- He had made a fool of himself, but in good hands one does not mind.
- She cited often the saying of Plato that the true philosophers are the young men of their age. ‘Not,’ she would add, ‘because they do it very well; but because they rush upon ideas with their whole soul. Later one philosophises for praise, or for apology, or because it is a complicated intellectual game.’
- His father passed through the court unseeing, for on that day his mind had been full of care. Suddenly the hero saw that the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment.
- It was Chrysis’s reiterated theory of life that all human beings – save a few mysterious exceptions who seemed to be in possession of some secret from the gods – merely endured the slow misery of existence, hiding as best they could their consternation that life had no wonderful surprises after all and that its most difficult burden was the incommunicability of love.
- What can one do for them? What – to be equal to them – can one do for oneself? He was twenty-five already, that is – no longer a young man. He would soon be a husband and a father, a condition he did not invest with any glamour. He would soon be the head of this household and this farm. He would soon be old. Time would have flowed by him like a sigh, with no plan made, no rules set, no strategy devised that would have taught him how to save these others and himself from the creeping gray, from the too-easily accepted frustration. ‘How does one live?’ he asked the bright sky. ‘What does one do first?’
- Chrysis’s view of human experience expressed itself, as we have seen, in fables, in quotations from literature, in proverbs and in mottoes. Herself she summed up in a word: she regarded herself as having ‘died.’ Dead then as she was, the inconveniences of her profession, the sneers of the villagers, the ingratitude of her dependents, no longer had the power to disturb her.
- ‘I am alone. Why have I never seen that before? I am alone.’ Indeed the profession she followed was one of those that emphasise the dim notion that lies at the back of many minds: the notion that we are not necessary to anyone, that attachments weave and unweave at the mercy of separation, satiety and experience. The loneliest associations are those that pretend to intimacy.
- Great talkers are so constituted that they do not know their own thoughts until, on the tide of their particular gift, they hear them issuing from their mouths.
- Perhaps the maturity of a civilisation can be judged by this trait, by observing whether the young men first fall in love with women older or younger than themselves; if in their youth their imaginations pass their time in hallowing the images of prattling unnourishing girls their natures will be forever after the thinner. But even at their best Chrysis’s guests seemed remote and immature to her and finally she discovered a second way of making life more stable and her friends more constant: she adopted stray human beings that needed her. In the inner monologue of her thoughts Chrysis called these dependents her ‘sheep.’
- ‘The fault is in me. It’s my lack of perseverance in affection. I know that. Now, Chrysis, you must begin your life over again; you must assemble some plan. You must devote yourself with all your mind to your sheep. You must break down all their coldness and wilfulness. You must make yourself love them again. You must bring back the happiness you felt with each one of them when you first knew them. It is routine, it is the daily contact that has spoiled all that. It’s cowardly of me to be able to love people only when they are new. Now, now, Chrysis! – arise!’
- ‘I should not wish to be alive in a world where there was no war,’ he replied. ‘That would be an age of women.’ Now Chrysis was jealous of the dignity of women and lost no occasions to combat such hasty disparagements. She leaned forward and asked encouragingly: ‘You wish to serve the state, Niceratus?’ ‘I do.’ ‘And you admire courage?’ ‘I do, Chrysis.’ ‘Then go bear children,’ she replied, turning away.
- ‘Happy are the associations,’ she would say, ‘that have grown out of a fault and a forgiveness.’
- ‘Tell them,’ said the women eagerly, ‘that it is only in appearance that we are unstable. Tell them that this is because we are hard-pressed and in bitter servitude to nature, but that at heart, only asking their patience, we are as steadfast, as brave and as manly as they.’
- The caress of the hands in first love, and never so simply again, seems to be a sharing of courage, an alliance of two courages against a confusing world.
- ‘I am happy because I love this Pamphilus, – Pamphilus the anxious, Pamphilus the stupid. __Why cannot someone tell him that it is not necessary to suffer so about living.__’
- This is something new in the world, this concern for the unfit and the broken. Once he begins that, there’s no end to it, only madness. It leads nowhere. That is some god’s business.’
- ‘Oh, such people are unconscious of their goodness. They strike their foreheads with their hands because of their failure, and yet the rest of us are made glad when we remember their faces. Pamphilus, you are another herald from the future. Some day men will be like you. Do not frown so. . . .’
- They lived at one remove from that self that supports the generality of men, the self that is a bundle of self-assertions, of greeds, of vanities and of easily offended pride.
- The only terror left in the world was the fear that she might leave it with cries of pain, with a torn mind, and with discomposed features.
- But she distrusted the emotion that filled her heart. It was perhaps mere excitement and pain; or a vague and false sentiment. Probably the best thing to do was to be stoic; to be brave and inarticulate; to talk of trivial things. Or was it a greater bravery to surmount this shame and to say whatever obvious words the heart dictated? Which was right?
- Remember some day, remember me as one who loved all things and accepted from the gods all things, the bright and the dark. And do you likewise. Farewell.’
- One has no right to bring into the world those children that cannot join others in their games, silent children who go through life regularly subject to fevers and coughs and pains. The most important thing in life is a houseful of strong healthy boys.
- The mistakes we make through generosity are less terrible than the gains we acquire through caution.
- True influence over another comes not from a moment’s eloquence nor from any happily chosen word, but from the accumulation of a lifetime’s thoughts stored up in the eyes.
- asking himself whether the associations in life are based upon an accidental encounter or upon a profound and inner necessity.
- ‘Viewed from a distance,’ Simo said to himself, ‘life is harmonious and beautiful. No doubt the years when my mother smiled to us from that bench were as full of crossed wills and exasperations as today, but how beautiful they seem in memory! The dead are wrapped in love; in illusion, perhaps. They go underground and slowly this tender light begins to fall upon them. But the present remains: this succession of small domestic vexations. I have lived such a life for sixty years and I am still upset by its ephemeral decisions. And I am still asking myself which is the real life: the present with its discontent, or the retrospect with its emotion?’
- and remembered her strange command to him that he praise all life, even the dark. And as he thought of her his depression, like a cloud, drifted away from him and he was filled with a tremulous happiness. He too praised the whole texture of life, for he saw how strangely life’s richest gift flowered from frustration and cruelty and separation.
- It seemed to him that the whole world did not consist of rocks and trees and water nor were human beings garments and flesh, but all burned, like the hillside of olive trees, with the perpetual flames of love, – a sad love that was half hope, often rebuked and waiting to be reassured of its truth.
mar 5 2016 ∞
mar 5 2016 +