Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

Between infinity and eternity stretches the thin hard tightrope human beings must walk, joined at the waist! Do not let these unamiable propositions dismay you, Brother Ass. They are written down in pure joy, uncontaminated by a desire to preach!

I am really writing for an audience of the blind — but aren’t we all? Good art points, like a man too ill to speak, like a baby! But if instead of following the direction it indicates you take it for a thing in itself, having some sort of absolute value, or as a thesis upon something which can be paraphrased, surely you miss the point; you lose yourself at once among the barren abstractions of the critic? Try to tell yourself that its fundamental object was only to invoke the ultimate healing silence — and that the symbolism contained in form and pattern is only a frame of reference through which, as in a mirror, one may glimpse the idea of a universe at rest, a universe in love with itself. Then like a babe in arms you will ‘milk the universe at every breath’! We must learn to read between the lines, between the lives.

Liza used to say: ‘But its very perfection makes one sure that it will come to an end.’ She was right; but women will not accept time and the dictates of the death-divining second. They do not see that a civilization is simply a great metaphor which describes the aspirations of the individual soul in collective form — as perhaps a novel or a poem might do. The struggle is always for greater consciousness. But alas! 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.

But surely there is a catch in all this? Yes, Time is the catch! Space is a concrete idea, but Time is abstract. In the scar tissue of Proust’s great poem you see that so clearly; his work is the great academy of the time-consciousness. But being unwilling to mobilize the meaning of time he was driven to fall back on memory, the ancestor of hope!

Ah! but being a Jew he had hope — and with Hope comes the irresistible desire to meddle. Now we Celts mate with despair out of which alone grows laughter and the desperate romance of the eternally hopeless. We hunt the unattainable, and for us there is only a search unending.

For him it would mean nothing, my phrase ‘the prolongation of childhood into art’. Brother Ass, the diving-board, the trapeze, lie just to the eastward of this position! A leap through the firmament to a new status — only don’t miss the ring!

Why for example don’t they recognize in Jesus the great Ironist that he is, the comedian? I am sure that two-thirds of the Beatitudes are jokes or 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.

Or let us turn to another aspect of the thing; it was you, just a moment ago, who mentioned our poverty of observation in all that concerns each other — the limitations of sight itself. Bravely spoken! But translated spiritually you get the picture of a man walking about the house, hunting for the spectacles which are on his forehead. To see is to imagine! And what, Brother Ass, could be a better illustration than your manner of seeing Justine, fitfully lit up in the electric signs of the imagination? It is not the same woman evidently who set about besieging me and who was finally driven off by my sardonic laughter. What you saw as soft and appealing in her seemed to me a specially calculated hardness, not which she invented, but which you evoked in her. All that throaty chatter, the compulsion to exteriorize hysteria, reminded me of a feverish patient plucking at a sheet! The violent necessity to incriminate life, to explain her soul—states, reminded me of a mendicant soliciting pity by a nice exhibition of sores. Mentally she always had me scratching myself! Yet there was much to admire in her and I indulged my curiosity in exploring the outlines of her character with some sympathy — the configurations of an unhappiness which was genuine, though it always smelt of grease paint! The child, for example!

‘I found it, of course. Or rather Mnemjian did. In a brothel.

It died from something, perhaps meningitis. Darley and Nessim came and dragged me away. All of a sudden I realized that I could not bear to find it; all the time I hunted I lived on the hope of finding it. But this thing, once dead, seemed suddenly to deprive me of all purpose. I recognized it, but my inner mind kept crying out that it was not true, refusing to let me recognize it, even though I already had consciously done so!’ The mixture of conflicting emotions was so interesting that I jotted them down in my notebook between a poem and a recipe for angel bread which I got from El Kalef. Tabulated thus: Relief at end of search.

Despair at end of search; no further motive force in life.

Horror at death.

Relief at death. What future possible for it?

Intense shame (don’t understand this).

Sudden desire to continue search uselessly rather than admit truth.

Preferred to continue to feed on false hopes!

A bewildering collection of fragments to leave among the analects of a moribund poet! But here was the point I was trying to make. She said: ‘Of course neither Nessim nor Darley noticed anything. Men are so stupid, they never do. I would have been able to forget it even perhaps, and dream that I had never really discovered it, but for Mnemjian, who wanted the reward, and was so convinced of the truth of his case that he made a great row.

There was some talk of an autopsy by Balthazar. I was foolish enough to go to his clinic and offer to bribe him to say it was not my child. He was pretty astonished. I wanted him to deny a truth which I so perfectly knew to be true, so that I should not have to change my outlook. I would not be deprived of my sorrow, if you like; I wanted it to go on — to go on passionately searching for what I did not dare to find. I even frightened Nessim and incurred his suspicions with my antics over his private safe. So the matter passed off, and for a long time I still went on automatically searching until underneath I could stand the strain of the truth and come to terms with it. I see it so clearly, the divan, the tenement.’ Here she put on her most beautiful expression, which was one of intense sadness, and put her hands upon her breasts. Shall I tell you something? I suspected her of lying ; it was an unworthy thought but then … I am an unworthy person.

I: ‘Have you ever been back to the place?’ She: ‘No. I have often wanted to, but did not dare.’ She shuddered a little. ‘In my memory I have become attached to that old divan.

It must be knocking about somewhere. You see, I am still half convinced it was all a dream.’ At once I took up my pipe, violin and deerstalker like a veritable Sherlock. I have always been an X-marks-the—spot man. ‘Let us go and revisit it’ I said briskly. At the worst, I thought, such a visitation would be cathartic. It was in fact a supremely practical thing to suggest, and to my surprise she at once rose and put on her coat. We walked silently down through the western edges of the town, arm in arm.

There was some kind of festival going on in the Arab town which was blazing with electric fight and flags. Motionless sea, small high clouds, and a moon like a disapproving archimandrite of another faith. Smell of fish, cardamon seed and frying entrails packed with cummin and garlic. The air was full of the noise of mandolines scratching their little souls out on the night, as if afflicted with fleas — scratching until the blood came on the liceintoxicated night! The air was heavy. Each breath invisibly perforated it. You felt it come in and out of the lungs as if in a leather bellows. Eheu! It was grisly all that light and noise, I thought.