It Goes

“Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.”

“She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything 

more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have 

to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). 

They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), 

they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, 

wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let 

drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. 

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people 

feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, 

evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. 

There was an embrace in death.”

Everything important happens accidentally, and I don’t notice it until later.

Mr. Emerson says to Lucy Honeychurch that the worst part of life is muddledom, and I didn’t get it until reading this:

“She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity.” 

My self-perception is Sylvia Plath’s oven.

“If you’re in a relationship, sometimes you probably feel like you’re fighting a caged death-match with an invisible spider monkey. And the monkey is rabid. And you don’t have any legs. And then a buffalo jumps in there and starts head-butting everything and your face catches on fire and there is a general atmosphere of chaos.”

“Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.”