Fanaticism and serenity

Somehow, then, we must learn from these madmen to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Each one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there is no great art and no profound happiness – and what else is worth having? For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism, and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed. Perfection of form or increase of knowledge, pursuit of fame or service to the community, love of God or god of Love, – we must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 93

Romantic love, the supreme intoxication

For romantic love, the supreme intoxication of which we are capable, is more than an intensifying of life; it is a defiance of it; it belongs to those evasions of reality through excessive stimulus which Spinoza called 'titivations'.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 89

The deep leaden keel of unhappiness

Now that I seem to have attained a temporary calm, I understand how valuable unhappiness can be; melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers, but we venture out in weather that would sink them, and we choose our direction. What distinguishes true civilisations from their mass-fabricated substitutes except that tap-root to the Unconscious, the sense of original sin?

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 86

Money talks

Money talks through the rich as alcohol swaggers in the drunken, and calls softly to itself to unite into the lava flow which petrifies everything it touches.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 79

Hate is the consequence of fear

There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, popularity, vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may learn to cease from hating. Analyse in this way the hatred of ideas, or of the type of person whom one has once loved and whose face is preserved in Spirits of Anger. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 77

Termitaries of the future

My rôle is not to belong to the future but, like Eliot's poet, "to live in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past". I believe that a conscious affinity with Nature forms the shield of Perseus through which man can affront the Gorgon of his fate and that, in the termitaries of the future where humanity cements itself up from the light of the sun, this dragon-slaying mirror will rust and tarnish.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 76

Cowardice in living

Cowardice in living: without health and courage we cannot face the present or the germ of the future in the present, and we take refuge in evasion. Evasion through comfort, through society, through acquisitiveness, through the book-bed-bath defence system, above all through the past, the flight to the romantic womb of history, into primitive myth-making.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 75

Truth is a river

Yet ridiculous as may seem the dualities in conflict at any given time, it does not follow that dualism is in itself a worthless process. Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 73

The ultimate meaning

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 259

The end of the world in the world

"The book I'm looking for," says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, "is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 243

For the love of the trick

Something must always remain that eludes us... for power to have an object on which to be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues..."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 240

Written truth

But if an individual truth is the only one that a book can contain, I might as well accept it and write my truth. The book of my memory? No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form. The book of my desires? Those also are true only when their impulse acts independently of my conscious will. The only truth I can write is that of the instant I am living.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 181

Beginnings

But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest – for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both – must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 153

Art is memory

Art is memory: memory is re-enacted desire.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 66

Card-indexes

Our memories are card-indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 63

The reward of art

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to live without it.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 54

Dungeon of self

Living in the present (the only escape) has to be contrived by drugs, by injections of work or pleasure, or by the giving 'which plays you least false'. The past is a festering wound; the present the compress vainly applied, painfully torn off. [...] We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 52

The world of Relation

Physical or intellectual attraction between two people is a constant communication. Underneath the rational and voluntary world is the involuntary, impulsive, integrated world, the world of Relation in which everything is one; where sympathy and antipathy are engrossed in their selective tug-of-war.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 49

Reading

"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead..."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 72

Perfection vs disintegration

I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 57

The artist's solitude

A great artist is like a fig-tree whose roots run a hundred feet underground, in search of tee-leaves, cinders and old boots. Art which is directly produced for the Community can never have the same withdrawn quality as that which is made out of the artist's solitude. For this possesses the integrity and bleak exhileration that are to be gained only form the absence of an audience and from communion with the primal sources of unconscious life. One cannot serve both beauty and power.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 42

Write in water and cast in sand

Today an artist must expect to write in water and to cast in sand.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 41

The desire to evolve

Ennui is the condition of not fulfilling our potentialities; remorse of not having fulfilled them; anxiety of not being able to fulfill them, – but what are they?
Let us take a simple idea like the desire to improve, to become better. Is it a natural instinct, or is it the result of early conditioning? Crocodiles, king-crabs, eagles, no not evolve, and yet seem perfectly content with their humble status. And many human beings enjoy a quiet existence without feeling themselves obliged to expand or develop. With the desire to evolve goes the fear of not evolving, or guilt. If there were no parents to make us try to be good, no schoolmasters to persuade us to learn, no one who wished to be proud of us, should not we be happy? [...] Does nature care in the least whether we evolve or not? Her instincts are for the gratification of hunger and sex, the destruction of rivals and the protection of offspring. What monster first slipped in the idea of progress? Who destroyed our static conception of happiness with these growing-pains?

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 40

The combustion of the Present with the Past

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market of Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: that is civilization, and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of combining with the Past. Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places, and we need only a few bombs and some prisons to blot it out altogether.
The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this the uncivilized have not forgiven them. One by one, the Golden Apples of the West are shaken from the tree.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 36

Freedom from Angst

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable. Happiness is in the imagination. What we perform is always inferior to what we imagine; yet day-dreaming brings guilt; there is no happiness except through freedom from Angst, and only creative work, communion with nature and helping others are Angst-free.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 28

Shattered time and literature

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 8

The benign indifference of the world

For the first time in a very long time I thought of mother. I felt that I understood why at the end of her life she'd taken a 'fiancé' and why she'd pretended to start again. There at the home, where lives faded away, there too the evenings were a kind of melancholy truce. So close to death, mother must have felt liberated and ready to live her life again. No one, no one at all had any right to cry over her. And I too felt ready to live my life again. As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I'd been happy, and that I was still happy.

Albert Camus, The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) p. 117

Enough memories not to get bored

I ended up not being bored at all as soon as I learnt how to remember things. Sometimes I'd start thinking about my room and, in my imagination, I'd set off from one corner and walk round making a mental note of everything I saw on the way. At first it didn't take very long. But every time I did it, it took a bit longer. Because I'd remember every piece of furniture, and on every piece of furniture, every object and, on every object, every detail, every mark, crack or chip, and then even the colour or the grain of the wood. At the same time, I'd try not to lose track of my inventory, to enumerate everything. So that, by the end of a few weeks, I could spend hours doing nothing but listing the things in my room. And the more I thought about it the more things I dug out of memory that I hadn't noticed before or that I'd forgotten about. I realized then that a man who'd only lived for a day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He'd have enough memories not to get bored. In a way, that was a good thing.

Albert Camus, The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) p. 77

An oceanic feeling

I wish my friends to know that I am leaving their company in a peaceful frame of mind, with some timid hopes for a de-personalised after-life beyond due confines of space, time and matter and beyond the limits of our comprehension. This 'oceanic feeling' has often sustained me at difficult moments, and does so now, while I am writing this.

Arthur Koestler's suicide note, 1983

A solitary bee

The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning. I know that in such contemplation lies my true personality, and yet I live in an age when on all sides I am told exactly the opposite and asked to believe that the social and cooperative activity of humanity is the one way through which life can be developed. Am I an exception, a herd-outcast? There are also solitary bees, and it is not claimed that they are biologically inferior. A planet of contemplators, each sunning himself before his doorstep like the mason-wasp; no one would help another, and no one would need help!

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 19

Obstacles to wisdom

Three faults, which are always found together and which infect every activity: laziness, vanity, cowardice. If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom. Yet it is only the thinking which begins when habit-thinking leaves off, which is ignited by the logic of the train of thought, that is worth pursuing. A comfortable person can seldom follow up an original idea any further than a London pigeon can fly.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 15