The Death of the Heart

You expect every bloody thing to be either right or wrong, and be done with the whole of oneself.

experience means nothing till it repeats itself.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realisation is something of an ordeal. Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

In the first great phase of love, which with very young people lasts a long time, the beloved is not outside one, so neither comes nor goes. In this dumb, exalted and exalting confusion, what actually happens plays very little part. In fact the spirit stays so tuned up that the beloved’s real presence could be too much, unbearable: one wants to say to him: “Go, that you may be here.” The most fully-lived hours, at this time, are those of memory or of anticipation, when the heart expands to the full without any check. Portia now referred to Eddie everything that could happen: she saw him in everything that she saw.

Willing absence (however unwilling) is the negation of love. To remember can be at times no more than a cold duty, for we remember only in the limited way that is bearable. We observe small rites, but we defend ourselves against that terrible memory that is stronger than will. We defend ourselves from the rooms, the scenes, the objects that make for hallucination, that make the senses start up and fasten upon a ghost. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

To look at the sea the day someone is crossing is to accept the finality of the defined line. For the senses bound our feeling world: there is an abrupt break where their power stops —when the door closes, the train disappears round the curve, the plane’s droning becomes inaudible, the ship enters the mist or drops over the line of sea. The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out.

Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

She did not know half she remembered tili a sensation touched her; she forgot to look back till these first evenings of spring.

Memory enlarged and enlarged inside her an echoing, not often visited cave.

“There would always be lunch and lessons and dinner. There have been days that were simply that already, but in that case I always leave a blank page.”
“Do you think they were worth a whole blank page?”
“Oh yes, because they were days, after all.”