“Clear thought makes clear speech.”
“Well. Reich says that history so far is always one thing. The Hellenisation of Europe. … The Greeks were the first to evolve universal ideals. Which were passed on. Through two channels. Law-giving Rome. And the Roman church; Paul, who had made Christianity a universal working scheme. So Europe has been Hellenised. And the Hellenisation of the rest of the world will be through its Europeanisation. The enemy to this is the rude materialistic modern Germany. The only hope, England. Which he calls a nation of ignorant specialists, ignorant of history; believing only in race, which doesn’t exist—a blindfold humanitarian giant, utterly unaware that other people are growing up in Europe and have the use of their eyes. The French don’t want to do anything outside their large pleasant home. They are the sedentary Greeks; townspeople. The English are Romans, official, just, inartistic. Good colonists, not intrinsically, but because they send so much of their best away from their little home. A child can see that the English and Americans care less for money than any people in the western world, are adventurous and wandering and improvident; the only people with ideals and a sense of the future. Inartistic. …”
“Geography he calls the ground symphony of history, but nothing more, or Ireland would play first fiddle in Great Britain. The rest is having to fight for your life and being visited by your neighbours. England has attracted thousands of brilliant foreigners, who have made her, including the Scotch, who until they became foreigners in England were nothing. And the foreigner of foreigners is the permanently alien Jew. And the genius of all geniuses Loyola, because he made all his followers permanent aliens. Countries without foreigners are doomed. Like Hungary. Doomed to extinction if England does not beat Germany. That’s all.”
“There won’t, if we can help it, be any need for England to beat Germany. There are, you know, possibly unobserved by your rather wildly rocketting Reich, a few eyes in England. That war can be written away; by journalists and others, written into absurdity.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. Listening to Reich makes one certain that the things that seem to be happening in the world are illusions and the real result of the unseen present movement of history is war with Germany. I don’t like Reich. His idea of making everything begin with Greece. His awful idea that art follows only on pressure and war. Yet it is true that the harassed little seaboard peoples who lived insecurely did have their art periods after they had fought for their lives. Then no more wars no more Art. … Well; perhaps Art like war is just male ferocity!”
“Nonsense, Miriam.”
“Do you really think the war can be written away? There are so many opinions, and reading keeps one always balanced between different sets of ideas.”
“You’re too omnivorous, Miriam. You get the hang of too many things. You’re scattered.”
“The better you hear a thing put, the more certain you are there’s another view. And then there are motives.”
“Ah, now you’re talking. … Motives; can be used. Almost any sort of motive can be roped in; and directed. You ought to write up that little meeting by the way. You’re lucky you know, Miriam, in your opportunities for odd experience. Write it up. Don’t forget.”
“You weren’t there. It wasn’t a joke. I don’t want to be facetious about it.”
“You’re too near. But you will. Save it up. You’ll see all these little excursions in perspective when you’re round the next corner.”
“Oh I hate all these written up things; ‘Jones always wore a battered cricket cap, a little askew.’ They simply drive me mad. You know the whole thing is going to be lies from beginning to end.”
“You’re a romantic, Miriam.”
“I’m not. It’s the ‘always wore.’ Trying to get at you, just as much as ‘Iseult the Fair.’ Just as unreal, just as much in an assumed voice. The amazing thing is the way men go prosing on forever and ever, admiring each other, never suspecting.”
“You’ve got to create an illusion you know.”
“Why illusion? Life isn’t an illusion.”
“We don’t know what life is. You don’t know what life is. You think too much. Life’s got to be lived. The difference between you and me is that you think to live and I live to think. You’ve made a jolly good start. Done things. Come out and got your economic independence. But you’re stuck.”
“Now there’s somebody who’s writing about life. Who’s shown what has been going on from the beginning. Mrs. Stetson. It was the happiest day of my life when I read Women and Economics.”
“It’s no good, you know, that idea of hers. Women have got to specialise. They are specialists from the beginning. They can’t run families, and successful careers at the same time.”
“They could if life were differently arranged. They will. It’s not that so much. Though it’s a relief to know that homes won’t be always a tangle of nerve-racking heavy industries which ought to be done by men. But the blaze of light she brings is by showing that women were social from the first and that all history has been the gradual socialisation of the male. It is partly complete. But the male world is still savage.”
“The squaw, Miriam, was—”
“Absolutely social and therefore civilised, compared to the hunting male. She went out of herself. Mother and son was society. He had no chance. Everyone, even his own son, was an enemy and a rival.”
“That’s old Ellis’s idea. There’s been a matriarchate all right, Miriam, for your comfort.”
“I don’t want comfort, I want truth.”
“Oh you don’t, Miriam. One gives you facts and you slide away from them.”
Household life breaks everything up. Comes crashing down on moments that cannot recur. … Thought runs on, below the surface to conclusions, arriving distractingly at the wrong moment.
It always seems a deliberate conspiracy to suppress conclusions. Lunch, grinning like a jack-in-the-box, in a bleak emptiness. People ought not to meet at lunch
