The Alexandria Quartet

Truth has no heart... Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic...

In memory, I always see them like this, staring at each other with clasped hands, so near together, so far apart. The telephone is a modern symbol for communications which never take place.

There are only as many realities as you care to imagine...

And when night falls and the white city lights up the thousand candelabra of its parks and buildings, tunes in to the soft unearthly drum-music of Morocco or Caucasus, it looks like some great crystal liner asleep there, anchored to the horn of Africa — her diamond and fire-opal reflections twisting downwards like polished bars into the oily harbour among the battleships.

The city, inhabited by these memories of mine, moves not only backwards into our history, studded by the great names which mark every station of recorded time, but also back and forth in the living present, so to speak — among its contemporary faiths and races: the hundred little spheres which religion or lore creates and which cohere softly together like cells to form the great sprawling jellyfish which is Alexandria today.

Truth is what most contradicts itself in time.

Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?

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.

As for me I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended
like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.

Презрение к смерти переродилось в презрение к жизни, и жизнь подобный человек согласен принимать исключительно на своих условиях.