A review by awilderm23
The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
3.0
this all kind of unraveled at the end...
‘ we enjoyed and craved for each other’s company. what a test that is, more than devotion, admiration, passion. if you longed and long for someone’s company you love them.
sheer hatred can be a commanding form of madness
ever since i first loved you you live in my mind
my love for you exists in a sort of eternal present, it is almost the meaning of time. i don’t protest too much, such love can live with despair with quietness with resignation with ordinariness and tiredness and silence.
your letter had made an aching emptiness and a need and i shall not be the same
she cried before me with wide open eyes not staunching the tears, her tears fell on my sleeve, on my hand like storm rain. and when at last i told her to go she went like a shadow with silent swift obedience
a furious mutual desire for possession dominated the entire affair while it lasted
extreme love must bring terror with it and great terror like some kind of prayer which lean upon the omniscience of the almighty has a vast unlimited all embracing compass
never so pure and gentle never so intense did it come to me after, that absolute and holy yearning of one human body and soul for another
mercifully one forgets ones love affairs as one forgets one’s dreams
it would have to be love between us but love purged of possessive madness, purged of self, disciplined by time and the irrevocability of our fates. we must find out how at last to be absolutes to each other never to lose each other without putting any foot wrong or spilling one drop of some vessel of truth and history that was held up between us
in the teeth of our fates most exquisite cruelty, in the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other
all art disfigures life
some life we might have had together if i had been different, and she has been different. now it was gone, whatever happened next, and the world was changed
and now it’s ended before it even began and i never imagined itwould all be spoiled and broken at the start. and now i’ve got nothing except my love for you, all wakened up again and rejected, all wakened up again for ever and ever
i love you i’ve never forgotten you and when i saw you i felt it all again but it’s something childish, it isn’t part of the real world. there was never any place for our love in the world. if there had been, it would have won and we wouldn’t have parted.
what shall i do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? why did you come back if you could not content me? what can i do now with a great useless machine of my love which has no work to do?
‘ we enjoyed and craved for each other’s company. what a test that is, more than devotion, admiration, passion. if you longed and long for someone’s company you love them.
sheer hatred can be a commanding form of madness
ever since i first loved you you live in my mind
my love for you exists in a sort of eternal present, it is almost the meaning of time. i don’t protest too much, such love can live with despair with quietness with resignation with ordinariness and tiredness and silence.
your letter had made an aching emptiness and a need and i shall not be the same
she cried before me with wide open eyes not staunching the tears, her tears fell on my sleeve, on my hand like storm rain. and when at last i told her to go she went like a shadow with silent swift obedience
a furious mutual desire for possession dominated the entire affair while it lasted
extreme love must bring terror with it and great terror like some kind of prayer which lean upon the omniscience of the almighty has a vast unlimited all embracing compass
never so pure and gentle never so intense did it come to me after, that absolute and holy yearning of one human body and soul for another
mercifully one forgets ones love affairs as one forgets one’s dreams
it would have to be love between us but love purged of possessive madness, purged of self, disciplined by time and the irrevocability of our fates. we must find out how at last to be absolutes to each other never to lose each other without putting any foot wrong or spilling one drop of some vessel of truth and history that was held up between us
in the teeth of our fates most exquisite cruelty, in the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other
all art disfigures life
some life we might have had together if i had been different, and she has been different. now it was gone, whatever happened next, and the world was changed
and now it’s ended before it even began and i never imagined itwould all be spoiled and broken at the start. and now i’ve got nothing except my love for you, all wakened up again and rejected, all wakened up again for ever and ever
i love you i’ve never forgotten you and when i saw you i felt it all again but it’s something childish, it isn’t part of the real world. there was never any place for our love in the world. if there had been, it would have won and we wouldn’t have parted.
what shall i do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? why did you come back if you could not content me? what can i do now with a great useless machine of my love which has no work to do?