MORE BLACK BOOK

All this is an evasion of the true disease, the disease which I try to drown in books, in bright pictures.  All day long I pace the museums, inspecting the relics of our history, all carefully laid out and labelled in scholarly hands on postcards.  At night I meditate on the quantities of pure gold which we house so carelessly in glass cases, unaware that this same putrid stuff is decaying in our arteries.  Is it possible to keep the vitality of the centuries in a bottle, with a postcard on it to hint at an identity long since lost!  My own history, my present, is confused by the death which I see gathered around me, here a jawbone, there a femur, here a wedding ring, there a pickaxe.  I cannot live because the decomposing bodies of my ancestors dog me at every turn.  They are not living in their myth, but dead, influencing my dying, not my life.  That is why action is so erratic, so full of extremes, because the hypaethral universes which should live in us today are dead, and behind glass.  Instead of nourishing us they are the umpires of our defeat, our decline and fall.

The circuit is complete.  We have put our myths in the cellar and must start building again with new implements, a new tongue.

Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book.

THE BLACK BOOK

Everything is plausible here, because nothing is real.  Forgive me.  The barriers of the explored world, the divisions, the corridors, the memories – they sweep down on us in a catharsis of misery, riving us.  I am like a child left alone in these corridors, these avenues of sleeping doors among the statuary, with no friends but an audience of yawning boots.  I am being honest with you for once, I, Death Gregory, the monkey on the stick.  If I were to prick out my history for you, as Lobo his plans on the mature parchment, would you be able to comprehend for an instant the significance of the act?  I doubt it.  In the field of history we all share the irrelevance of painted things.  I have only this portion of time in which to suffer.

The realms of history, then! The fact magical, the fancy wonderful, the fact treasonable.  All filtered, through the wretched instruments of the self.  The seventy million I’s whose focus embraces these phenomena and records them on the plate of the mind.  The singularity of the world would be inspiriting if one did not feel there was a catch in it.  When I was nine the haggard female guardian in whose care I had been left exclaimed: “Horses sweat, Herbert.  Gentlemen perspire.  Don’t say that nasty word any more.”  I shall never forget the phrase; it will remain with me until I die – along with that other useless and ineradicable lumber – the proverbs, practices, and precepts of a dead life in a dead land.  it is, after all, the one permanent thing, the one unchanging milestone on the climb.  it is I who change; constant, like a landmark of the locality, the lumber remains.  Like a lake seen from different altitudes during a journey, its position never varying: only its aspect altering in relation to my own place on the landscape.  I think that what we are to be is decided for us in the first few years of life; what we gain afterwards in the way of reason, adjustment etc., is superficial: a veneer, which only aggravates our disorders.  Perish the wise, the seekers after reason.  I am that I am.  The treasonable self remains.  I am not more astonished now by the knowledge that gentlemen can, if they want, have wings, than I was by that pithy social formula; or, for example, that red blood runs in fishes.  I shall never be more amazed.

Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book.