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

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

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

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