Commonplace Book

'...throughout the life of the wisest man his destiny keeps his philosophy in a state of siege.'

from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (Chapter 9)

Commonplace Book

'...Though it was practically annoying that she should be sad, the hue and spirit of sadness came home to her aspect. Sorrow visited her tenderly falling eyelids like a sister.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XI)

Commonplace Book

'...While she was hearing from her sister almost weekly, her confidence was buoyed on a summer sea. In the silence it fell upon a dread. She had no answer in her mind for her father's unspoken dissatisfaction, and she had to conceal her cruel anxiety. There was an interval of two months: a blank fell charged with apprehension that was like the humming of a toneless wind before storm; worse than the storm, for any human thing to bear.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter IX)

Commonplace Book

'I don't know what I played. It was the violin that played while I held it and listened. I forgot everybody, - forgot Kloster critically noting what I did wrong, and forgot, so completely that I might have been unconscious, myself. I was listening; and what I heard were secrets, secrets strange and exquisite; noble, and so courageous that suffering didn't matter, didn't touch, - all the secrets of life. I can't explain. It wasn't like anything one knows really. It was like something very important, very beautiful that one used to know, but has forgotten.'

from a letter dated July 19, 1914, in Christine by Alice Cholmondeley (Elizabeth von Arnim)

Commonplace Book

'"...It was that marvellous French and Russian stuff. I must play it to you, and play it to you, till you love it. It's like nothing there has ever been. It is of an exquisite youth, - untouched, fearless, quite heedless of tradition, going its own way straight through and over difficulties and prohibitions that for centuries have been supposed final. People like Wagner and Strauss and the rest seem so much sticky and insanitary mud next to these exquisite young ones, and so very old; and not old and wonderful like the great men, Beethoven and Bach and Mozart, but uglily old like a noisy old lady in a yellow wig."'

from a letter dated June 21, 1914 in Christine by Alice Cholmondeley (Elizabeth von Arnim)

In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (2014)

I'll admit that I had what is possibly a peculiar fantasy concerning this one. It was slated for publication in 1971 and then withdrawn, after which its author remained silent, so it has long been one of those 'lost' novels which may never have seen the light of day. Harrower had arguably been Australia's premier female writer of the 50s and 60s, alongside Patrick White as the main male. So it has been anticipated at a somewhat higher pitch. My odd fantasy concerns the likening I can feel between Harrower's style and that of many mid-century proponents from other Anglo cultures - writers like Elizabeth Taylor and Hortense Calisher. They have a spare poetic density which is a superb vehicle for insight and guarded emotional effect. And of course I feel the debt that style owes to vanguard authors like Virginia Woolf; my fantasy involved the fact that Woolf was not successful in her 1941 suicide attempt, that she continued to work alongside her husband Leonard at the Hogarth Press, that she mentored younger English writers like Taylor. And then, a year after Leonard's death in 1969, when she was 88, she took up the fifth novel of a fine Australian as her first commission after the grief had laid her off for a few months, and the rest was history, both in terms of that author's reputation being expanded, and of Woolf's becoming a pioneering sole female proprietor of a publishing house. Silly really, but fun to think about. The main characters here don't go through a huge plot-arc, though the story is more eventful than might first be anticipated. Mid-century, a well-off brother and sister, he back from the war and tender, she wide-eyed and just setting out in the world, take up a less fortunate pair and find that the friendship lasts. Their circles are very well-heeled, and all sorts of possibilities come to them with ease, but Harrower is at pains to point out the fact that this is not dehumanising, it simply creates its own topography in terms of the emotions and tensions that resonate through their lives - such challenges as we all have in common, but differently expressed. Agonies and triumphs, marriages, collapses, punctuate the picture as it progresses, magnified by Harrower's intense insight. By the time we reach the late 60s and early 70s, at the end of the book, the four are all more or less dissatisfied, and wrangling each other, along with partners and children, in tangled streams of stultified intent and misunderstanding. A slightly unbelievable accidental mistake by one of them blows apart these problems; the sediments really kick up in their pool. The end shows those murks redescending in a new arrangement - not a sense of immature release, but rather a wiseing-up, an understanding breaking through some, but not all, blockages. It is not the plot though that marks this book out - like those aforementioned contemporaries, it is the writing of these humanities that proves Harrower a great exponent of the modern mind.

Commonplace Book

'...Though I was the only child there, the household did not at all revolve around me, and so the adult world pressed only lightly upon me. My aunts and uncle had, I imagine, no theories about child upbringing, and therefore little anxiety over it. Indulgent they certainly were; but since they themselves had been brought up in a large family, they knew instinctively the steadying effect upon a child of having its own status within the group, of "knowing its place" and living by a natural system of degree under which the demands of the younger are not given automatic priority over the rights of the older; and so their indulgence to me was neither capricious nor enervating.'

from The Buried Day by C Day Lewis (Part One, Chapter 2)

Commonplace Book

'"...It's only that, when you're close to death, everything wears a look of eternity. Ephemeral expressions of bad feeling felt to me" - she clapped a hand to her chest - "like a last message from the human race. The terrible urgency, and the way no one could hear. You're like a wireless receiver turned to finer and finer degrees of receptivity, so that you receive messages other people aren't really aware of sending."'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part Three)

Commonplace Book

'"...I've always been convinced that if you're of sound mind you have no real right to - lower the confidence of the world. Something like that. By deserting it. Letting it be known that you reject what makes everyone else cling to life..."'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part Three)