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Verse 

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)

I

• Just as my fingers on these keys
• Make music, so the self-same sounds
• On my spirit make a music, too.
• Music is feeling, then, not sound;
  And thus it is that what I feel,
  Here in this room, desiring you,
  Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
  Is music.

II

• In the green water, clear and warm,
  Susanna lay.
  She searched
  The touch of springs,
  And found
  Concealed imaginings.
  She sighed,
  For so much melody.

• Upon the bank, she stood
  In the cool
  Of spent emotions.
  She felt, among the leaves,
  The dew
  Of old devotions.

• She walked upon the grass,
  Still quavering.
  The winds were like her maids,
  On timid feet,
  Fetching her woven scarves,
  Yet wavering.

• A breath upon her hand
  Muted the night.
  She turned —
  A cymbal crashed,
  Amid roaring horns.

IV

• Beauty is momentary in the mind —
  The fitful tracing of a portal;
  But in the flesh it is immortal.
  The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
  So evenings die, in their green going,
  A wave, interminably flowing.
  So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
  The cowl of winter, done repenting.
  So maidens die, to the auroral
  Celebration of a maiden’s choral.

• Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
  Of those white elders; but, escaping,
  Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
  Now, in its immortality, it plays
  On the clear viol of her memory,
  And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Death is the mother of beauty

• “Sunday Morning”

And today is the birthday of Graham Greene (Henry Graham Greene; St John’s House boarding house of Berkhamsted School, Hertfordshire, England 2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991 Vevey, Switzerland); writer and journalist, in my opinion, one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century.  Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or “entertainments” as he termed them). He was shortlisted, in 1966 and 1967, for the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. He was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize.

Greene was an agnostic, but was baptised into the Catholic faith in 1926 after meeting his future wife Vivien Dayrell-Browning.  They were married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary’s Church, Hampstead, north London.

In his discussions with Father Trollope, the priest to whom he went for instruction in Catholicism, Greene argued with the cleric “on the ground of dogmatic atheism”, as Greene’s primary difficulty with religion was what he termed the “if” surrounding God’s existence. He found, however, that “after a few weeks of serious argument the ‘if’ was becoming less and less improbable”, and Greene was converted and baptised after vigorous arguments initially with the priest in which he defended atheism, or at least the “if” of agnosticism.  Late in life, Greene called himself a “Catholic agnostic”.

Beginning in 1946, Greene had an affair with Catherine Walston, the wife of Harry Walston, a wealthy farmer and future life peer.  That relationship is generally thought to have informed the writing of The End of the Affair, published in 1951, when the relationship came to an end.  Greene left his family in 1947, but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, in accordance with Catholic teaching, and they remained married until Greene’s death in 1991.

Greene lived with manic depression (bipolar disorder).  He had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life.  In a letter to his wife, Vivien, he told her that he had “a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life,” and that “unfortunately, the disease is also one’s material”.

The End of the Affair (1951)

• If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

• I sat on my bed and I said to God: You’ve taken her, but you haven’t got me yet. I know Your cunning. It’s You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You’re a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don’t want Your peace and I don’t want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

• A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
  • Bk. 1, ch. 1

• To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.
  • Bk. 1, ch. 1

• Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.
  • Bk. 1, ch. 1

• I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and change conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book – the unconscious worked on it instead…
  • Bk. 1, ch. 2

• And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.
  • Bk. 1, ch. 6

• The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.
  • Bk. 2, ch. 1

• As long as one suffers one lives.
  • Bk. 5, ch. 1

Mac Tag