democracies naturally like and enjoy, because these are the very things which, unchecked, will destroy democracy. You would almost wonder that even humans don't see it themselves. Even if they don't read Aristotle (that would be undemocratic) you would have thought the French Revolution would have taught them that the behaviour aristocrats naturally like is not the behaviour that preserves aristocracy. They might then have applied the same principle to all forms of government.
But I would not end on that note. I would no - Hell forbid! encourage in your own minds that delusion which you must carefully foster in the minds of your human victims. I mean the delusion that the fate of nations is in itself more important than that of individual souls. The overthrow of free peoples and the multiplication of slave states are for us a means (besides, of course, of being fun); but the real end is in the destruction of individuals...I'm as good as you is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind which, necessarily excluding humility, chastity, contentment, and all the pleasures of gratitude or admirations, turns a human being away from almost every road which might finally lead him to Heaven (169-70).
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The fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighbourhood of the Holy. Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar (172).

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

A play by Tom Stoppard

Guil: Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are…condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one – that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it’ll just be shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity is part of their order, we’d know that we were lost. (He sits.) A Chinaman of the T’ang Dynasty – and, by which definition, a philosopher – dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him, in his two-fold security (60).
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Ros: (He takes out one of his coins. Spins it. Catches it. Looks at it. Replaces it.)

Guil: What was it?

Ros: What?

Guil: Heads or tails?

Ros: Oh. I didn’t look.

Guil: Yes you did.

Ros: Oh, did I? (He takes out a coin, studies it.) Quite right – it rings a bell.

Guil: What’s the last thing you remember?

Ros: I don’t wish to be reminded of it.

Guil: We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once watered our eyes (60-1).
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Ros: Shouldn't we be doing something... constructive?
Guil: What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?
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Ros: Did you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?

Guil: No.

Ros: Nor do I, really. It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean, one thinks of it like being alive in a box. One keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never *know* you were in a box, would you? It would be just like you were asleep in a box. Not that I'd like to sleep in a box, mind you. Not without any air. You'd wake up dead for a start, and then where would you be? In a box. That's the bit I don't like, frankly. That's why I don't think of it. Because you'd be helpless, wouldn't you? Stuffed in a box like that. I mean, you'd be in there forever, even taking into account the fact that you're dead. It isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off, "I'm going to stuff you in this box. Now, would you rather be alive or dead?" naturally, you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance, at least. You could lie there thinking, "Well, at least I'm not dead. In a minute somebody is going to bang on the lid, and tell me to come out."
[bangs on lid]
Ros: "Hey you! What's your name? Come out of there!"

[long pause] Guil: I think I'm going to kill you.
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Ros: I don't believe in it anyway.
Guil: What?
Ros: England.
Guil: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
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Guil: Is that you?
Ros: I don't know.
[in disgust] Guil: It's you.
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Guil: Bet me the year of my birth doubled is an odd number.
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Ros: [The wind's] coming up through the floor. That can't be south, can it?

Guil: That's not a direction. Lick your toe and wave it around a bit.

Ros considers the distance of his foot.
Ros: No, I think you'd have to lick it for me.

Pause.

Guil: I'm prepared to let the whole matter drop.

Ros: Or I could lick yours, of course.

Guil: No thank you.

Ros: I'll even wave it around for you.

Guil: What in God's name is wrong with you!?

Ros: Just being friendly.
__________________________________________________________________________

Ros: Stark raving sane.
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Player: There's nothing more unconvincing than an unconvincing death.

The English Patient

A novel by Michael Ondaatje

“Lyrical…dreamlike and enigmatic…A Farewell to Arms drenched in spooky ennui. It is also a difficult novel to leave behind, for it has the external grip of a war romance and yet the ineffable pull of poetry…An exquisite ballet that takes place in the dark.” – Boston Sunday Globe

“A poetry of smoke and mirrors.” – Washington Post Book Review

“Most of you, I am sure, remember the tragic circumstances of the death of Geoffrey Clifton at Gilf Kebir, followed later by the disappearance of his wife, Katharine Clifton, which took place during the 1939 desert expedition in search of Zerzura.
“I cannot begin this meeting tonight without referring very sympathetically to those tragic occurrences.
“The lecture this evening…”
-- From the minutes of the Geographical Society meeting of November 194—, London
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She has nursed him for months and knows the body well…Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his back, no pillow, looking up at the foliage painted onto the ceiling, its canopy of branches, and above that, blue sky (3-4).
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There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened the aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.
There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days – burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob – a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand meters high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself in the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for “fifty,” blooming for fifty days – the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Egypt that carries fragrance.
There is also the , the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by the king after his son died with it. And the nafhat – a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen – a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as “that which plucks the fowls.” The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, “the black wind.” The Samiel from Turkey, “poison and wind,” used often in battle. As well as the other “poison winds,” the simoom, of North Africa, and the Solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.
Other, private winds (16-17).
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When he was a child he had grown up with his aunt, and on the grass of her lawn she had scattered a deck of cards face down and taught him the game of Pelmanism. Each player allowed to turn up two cards and, eventually, through memory pairing them off. This had been in another landscape, of trout streams, birdcalls that he could recognize from a halting fragment. A fully named world. Now, with his face blindfolded in a mask of grass fibres, he picked up a shell and moved with his carriers, guiding them towards a gun, inserted the bullet, bolted it, and holding it up in the air fired. The noise cracking crazily down the canyon walls. “For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.” A man thought to be sullen and mad had written that sentence down in an English hospital. And he, now in this desert, was sane, with clear thought, picking up the cards, bringing them together with ease, his grin flung out to his aunt, and firing each successful combination into the air, and gradually the unseen men around him replied to each rifle shot with a cheer. He would turn to face one direction, then move back to the Breda this time on his strange human palanquin, followed by a man with a knife who carved a parallel code on a shell box and gun stock. He thrived on it – the movement and the cheering after the solitude. This was payment with his skill for the men who had saved him for such a purpose (20-1).
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Caravaggio stood there. Those who weep lose more energy than they lose during any other act. It was not yet dawn. Her face against the darkness of the table wood (44).
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To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgement. A bath in the sea, a ---- with a soldier who never knew your name. Tenderness towards the unknown and anonymous, which was a tenderness to the self (49).
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He sat down with the carafe of wine the monks from the monastery had given Hana. It was Hana’s house and he moved carefully, rearranging nothing. He noticed her civilisation in the small wildflowers, the small gifts to herself. Even in the overgrown garden he would come across a square foot of grass snipped down with her nurse’s scissors. If he had been a younger man he would have fallen in love with this.
He was no longer young. How did she see him? With his wounds, his unbalance, the grey curls at the back of his neck. He had never imagined himself to be a man with a sense of age and wisdom. They had all grown older, but he still did not feel he had wisdom to go with his aging (58).
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But the event had produced age, as if during the one night when he was locked to that table they had poured a solution into him that slowed him (59).
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She stood by the window and her fingers clutched the hair on her head with a tough grip, pulling it. In darkness, in any light after dusk, you can slit a vein and the blood is black (62).
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He turns and sees Hana asleep on the sofa. He closes the book and leans back against the thigh-high ledge under the shelves. She is curled up, her left cheek on the dusty brocade and her right arm up towards her face, a fist against her jaw. Her eyebrows shift, the face concentrating within sleep.
When he had first seen her after all this time she had looked taut, boiled down to just body enough to get her through this efficiently. Her body had been in a war and, as in love, it has used every part of itself (81).
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I was the one who destroyed it (85).
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A novel is a mirror walking down the road (91).
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He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives called the Lahore Museaum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that “fire-breathing dragon,” hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.
“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise” (93-4).
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King David was old and stricken in years and they covered him with clothes but he received no heat.
Whereupon his servants said, Let there be sought for the King a young virgin: and let her cherish him, and let her lie in this bosom, that our King may have heat.
So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag a Shunammite. And the damsel cherished the King, and ministered to him: but the King knew her not (94-5).
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She had tried to damage her life so casually (113). --> 85
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“David Caravaggio – an absurd name for you, of course…”
“At least I have a name.”
“Yes.”
…
The Englishman turns to him.
“There’s a painting by Caravaggio, done late in his life, David with the Head of Goliath. In it, the young warrior holds at the end of his outstretched arm the head of Goliath, ravaged and old. But that is not the true sadness in the picture. It is assumed that the face of David is a portrait of the youthful Caravaggio and the head of Goliath is a portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did the painting. Youth judging age at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one’s own mortality. I think when I see him at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David.”
…
He has been a man who slips away, in the way lovers leave chaos, the way thieves leave reduced houses (116).
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“Could you fall in love with her if she wasn’t smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn’t it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now. She can be obsessed by the Englishman because he knows more. We’re in a huge field when we talk to that guy. We don’t even know if he’s English. He’s probably not. You see, I think it is easier to fall in love with him than with you. Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world” (121).
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If it is physical attraction. If all this has to do with love of Kip. She likes to lay her face against the upper reaches of his arm, that dark brown river, and to wake submerged within it, against the pulse of an unseen vein in his flesh beside her. The vein she would have to locate and insert a saline solution into if he were dying (125).
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The ends of the earth are never the points on a map that colonists push against, enlarging their sphere of influence. On one side servants and slaves and tides of power and correspondence with the Geographical Society. On the other the first step by a white man across a great river, the first sight (by a white eye) of a mountain that has been there forever.
When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.
But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past. We were young. We knew power and great finance were temporary things. We all slept with Herodotus. “For those cities that were great in earlier times must have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before....Man’s good fortune never abides in the same place” (141-2).
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The desert fire was between us. The Cliftons, Madox, Bell and myself. If a man leaned back a few inches he would disappear into darkness. Katharine Clifton began to recite something, and my head was no longer in the halo of the camp’s twig fire.
There was classical blood in her face. Her parents were famous, apparently, in the world of legal history. I am a man who did not enjoy poetry until I heard a woman recite it to us. And in that desert she dragged her university days into our midst to describe the stars – the way Adam tenderly taught a woman with gracious metaphors.
These then, though unbeheld in deep of night,
Shine not in vain, nor think, though men were none,
That Heav’n would want spectators, God want praise;
Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep:
All these with ceaseless praise his works behold
Both day and night: how often from the steep
Of echoing Hill or Thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole, or responsive each to other’s note
Singing their great Creator...

That night I fell in love with a voice. Only a voice. I wanted to hear nothing more. I got up and walked away.

She was a willow. What would she be like in winter, at my age? I see her still, always, with the eye of Adam. She had been these awkward limbs climbing our of a plane, bending down in our midst to prod at a fire, her elbow up and pointed towards me as she drank from a canteen (144).
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She was on her back, positioned the way the mediaeval dead lie.
I approached her naked as I would have done in our South Cairo room, wanting to undress her, still wanting to love her.
What is terrible in what I did? Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it. You can make love to a woman with a broken arm, or a woman with a fever. She once sucked blood from a cut on my hand as I had tasted and swallowed her menstrual blood. There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language. Felhomaly. The dusk of graves. With the connotation of intimacy there between the dead and the living (170).
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“I know all about sarongs.” Caravaggio waved his hand towards Kip and Hana as he spoke. “In the east end of Toronto I met these Indians. I was robbing a house and it turned out to belong to an Indian family. They woke from their beds and they were wearing these cloths, sarongs, to sleep in, and it intrigued me. We had lots to talk about and they eventually persuaded me to try it. I removed my clothes and stepped into one, and they immediately set upon me and chased me half naked into the night.”
“Is that a true story?” She grinned.
“One of many!”
She knew enough about him to almost believe it. Caravaggio was constantly diverted by the human element during burglaries. Breaking into a house during Christmas, he would become annoyed if he noticed the Advent calendar had not been opened up to the date to which it should have been. He often had conversations with the various pets left alone in houses, rhetorically discussing meals with them, feeding them large helpings, and was often greeted by them with considerable pleasure if he returned to the scene of a crime (208-9).
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She had come to love these books dressed in their Italian spines, the frontispieces, the tipped-in colour illustrations with a covering of tissue, the smell of them, even the sound of the crack if you opened them too fast, as if breaking some minute unseen series of bones (221-2).
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They were a popular young couple with honour between them, and I was on the periphery of Cairo society. They lived well. A ceremonial life that I would slip into now and then. Dinners, garden parties. Events I would not normally have been interested in but now went to because she was there. I am a man who fasts until I see what I want (235).
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Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replaced by estuaries of silt. The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn.
…
I’ll be looking at the moon,
but I’ll be seeing you (238-9).
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He was in broken country, had moved from sand to rock. He refused to think about her. Then hills emerged like mediaeval castles. He walked till he stepped with his shadow into the shadow of a mountain. Mimosa shrubs. Colocynths. He yelled out her name into the rocks. For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places (250).
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Was I curse upon them? For her? For Madox? For the desert raped by war, shelled as if it were just sand? The Barbarians versus the Barbarians. Both armies would come through the desert with no sense of what it was. The deserts of Libya. Remove politics, and it is the loveliest phrase I know. Libya. A sexual, drawn-out word, a coaxed well. The b and the y. Madox said it was one of the few words in which you heard the tongue turn a corner. Remember Dido in the deserts of Libya? A man shall be as rivers of water in a dry place...(257)
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And all the names of tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert and saw brightness and faith and colour. The way a stone or found metal box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer. Such glory of this country she enters now and becomes part of. We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
I carried Katharine Clifton into the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds (261).
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Each morning he would step from the painted scene towards dark bluffs of chaos. The knight. The warrior saint. She would see the khaki uniform flickering through the cypresses. The Englishman had called fato profugus – fate’s fugitive. She guessed that these days began for him with the pleasure of lifting his eyes up to the trees (273).
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He has his hands under his head, interpreting a new toughness in the face of the angel he didn’t notice before. The white flower it holds has fooled him. The angel too is a warrior. In the midst of this series of thoughts his eyes close and he gives in to tiredness (280).

Long Day's Journey Into Night

A play by Eugene O'Neill

For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary

Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love to face my dead at last and write this play – write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.
These twelve years, O Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light – into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!

Gene.
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Edmund
…Then with alcoholic talkativeness
You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They’re all connected with the sea. Here’s one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and the singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself – actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow’s nest on the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see – and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!
He grins wryly.
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death (153-4)!
__________________________________________________________________



Jamie

To hell with repining! Fat Violet’s a good kid. Glad I stayed with her. Christian act. Cured her blues. Hell of a good time. You should have stuck with me, Kid. Taken your mind off your troubles. What’s the use coming home to get the blues over what can’t be helped. All over – finished now – not a hope!
He stops, his head nodding drunkenly, his eyes closing – then suddenly he looks up, his face hard, and quotes jeeringly.
“If I were hanged on the highest hill,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!
I know whose love would follow me still…(161)”
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Tyrone

Heavily.
I wish to God she’d go to bed so that I could, too.
Drowsily.
I’m dog tired. I can’t stay up all night like I used to. Getting old – old and finished.
With a bone-cracking yawn.
Can’t keep my eyes open. I think I’ll catch a few winks. Why don’t you do the same, Edmund? It’ll pass the time until she –
His voice trails off. His eyes close, his chin sags, and he begins to breathe heavily through his mouth. Edmund sits tensely. He hears something and jerks nervously forward in his chair, staring through the front parlor into the hall. He jumps up with a haunted, distracted expression. It seems for a second he is going to hide in the back parlor. Then he sits down again and waits, his eyes averted, his hands gripping the arms of his chair. Suddenly all five bulbs of the chandelier are turned on from a wall switch, and a moment later someone starts playing piano in there – the opening of one of Chopin’s simpler waltzes, done with a forgetful, stiff-fingered groping, as if an awkward schoolgirl were practicing it for the first time. Tyrone starts to wide-awakeness and sober dread, and Jamie’s head jerks back and his eyes open. For a moment they listen frozenly. The playing stops as abruptly as it began, and Mary appears in the doorway. She wears a sky-blue dressing gown over her nightdress, dainty slippers with pompons on her bare feet. Her face is paler than ever. Her eyes look enormous. They glisten like polished black jewels. The uncanny thing is that her face now appears so youthful. Experience seems ironed out of it. It is a marble mask for girlish innocence, the mouth caught in a shy smile. Her white hair is braided in two pigtails which hang over her breast. Over one arm, carried neglectfully, trailing on the floor, as if she had forgotten she held it, is an old-fashioned white satin wedding gown, trimmed with duchesse lace. She hesitates in the doorway, glancing around the room, her forehead puckered puzzledly, like someone who has come to a room to get something but has become absent-minded on the way and forgotten what it was. They stare at her. She seems aware of them merely as she is aware of other things in the room, the furniture, the windows, the familiar things she accepts automatically as naturally belonging there but which she is too preoccupied to notice.

Jamie
Breaks the cracking silence – bitterly, self-defensively sardonic.
The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!
His father and brother both turn on him fiercely. Edmund is quicker. He slaps Jamie across the mouth with the back of his hand (169-70).
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Tyrone
In a stifled voice.
What’s that she’s carrying, Edmund?

Edmund
Dully.
Her wedding gown, I suppose.

Tyrone
[ ]!
He gets to his feet and stands directly in her path – in anguish.
Mary! Isn’t it bad enough– ?
Controlling himself, gently persuasive.
Here, let me take it dear. You’ll only step on it and tear it and get it dirty dragging it on the floor. Then you’d be sorry afterwards.
She lets him take it, regarding him from somewhere far away within herself, without recognition, without either affection or animosity (171-2).
___________________________________________________________________


Mary

…That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.
She stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie remain motionless (176).