The Razor’s Edge
The book that made me cry on an airplane. One of my two favorite books. Have you ever read a book that made your heart feel an overwhelming sense of belonging? Here are some parts from the books that I loved while reading and wrote down.
Death ends all thing and so is the comprehensive conclusion of a story, but marriage finished it very properly too and the sophisticated are ill-advised to sneer at what is by convention termed a happy ending.
The dead looks terribly dead when they’re dead.
“Perhaps whatever it is that happened to him during the war has left him with a restlessness that is won’t let him be. Don’t you think he may be pursuing an ideal that is hidden in a cloud of unknowing—like an astronomer looking for a star that only a mathematical calculation tells him exists?”
“He gives me such an odd impression sometimes; he gives the impression of a sleep-walker who’s suddenly wakened in a strange place and can’t think where he is.”
Solitude, and an air so pure that it goes to your head like wine and you feel like a million dollars.
“What would happen to America if everyone shirked as you’re shirking?”
“You’re very severe, honey,” he smiled. “The answer to that is that everyone doesn’t feel like me. Fortunately for themselves, perhaps most people are prepared to follow the normal course; what you forget is that I want to learn as passionately as—Gary, for instance, wants to make pots of money.”
(Lin: there is the same thing in the moon and sixpence)
“I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It’s illimitable. It’s such a happy life. There’s only one thing like it, when you’re up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you. You’re intoxicated by the boundless space. You feel such a sense of exhilaration that you wouldn’t exchange it for all the power and glory on the world. I was reading Descartes the other day. The ease, the grace, the lucidity. Gosh!”
… and they talked so brightly, with so much conviction that what they were saying was worth saying, that you almost thought they were talking sense.
“… there are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can’t help themselves, they’ve got to do it. They’re prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning.”
“Even the people who love them?”
“Oh, yes”
“Is that anything more than plain selfishness?”
“I wouldn’t know.” I smile.
It’s a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called but few are chosen.
“He said that the world isn’t a creation, for out of nothing nothing comes; but a manifestation of the eternal nature; well, that was all right, but then he added that evil is as direct a manifestation of the divine as good.”
“I’ve always said that eight was the perfect number,” said Elliott, determined to look on the bright side of things. “It’s intimate enough to permit of general conversation and yet large enough to give the impression of a party.”
He greeted me with pleasant cordiality and indeed seemed as glad to see me as if I were an old friend, but I had the impression that his rather noisy heartiness was a habit of manner that scarcely corresponded with his inner feeling.
And now, as thought she had sought to catch a sunbeam in her hand and it slipped through her fingers as she grasped, she was a trifle dismayed.
Unless love is passion, it’s not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction, but on impediment.
Passion is destructive. It destroyed Anthony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O’shea. And if it doesn’t destroy it dies.
In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honest is not only the best but the only policy.
“I very nearly fell in love with him myself once. You might as well fall in love with a reflection in the water or a ray of sunshine or a cloud in the sky. I had a narrow escape. Even now when I think of it I tremble at the danger I ran.”
“I strove with none, for none was worth my strive.
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks, and I’m ready to depart.”
“… self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that besides it even lust and hunger are trifling.”
I think he’s been seeking for a philosophy, or maybe a religion, and a rule of life that’ll satisfy both his head and his heart.
(To be continued…)