There was still a pale light flowing into the dusk of the garret. It must be only about nine o’clock … the gas flared out making a winter brilliance … Four sermons on Dante. … Kuenen’s Life of Dante … Gemma Donati, Gemma, busily making puddings in the world lit by the light of the Mystic Rose; swept away by the rush of words … a stout Italian woman … Gemma; Bayatrichay … they were bound to reach music … a silent Italian woman in a hot kitchen scolding, left out of the mystic rose … Lourdes … Le Nabab … atroce comédie de bonheur conjugale sans relâche … the Frenchman expressing what the Englishman only thinks … “the wife” … I met my wife! … red nose and check trousers, smoky self-indulgent married man, all the self-indulgent married men in the audience guffawing … “You must be ready to face being taken for granted, you must hide your troubles, learn to say nothing of your unnoticed exhausting toil, wear a smile above the heart that you believe is breaking; stand steady in face of the shipwreck of all your dreams. Remember that although he does not know it, in spite of all his apparent oblivion and neglect, if you fail, his universe crumbles” … men live their childish ignorant lives on a foundation of pain and exhaustion. Down in the fevered life of pain and exhaustion there is a deep certainty. There is no deep certainty in the lives of men. If there were they would not be forever talking with conceited guilty lips as if something were waiting if they stopped, to spring on them from behind. … The evolution of the Idea of God. … I have forgotten what that is about … a picture of a sort of Madonna … corn goddess, with a child and sheaves of corn. … The Mechanism of Thought. … Thirty Sane Criticisms. … Critique de la Pensée Moderne; traduit par H. Navray, Mercure de France. … How did he begin? Where was he when he came out and began saying everybody was wrong? How did he get to know about it all? She took down a volume unwillingly … there was something being lost, something waiting within the quiet air of the room that would be gone if she read. It was not too late. Why did men write books? Modern men? The book was open. Her eyes scanned unwillingly. Fabric. How did he find his words. No one had ever said fabric about anything. It made the page alive … a woven carpet, on one side a beautiful glowing pattern, on the other dull stringy harshness … there is a dangerous looseness … her heart began beating apprehensively. The room was dead about her. She sat down tense, and read the sentence through. There is a dangerous looseness in the fabric of our minds. She imagined the words spoken, looseness was ugly, making the mouth ugly in speech. There is a looseness in the fabric of our minds. That is what he would have said in conversation, looking nowhere and waiting to floor an objection. There is a dangerous, he had written. That introduced another idea. You were not supposed to notice that there were two statements, but to read smoothly on, accepting. It was deliberate. Put in deliberately to frighten you into reading more. Dangerous. The adjective in the sentence, personal, a matter of opinion. People who read the books do not think about adjectives. They like them. Conversation is adjectives! … all the worry of conversation is because people use adjectives and rush on. … But you can’t describe … but dangerous is not a descriptive adjective … there is a twisted looseness, that describes … that is Saxon … Abendmahl … dangerous, French … the Prince of Wales uses the elegant Norman idiom … dangerous is an idea, the language of ideas. It expresses nothing but an opinion about life … a threat daring you to disagree. Dangerous to what? … Man is a badly made machine … an oculist could improve upon the human eye … and the mind wrong in some way too … logic is a cheap arithmetic. Imagination. What is imagination? Is it his imagination that has found out that mind is loose? Is not imagination mind? It is his imaginative mind. A special kind of mind. But if mind discovers that mind is unreliable, its conclusion is also unreliable. That’s logic … Barbara. All Mind is unreliable. Man is mind, therefore man is unreliable. … Then it is useless to try and know anything … books go on … he has invented imagination. Images. Fabric. But he did not invent dangerous. That is cheek. By this sin fell the angels. Perhaps he is a fallen angel. I was right when I told Eve I had sold my soul to the devil. … “Quite a good afterglow” and then wheeling alertly about to capture and restate some thread … and then later, finding you still looking. “M’yes; a fine … fuliginous … pink … God’s had a strawberry ice for supper” … endless inexhaustible objections … a cold grim scientific world … Alma knew it. In that clear bright house with the satisfying furniture … now let’s all make Buddhas. Let’s see who can make the best Buddha. … Away from them you could forget; but it was going on all the time … somehow ahead of everything else that was going on. … She got up and replaced the book. It was on her shelf; a signed copy; extraordinary. It was an extraordinary privilege. No one else could write books like that; no one else knew so much about everything. Right or wrong it was impossible to give up hearing all he had to say … and they were kind, alive to one’s life in a way other people were not. …
She strolled to the window, finding renewal in the familiar creaking of her floor in the house, here. … She went back across the happy creaking and turned out the gas and came again to the window. The sky was dark enough to show a brilliant star; here and there in the darkness of
