Контрапункт

Love, he had then believed (for he was only twenty-two at the time, ardently pure, with the adolescent purity of sexual desires turned inside out, just down from Oxford and stuffed with poetry and the lucubrations of philosophers and mystics), love was talk, love was spiritual communion and companionship. That was real love. The sexual business was only an irrelevancy, unavoidable, because unfortunately human beings had bodies, but to be kept as far as possible in the background.

He was free. Free from recollection and anticipation. Free, for an hour or two, to refuse to admit the existence of past or future. Free to live only now and here, in the place where his body happened at each instant to be.

He answered her with lies—half lies, that were worse, for the hypocritically justifying element of truth in them, than frank whole lies.

В ее кругу глупость считалась скорее добродетелью, чем недостатком. Чрезмерно умный человек рисковал уклониться от идеала джентльмена.Быть умным рискованно.

She liked to make everything sound exciting-as exciting as she still felt everything to be. She was only twenty.

‘I must be an idiot,’ he assured himself, when he thought of other people’s political enthusiasms and his own indifference. He was too modest to attribute the idiocy to the other people.

He put his hand under his chair, he touched wood. Whenever John Bidlake saw something unpleasant, he always felt safer if he could touch wood. He didn’t believe in God, of course; he liked to tell disobliging stories about the clergy. But wood, wood-there was something about wood….

A healthy sensualist, he made his love straightforwardly, naturally, with the good animal gusto of a child of nature.

‘Don’t expect me to talk about the stars and madonna lilies and the cosmos,’ he said. ‘They’re not my line. I don’t believe in them. I believe in—’ And his language became what a mysterious convention has decreed to be unprintable.

A noble end may justify shameful means. But when the end is shameful, what then?

The astounding process of creation was going on within her; but Marjorie was conscious only of sickness and lassitude; the mystery for her meant nothing but fatigue and ugliness and a chronic anxiety about the future, pain of the mind as well as discomfort of the body.