(no subject)
Justine: Lawrence Durrell
‘There are only three things to be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.’
Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman; under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs.
She was in a towering rage. ‘You thought I simply wanted to make love? God! haven't we had enough of that? How is it that you do not know what I feel for once? How is it?’ She stamped her foot in the wet sand. It was not merely that a geological fault had opened in the ground which we had been treading with such self-confidence. It was as if some long-disguised mineshaft in my own character had suddenly fallen in.
‘Idle’ she writes ‘to imagine falling in love as a correspondance of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them, [...]’
‘Every man is made of clay and daimon, and no woman can nourish both.’
At this she put out her hand and placed it on mine while she laughed, wrinkling up her nose: laughing with such candour, so lightly and effortlessly, that there and then I decided to love her.
A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
If this was love then it was a variety of the plant which I have never seen before. (“Damn the word” said Justine once. “I would like to spell it backwards as you say the Elizabethans did God. Call it evol and make it a part of ‘evolution’ or ‘revolt’. Never use the word to me.”)
‘Ah!’ she said softly and sadly. ‘You are crying. I wish I could. I have lost the knack.’
‘Today is Saturday’ he said hoarsely ‘in Alexandria.’ He spoke as if a different sort of time obtained here, and he was not wrong. ‘If I don't find the key it will stop.’ In the last gleams of the wet dusk he tenderly drew the watch from its silk-lined waist-coat pocket. ‘I have until Monday evening. It will stop.’ Without the key it was useless to open the delicate golden leaf and expose the palpitating viscera of time itself stirring.
He spoke now of Nessim, saying: ‘Of all of us he is the most happy in a way because he has no preconcieved idea of what he wants in return for his love. And to love in such an unpremeditated way is something that most people have to re-learn after fifty. Children have it. So has he. I am serious.’
[...] all our women are Justines, you know, in different styles [...]
‘Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.’
I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all.
‘I cheated her over her coat. It was really sealskin. Also the moths had been at it. I had it relined. Why should I do such a thing? When she was ill I would not pay for her to see the doctor. Small things, but they weigh heavy.’
‘I was always worried about money’ he said felicitously ‘while I was alive. But when you are dying you suddenly find yourself in funds.’
‘We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love.’
All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.
(What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place - for that is history - but in the order in which they first became significant for me.)
I should say something like this: that she had been poured, while still warm, into the body of a young grace: that is to say, into a body born without instincts or desires.
‘There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self - because she does not know where to find it.’
“Tell me how she behaves and I will imitate her. In the dark we are all meat and treacherous however our hair kinks or skin smells. Tell me, and I will give you the wedding-smile and fall into your arms like a mountain of silk.” And all the time I was thinking over and over again: “Nessim. Nessim.”
If God were anything he would be an art. Sculpture or medicine.
At the same time I was astonished to realize that the side of me which clave to Melissa was living its own autonomous existence, quietly and surely belonging to her yet not wishing her back.
It was now too that I learned of him saying, one night to Justine, as they watched Melissa dance: ‘If I thought there were any hope of success I would propose marriage to her tomorrow. But she is so ignorant and her mind is so deformed by poverty and bad luck that she would refuse out of incredulity.’
The driver watched us in the mirror like a spy. The emotions of white people, he perhaps was thinking, are odd and excite prurience. He watched as one might watch cats making love.
‘With her going the city took on an unnerving strangeness for him’ writes Arnauti. ‘Wherever his memory of her turned a familiar corner she recreated herself swiftly, vividly, and superimposed those haunted eyes and hands on the streets and squares. Old conversations leaped up and hit him among the polished table-tops of cafés where once they had sat, gazing like drunkards into each other's eyes. Sometimes she appeared walking a few paces ahead of him in the dark street. She would stop to adjust the strap of a sandal and he would overtake her with beating heart - only to find it was someone else. Particular doors seemed just about to admit her. He would sit and watch them doggedly. At other times he was suddenly seized by the irresistible conviction that she was about to arrive on a particular train, and he hurried to the station and breasted the crowd of passengers like a man fording a river. Or he might sit in the stuffy waiting-room of the airport after midnight watching the departures and arrivals, in case she were coming back to surprise him. In this way she controlled his imagination and taught him how feeble reason was; and he carried the consciousness of her going heavily about with him - like a dead baby from which one could not bring oneself to part.’
‘You can stay here’ said Clea ‘with me’; and she added with a gentleness which brought a lump into my throat, ‘But please - I don't know how to say this - please don't make love to me.’
I have decided to leave Clea's last letter unanswered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has the need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything* depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
‘Then how long will it last, this love?’ (in jest).
‘I don't know.’
‘Three weeks, three years, three decades . . .?’
‘You are like all the others . . . trying to shorten eternity with numbers,’ spoken quietly, but with intense feeling.
‘There are only three things to be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.’
Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman; under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs.
She was in a towering rage. ‘You thought I simply wanted to make love? God! haven't we had enough of that? How is it that you do not know what I feel for once? How is it?’ She stamped her foot in the wet sand. It was not merely that a geological fault had opened in the ground which we had been treading with such self-confidence. It was as if some long-disguised mineshaft in my own character had suddenly fallen in.
‘Idle’ she writes ‘to imagine falling in love as a correspondance of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them, [...]’
‘Every man is made of clay and daimon, and no woman can nourish both.’
At this she put out her hand and placed it on mine while she laughed, wrinkling up her nose: laughing with such candour, so lightly and effortlessly, that there and then I decided to love her.
A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
If this was love then it was a variety of the plant which I have never seen before. (“Damn the word” said Justine once. “I would like to spell it backwards as you say the Elizabethans did God. Call it evol and make it a part of ‘evolution’ or ‘revolt’. Never use the word to me.”)
‘Ah!’ she said softly and sadly. ‘You are crying. I wish I could. I have lost the knack.’
‘Today is Saturday’ he said hoarsely ‘in Alexandria.’ He spoke as if a different sort of time obtained here, and he was not wrong. ‘If I don't find the key it will stop.’ In the last gleams of the wet dusk he tenderly drew the watch from its silk-lined waist-coat pocket. ‘I have until Monday evening. It will stop.’ Without the key it was useless to open the delicate golden leaf and expose the palpitating viscera of time itself stirring.
He spoke now of Nessim, saying: ‘Of all of us he is the most happy in a way because he has no preconcieved idea of what he wants in return for his love. And to love in such an unpremeditated way is something that most people have to re-learn after fifty. Children have it. So has he. I am serious.’
[...] all our women are Justines, you know, in different styles [...]
‘Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.’
I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all.
‘I cheated her over her coat. It was really sealskin. Also the moths had been at it. I had it relined. Why should I do such a thing? When she was ill I would not pay for her to see the doctor. Small things, but they weigh heavy.’
‘I was always worried about money’ he said felicitously ‘while I was alive. But when you are dying you suddenly find yourself in funds.’
‘We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love.’
All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.
(What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place - for that is history - but in the order in which they first became significant for me.)
I should say something like this: that she had been poured, while still warm, into the body of a young grace: that is to say, into a body born without instincts or desires.
‘There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self - because she does not know where to find it.’
“Tell me how she behaves and I will imitate her. In the dark we are all meat and treacherous however our hair kinks or skin smells. Tell me, and I will give you the wedding-smile and fall into your arms like a mountain of silk.” And all the time I was thinking over and over again: “Nessim. Nessim.”
If God were anything he would be an art. Sculpture or medicine.
At the same time I was astonished to realize that the side of me which clave to Melissa was living its own autonomous existence, quietly and surely belonging to her yet not wishing her back.
It was now too that I learned of him saying, one night to Justine, as they watched Melissa dance: ‘If I thought there were any hope of success I would propose marriage to her tomorrow. But she is so ignorant and her mind is so deformed by poverty and bad luck that she would refuse out of incredulity.’
The driver watched us in the mirror like a spy. The emotions of white people, he perhaps was thinking, are odd and excite prurience. He watched as one might watch cats making love.
‘With her going the city took on an unnerving strangeness for him’ writes Arnauti. ‘Wherever his memory of her turned a familiar corner she recreated herself swiftly, vividly, and superimposed those haunted eyes and hands on the streets and squares. Old conversations leaped up and hit him among the polished table-tops of cafés where once they had sat, gazing like drunkards into each other's eyes. Sometimes she appeared walking a few paces ahead of him in the dark street. She would stop to adjust the strap of a sandal and he would overtake her with beating heart - only to find it was someone else. Particular doors seemed just about to admit her. He would sit and watch them doggedly. At other times he was suddenly seized by the irresistible conviction that she was about to arrive on a particular train, and he hurried to the station and breasted the crowd of passengers like a man fording a river. Or he might sit in the stuffy waiting-room of the airport after midnight watching the departures and arrivals, in case she were coming back to surprise him. In this way she controlled his imagination and taught him how feeble reason was; and he carried the consciousness of her going heavily about with him - like a dead baby from which one could not bring oneself to part.’
‘You can stay here’ said Clea ‘with me’; and she added with a gentleness which brought a lump into my throat, ‘But please - I don't know how to say this - please don't make love to me.’
I have decided to leave Clea's last letter unanswered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has the need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything* depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
‘Then how long will it last, this love?’ (in jest).
‘I don't know.’
‘Three weeks, three years, three decades . . .?’
‘You are like all the others . . . trying to shorten eternity with numbers,’ spoken quietly, but with intense feeling.