‘Summer left Wellingon abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers.’
Zadie Smith, On Beauty, Part 2: The Anatomy Lesson, Chapter I, p. 129.
‘Yes, but the dead are everywhere. They cannot be so simply evaded. One feels them pressing their sad blind fingers in deprivation upon the panels of our secret lives, asking to be remembered and re-enacted once more in the life of the flesh - encamping among our heartbeats, invading our embraces. We carry in ourselves the biological trophies they bequeathed us by their failure to use up life - alignment of an eye, responsive curve of a nose; or in still more fugitive forms like someone's dead laugh, or a dimple which excites a long-buried smile.’
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Clea', part VIII, p. 833.
‘it was quite impossible to repudiate the truth, namely, that death (not even at hand, but in the air) sharpens kisses, adds unbearable poignance to every smile and handclasp. Even though I was no soldier the dark question mark hovered over our thoughts, for the real issues of the heart were influenced by something of which we were all, however reluctantly, part: a whole world. If the war did not mean a new way of dying, it meant a way of ageing, of tasting the true staleness in human things, and of learning to confront change bravely. No-one could tell what lay beyond the closed chapter of every kiss.’
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Clea', part II, p. 733.
‘To become a poet is to take the whole field of human knowledge and human desire for one's province; yes but, this field can only be covered by continual inner abdications.’
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Some Notes for Clea (by Pursewarden)', p. 880.
‘the physique is only the outer periphery, the contours of the spirit, its solid part. Through smell, taste, touch we apprehend each other, ignite each other's minds; information conveyed by the body's odours after orgasm, breath, tongue-taste - through these one "knows" in quite primeval fashion. Here was a perfectly ordinary man with no exceptional gifts but in his elements, so to speak, how good for me; he gave off the odours of good natural objects: like newly baked bread, roasting coffee, cordite, sandalwood. In this field of rapport I missed him like a skipped meal - I know it sound vulgar! Paracelsus says that thoughts are acts. Of them all, I suppose, the sex act is the most important, the one in which our spirits most divulge themselves. Yet one feels it a sort of clumsy paraphrase of the poetic, the noetic, thought which shapes itself into a kiss or an embrace. Sexual love is knowledge, both in etmology and in cold fact; "he knew her" as the Bible says! Sex is the joint or coupling which unites the male and female ends of knowledge merely - a cloud of unknowing! When a culture goes bad in its sex all knowledge is impeded.’
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Clea', Part II, p. 739.
‘we Anglo-Saxons are incapable of thinking for ourselves; about, yes. In thinking about ourselves we put up every kind of pretty performance in every sort of voice, from cracked Yorkshire to the hot-potato-in-the-mouth voice of the BBC. There we excel, for we see ourselves at one remove from reality, as a subject under a microscope. This idea of objectivity is really a flattering extension of our sense of humbug. When you start to think for yourself it is impossible to cant - and we live by cant!.’
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Clea', Part III, p. 757.
‘The great schools of love will arise, and sensual and intellectual knowledge will draw their impetus from each other. The human animal will be uncaged, all his dirty cultural straw and coprolitic refuse of belief cleaned out. And the human spirit, radiating light and laughter, will softly tread the green grass like a dancer ...
Yes, to extend the range of physical sensuality to embrace mathematics and theology: to nourish not to stunt the intuitions.’
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Clea', Part III, p. 762.
‘How wonderful the death-struggle of Lawrence: to realize his sexual nature fully, to break free from the manacles of the Old Testament; flashing down the firmament like a great white struggling man-fish, the last Christian martyr. His struggle is ours - to rescue Jesus from Moses. For a brief moment it looked possible, but St Paul restored the balance and the iron handcuffs of the Judaic prison closed about the growing soul forever. Yet in The Man Who Died he tells us plainly what must be, what the reawakening of Jesus should have meant - the true birth of free man. Where is he? What has happened to him? Will he ever come?’
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Clea', Part III, p. 762.
‘I see art more and more as a sort of manuring of the psyche. It has no intention, that is to say no theology. By nourishing the psyche, by dunging it up, it helps it to find its own level, like water. That level is an original innocence - who invented the perversion of Original Sin, that filthy obscenity of the West? Art, like a skilled masseur on a playing-field, is always standing by to help deal with casualties; and just as a masseur does, its ministrations ease up the tensions of the psyche's musculature. That is why it always goes for the sore places, its fingers pressing upon the knotted muscles, the tendon afflected with cramp - the sins, perversions, displeasing points which we are reluctant to accept. Revealing them with its harsh kindness it unravels the tensions, relaxes the psyche.’
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Clea', Part III, pp. 762-3.
‘Civilizations die in the measure that they become conscious of themselves. They realize, they lose heart, the propulsion of the unconscious motive is no longer there. Desperately they begin to copy themselves in the mirror. It is no use.’
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Clea', Part III, pp. 764.
‘Why for example don't they rercognize in Jesus the great Ironist that he is, the comedian? I am sure that two-thirds of the Beatitudes are jokes of squibs in the manner of Chuang Tzu. Generations of mystagogues and pedants have lost the sense. I am sure of it however because he must have known that Truth disappears with the telling of it. It can only be conveyed, not stated; irony alone is the weapon for such a task.’
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Clea', Part III, pp. 764.
‘The myth of London art now is that something unique happened here in the 1990s that still sets us apart. In fact, the best art of a decade ago was nothing like unique to Britain. All over the world, there was an intensification of art at the end of the 80s. Attribute it to Aids, or economic crisis, or Kurt Cobain, or whatever, but the shallow playfulness of "postmodernism" gave way to serious art about disease, loneliness and death. Messager, Sophie Calle and Christian Boltanski, the French representatives of this moment, were just as original as Rachel Whiteread.’
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, 6 October 2005. Full text at the Guardian online
‘The psychogeography patent is usually assigned to Guy Debord, prominent member of the Situationist International, an avant-garde group active between 1957 and 1972. Debord and the Situationists were looking for ways to explode the herd-think of the urban masses, and to disrupt their choreographed obedience to the sign-making habits of capitalism. To these ends, they developed the idea of the "dérive" or "drift": the randomly motivated walk, which - in Debord's well-known definition - was "a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the coniditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances." The dériveur was thus a radical update of the nineteenth-century figure of the flâneur, the pedestrian who wandered, idled and watched, and who - as Walter Benjamin pointed out - had been co-opted and degraded by capitalism into the figure of the shopper, aimlessly dot-to-dotting points of purchase.
The dérive was an aspect of the Situationists' wider drive to achieve a revolutionary transformation of everyday life. Specifically, it offered a way to see past or through what Debord called "the society of spectacle". By forcing an arbitrariness of route, and insisting on pedestrianism, the dériveur was, in theory, brought to experience astonishment upon the terrain of familiarity, and was made more sensitive to the hidden histories and encrypted events of the city.’
Robert MacFarlane, Times Literary Supplement, October 7 2005, p. 3
‘The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.’
quoted by M. John Harrison, Times Literary Supplement, October 7 2005, p. 21.
‘when he does not act, Nessim is nothing; he is completely flavourless, not in touch with himself at any point. Then he has no real self to interest a woman, to grip her ... When a sense of destiny consumes him he becomes truly splendid.’
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Clea', part I, chapter III, p. 696.
‘They have shaken all states and founded none. They nowhere created a great state or developed a distinctive culture of their own.’
quoted by Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 'Clea', chapter IV, p. 704.