October 2010 Archives

“SCOBIE’S COMMON USAGE

Expressions noted from Scobie’s quaint conversation, his use of certain words, as: . . .

     Mauve, meaning ‘silly’, ex.: ‘He was just plain mauve when it came to, etc.’ . . .

     Saffron Walden, meaning ‘male brothel’, ex.: ‘He was caught in a Saffron Walden, old man, covered in jam.’ ”

—Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar, 1958.

“Amaril was an original man in his way and a bit of a dandy withal. The silver duelling-pistols, the engraved visiting-cards in their superb case, clothes cut in all the elegance of the latest fashions. His house was full of candles and he wrote for preference on black paper with white ink.”

—Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar, 1958.

“Come, I am always saying to Tarquin. There are still new universes to be inhabited, if you have the authentic disease and the courage. Come, drop down with me to the limits of the photic zone. Let us construct out of the sensitive bodies of this twilight race our new systems that we talk about all day long. . . . At a hundred fathoms fish like silver bullets. Under the viscous scalp itself phenomena like Porpita and Ianthina, blue smoke in water. At three hundred rufus, brick, claret. The violet flesh of pteropods, wicked, wicked, wicked. Here is a philosophic reality whose terminology is lying there, complete but unused. . . . Yes, beyond the territory of those remote tribes we only live in illuminated names: the pycnogonids, the nudibranchs, the brittlestars, the chitons, the crinoids, and the penatulids—away beyond these into that region from which we are going to receive the new myth.

     Attempt it, I am always saying to that sallow bastard, attempt it.”

—Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book, 1938.

“She lies down and arranges her legs like compasses. But of course you know? Do you know? Shape of an M. I have never seen anything so obscene in my life.”

—Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book, 1938.

“It is all laid out like a page in Gregory’s diary. See, from one end the pen begins to bite, you turn up a long furrow on the paper—a green furrow. The fingers tug slowly like a team of oxen. Behind the steel tooth green figures are coming alive, stretching their arms, and looking around. In this way everything was created.”

—Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book, 1938.

“Then there was my diary, the little black book in which the green ink smokes like many jewels.”

—Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book, 1938.

“All night now I will drive the black car under the moon in an agony of escape—I do not know from what.”

—Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book, 1938.

“ ‘I think’, he says at last, ‘I will go into a monastery. Will you come with me? Eh? We forget all these bitches, dear boy, and be holy holy holy. In black.’ ”

“The light grows and waxes, turning now from red to green. The clouds themselves are moving to reveal enormous cavities of sky. They peel the morning like a fruit.”

—Lawrence Durrell, Justine, 1957.

“The little ritual with Fatma seemed to free Justine from constraint; she was free to be natural, to move about with ‘that insolent unbalanced air, cursing her frock for catching in the cupboard door’, or pausing to apostrophize herself in the great spade-shaped mirror.”

—Lawrence Durrell, Justine, 1957.

“I was interesting, I realized, as a foreigner with good manners—and she turned upon me now the shy-wise regard of an owl from those enormous brown eyes whose faintly bluish eyeballs and long lashes threw into relief the splendour of the pupils, glittering and candid.”

—Lawrence Durrell, Clea, 1960.