The End of the Affair

Easily slipped my mind and fell into the stacks of books that, in perdition, wait. I noticed the edges flamed with yellow post-it flags, so here are the five or six things I wanted to remember from a book I'd rather forget.

When I began to realize how often we quar-relled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn't settle to work. I would recon-struct what we had said to each other; I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forc-ing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death; I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
and
My landlady knocked on the door and said "A Mr. Parkis to see you," thus indicating by a grammatical article the social status of the caller.
....
Have a cigarette"
"Oh no sir, not on duty- except of course for purposes of concealment."
....
How old is he?"
"Gone twelve" as though his boy were a clock. "A youngster can be useful and nobody notices him. Boys are born lingerers"
and
"Im sorry Henry". How often we believe we can slide out of our guilt by an act of contrition.

and finally a highly-wrought tussle with reason and retraction and dawning understanding- so skillful and droll and so much a part of why one loves Greene:

When I came in and sat down and looked round I realized it was a Roman church, full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art.
I hated the statues, the crucifix, all the emphasis on the human body. I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed. I thought I could believe in some kind of a God that bore no relation to ourselves, something vague, amorphous, cosmic, to which I had promised something and which had given me something in return —a Thing which had stretched out of the vague into the concrete human life, like a powerful vapour moving among the chairs and walls. One day I too would become part of that vapour; I would escape myself forever. And then I came into that dark church in Park Road and saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars—the hideous plaster statues with their complacent faces—and I re-membered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body I wanted destroyed forever. I had done so much injury with this body. How could I want to pre-serve any of it for eternity ? And suddenly I remembered a phrase of Richard's, about human beings inventing doctrines to satisfy their desires, and I thought, how wrong he is. If I were to invent a doctrine it would be that the body was never born again, that it rotted with last year's vermin. It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests—not in the dull perpendicular mean, where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another ? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there. Well, the pendulum swung today, and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice's. I thought of certain lines life had put on his face, as personal as lines of his writing. I thought of a new scar on his shoulder that wouldn't have been there if once he hadn't tried to protect another man's body from a falling wall. He didn't tell me why he was in hospital those three days; Henry told me. That scar was part of his ch'aracter as much as his jealousy. And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour—mine, yes, but his ? And I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity. But could my vapour love that scar ? Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only be-cause it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds ? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our sense-less nails; we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve. Richard's right, I thought; we have invented the resur-rection of the body because we do need our own bodies, and immediately I admitted that he was right and that this was a fairy tale we tell each other for comfort, I no longer felt any hate of those statues. They were like bad coloured pictures in Hans Andersen; they were like bad poetry, but somebody had needed to write them, some-body who wasn't so proud that he hid them rather than expose his foolishness. I walked up the church, looking at them one after the other. In front of the worst of all—I don't know who she was—a middle-aged man was praying. He had put his bowler hat beside him, and in the bowler hat, wrapped in newspaper, were some sticks of celery. And of course on the altar there was a body too—such a familiar body, more familiar than Maurice's, that it had
never struck me before as a body with all the parts of a body, even the parts the loincloth concealed. I remembered one in a Spanish church I had visited with Henry, where the blood ran down in scarlet paint from the eyes and the hands. It had sickened me. Henry wanted me to admire the twelfth-century pillars, but I was sick, and I wanted to get out into the open air. I thought, these people love cruelty. A vapour couldn't shock you with blood and cries. When I came out into the plaza I said to Henry, "I can't bear all these painted wounds." Henry was very reason-able—he's always reasonable. He said, "Of course it's a very materialistic faith. A lot of magic—" "Is magic materialistic ?" I asked. "Yes. 'Eye of newt and toe of frog, finger of birth-strangled babe.' You can't have anything more materialistic than that. In the Mass they still believe in transsubstantiation. I knew all about that, but I had an idea that it had more or less died out at the Reformation—except for the poor, of course. Henry put me right—how often has Henry rearranged my muddled thoughts! "Materialism isn't only an attitude for the poor," he said. "Some of the finest brains have been materialist—Pascal, Newman. So subtle in some directions; so crudely superstitious in others. One day we may know why. It may be a glandular deficiency." So today I looked at that material body on that material cross, and I wondered, how could the world have nailed a vapour there ? A vapour, of course, felt no pain and no pleasure. It was only my superstition that imagined
AFFAIR it could answer my prayers. Dear God, I had said; I should have said, Dear Vapour. I had said, I hate you; but can one hate a vapour ? I could hate that figure on the cross with its claim to my gratitude—"I've suffered this for you"—but a vapour— And yet Richard believed in less even than a vapour. He hated a fable, he fought against a fable, he took a fable seriously. I couldn't hate Hansel and Gretel, I couldn't hate their sugar house as he hated the legend of Heaven. When I was a child I could hate the wicked queen in Snow White, but Richard didn't hate his fairy-tale devil. The devil didn't exist, and God didn't exist, but all his hatred was for the good fairy tale, not for the wicked one. Why ? I looked up at that over-familiar body, stretched in imaginary pain, the head drooping like a man asleep. I thought, sometimes I've hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn't loved him too ? 0 God, if I could really hate you, what would that mean ? Am I a materialist after all? I wondered. Have I some glandular deficiency, that I am so uninterested in the really important unsuperstitious things and causes, like the Charity Commission and the cost-of-living index and better calories for the working class ? Am I a materialist be-cause I believe in the independent existence of that man with the bowler, the metal of that cross, these hands I can't pray with ? Suppose God did exist, suppose he was a body like that. What's wrong in believing that his body existed as much as mine ? Could anybody love him or hate him if he hadn't got a body ? I can't love a vapour that was Maurice. That's coarse, that's beastly, that's materialist, I know—but why shouldn't I be beastly and coarse and materialist ? I walked out of the church in a flaming rage and, in defiance of Henry and all the reason-able and the detached, I did what I had seen people do in Spanish churches: I dipped my finger in the so-called holy water and made a kind of cross on my forehead.

and

St. Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist.