A Burnt-out Case

 ‘Have you been married long ?’ 

‘Two years. I brought her out after my last leave. In a post like this it’s necessary to have a companion. You married ?’ 

‘Yes - that is to say I have been married.’ 

‘Of course I know you are thinking that she 1s very young for me. But I look ahead. If you believe in marriage you have to look to the future. I’ve still got twenty years of — let’s call it active life ahead of me, and what would a woman of thirty be like in twenty years? A man keeps better in the tropics. Don’t you agree >’ 

‘I’ve never thought about it. And I don’t yet know the tropics.’ 

‘There are enough problems without sex I can assure you. St Paul wrote, didn’t he, that 1t was better to marry than burn. Marie will stay young long enough to save me from the furnace.’ He added quickly, ‘Of course I’m only joking. We have to joke, don’t we, about serious things. At the bottom of my heart I believe very profoundly in love.” He made the claim as some men might claim to believe in fairies. 

&

"You can take my torch.” The morning would be better, the man repeated, and Querry saw that he was scared. ‘If I go with you, will you come ?’ ‘ The man shook his head, so Querry went alone.

 He could not blame these people for their fears: a man had to believe in nothing if he was not to be afraid of the big bush at night. There was little in the forest to ln appeal to the romantic. It was completely empty. It had never been humanised, like the woods of Europe, with t witches and charcoal-burners and cottages of marzipan; no one had ever walked under these trees lamenting lost love, nor had anyone listened to the silence and communed like a lake-poet with his heart. For there was no silence; if a man here wished to be heard at night he had to raise his voice to counter the continuous chatter of the insects as in some monstrous factory where thousands of sewing-machines were being driven against time by myriads of needy seamstresses. Only for an hour or so, in the midday heat, silence fell, the siesta of the insect. 

But if, like these Africans, one believed in some kind of divine being, wasn’t it just as possible for a god to exist in this empty region as in the empty spaces of the sky where men had once located him ? These woody spaces would remain unexplored, it seemed likely now, for longer than the planets. The craters of the moon were already better known than the forest at the door that one could enter any day on foot. The sharp sour smell of chlorophyl from rotting vegetation and swampwater fell like a dentist’s mask over Querry’s face. 

&

By the time the Ryckers came to go — they had to wait a long time for Mme. Cassin — Rycker had drunk to the margin of what was dangerous; he had passed from excessive amiability to dissatisfaction, the kind of cosmic dissatisfaction which, after probing faults in others’ characters, went on to the examination of his own. Marie Rycker knew that if he could be induced at this stage to take a sleeping-pill all might yet be well; he would probably reach unconsciousness before he reached religion which, like the open doorway in a red-lamp district, led inevitably to sex. 

&

‘Father Thomas, when you have been in Africa a little longer, you will learn not to ask an African a question which may be answered by yes. It is their form of courtesy to agree. It means nothing at all.’ 

‘I think after two years I can tell when an African is lying.’ 

‘Those are not lies. Father Thomas

&

Even in those early days he had known how to alter the direction of a woman’s need to love. Woman ? She was not even as old as the architectural student whose name he couldn’t now remember ~ an ugly name like Hoghe. Unlike Marie Morel the former student was probably still alive, building in some suburb his bourgeois villas — machines for living in. Querry addressed him from the bed. ‘I am sorry. I really believed that I meant you no harm. I really thought in those days that I acted from love.’ There is a time in life when a man with a little acting ability is able to deceive even himself. 

From the NYR

 Beard-

By the middle of the first century BCE, the traditional Roman system of timekeeping, with its rough and ready method of keeping the calendar year in step with the solar year, was hopelessly disorganized. Despite the best efforts of those responsible, the official date was sometimes several months adrift from the natural cycle of the seasons: “April” might fall in the middle of winter, and the harvest festivals tied to particular dates must often have been celebrated before the crops were even ripe. Caesar solved all this, introducing a year of 365 days, with an additional day in each quadrennial “leap year,” not to mention—in due course—a month named after himself, “July.” Ancient writers had no doubt that the expertise behind this reform came from scientists based in the Greek city of Alexandria in Egypt, where Caesar had been besieged. But how, and where, did Caesar manage to find the time to master the intricacies of calendrical science? It was most likely, we were told (half-jokingly perhaps), on that cruise. However he spent his evenings with Cleopatra, by day he was swotting up on his astronomy and having lessons with the Alexandrian scientists.

On Piranesi-

The Vedute, which he began in the 1740s and added to throughout his life, cleave closer to reality, but here also he found room for play—stretching the scale, collapsing distances, and infusing everything with haphazard life. People clamber over broken walls, herd sheep, gesture at each other in Italian; women hang clothes on a laundry line tethered to the Temple of Cybele (now known as the Temple of Hercules Victor). These actors are too peculiar and specific to qualify as staffage (the arthistorical term for the generic persons dotted about painted landscapes), and sheets of figure studies at the Morgan show Piranesi clocking the attitudes of workers in his printshop and people on the street. 

&

De Quincey’s account of “wheels, cables, catapults, &c., expressive of enormous power” wasn’t quite true, but it captured the mood and helped establish the images as metonyms for the irrational mind. Their special architectural-psychological trick was to appear simultaneously claustrophobic and infinite. More than a century after De Quincey, Aldous Huxley saw their “colossal pointlessness,” which “goes on indefinitely, and is co-extensive with the universe” as revealing the “subterranean workings of a tormented soul.” Later, nihilist aesthetes of my own generation meditated on posters of the Carcert through fugs of dorm-room pot smoke. Susanna Clarke’s recent novel of elliptical captivity and captivation is titled simply Piranesi.? “All considered,’ Tschudi writes in Piranesi and the Modern Age, “the mind itself as an infinitely extending entrapment is perhaps Piranesi’s most lasting legacy as an architect.” 

&

The practice of framing works on paper under glass developed during Piranesi’s lifetime, and most of his plates were conceived on the older model of albums or portfolios with title pages, dedications, and texts. Those appendages could be lengthy: Divers Manners of Ornamenting Chimneys and All Other Parts of Houses (1769) came with a trilingual, thirty-five-page “Apologetical Essay in Defence of the Egyptian and Tuscan Architecture.” 

A Passage to India

...then he turned to Ronny’s other merits, and in quiet, decisive tones said much that was flattering. It wasn’t that the young man was particularly good at the games or the lingo, or that he had much notion of the law, but — apparently a large but — Ronny was dignified. Mrs Moore was surprised to learn this, dignity not being a quality with which any mother credits her son. Miss Quested learnt it with anxiety, for she had not decided whether she liked dignified men. She tried indeed to discuss this point with Mr Turton, but he silenced her with a good-humoured motion of his hand, and continued what he had come to say. 

&

The doctor had begun by bullying her, had said Mrs Callendar was nice, and then — finding the ground safe — had changed; he had alternately whined over his grievances and patronized her, had run a dozen ways in a single sentence, had been unreliable, inquisitive, vain. Yes, it was all true, but how false as a summary of the man; the essential life of him had been slain. 

Going to hang up her cloak she found that the tip of the peg was occupied by a small wasp. She had known this wasp or his relatives by day; they were not as English wasps, but had long yellow legs which hung down behind when they flew. Perhaps he mistook the peg for a branch — no Indian animal has any sense of an interior. Bats, rats, birds, insects will as soon nest inside a house as out; it is to them a normal growth of the eternal jungle, which alternately produces houses trees, houses trees. There he clung, asleep, while jackals in the plain bayed their desires and mingled with the percussion of drums. 

&

‘You can talk to Miss Quested about the Peacock Throne if you like — she’s artistic, they say.’ 

‘Is she a Post-Impressionist?’ 

‘Post Impressionism, indeed! Come along to tea. This world is getting too much for me altogether.’ 

Aziz was offended. The remark suggested that he, an obscure Indian, had no right to have heard of Post Impressionism — a privilege reserved for the Ruling Race, that. He said stiffly: “I do not consider Mrs Moore my friend, I only met her accidentally in my mosque,’ and was adding ‘a single meeting is too short to make a friend,’ but before he could finish the sentence the stiffness vanished from it, because he felt Fielding’s fundamental goodwill. His own went out to it, and grappled beneath the shifting tides of emotion which can alone bear the voyager to an anchorage but may also carry him across it on to the rocks. He was safe really — as safe as the shore-dweller who can only understand stability and supposes that every ship must be wrecked, and he had sensations the shore-dweller cannot know. Indeed, he was sensitive rather than responsive. In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life, though vivid, was largely a dream. Fielding, for instance, had not meant that Indians are obscure, but that Post Impressionism is; a gulf divided his remark from Mrs Turton’s “Why, they speak English,’ but to Aziz the two sounded alike. Fielding saw that something had gone wrong, and equally that it had come right; but he didn’t fidget, being an optimist where personal relations were concerned; and their talk rattled on as before. 

&

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim: ‘I do enjoy myself,’ or, ‘I am horrified,’ we are insincere. ‘As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror’ — it's no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent. 

It so happened that Mrs Moore and Miss Quested had felt nothing acutely for a fortnight. Ever since Professor Godbole had sung his queer little song, they had lived more or less inside cocoons, and the difference between them was that the elder lady accepted her own apathy, while the younger resented hers. It was Adela’s faith that the whole stream of events is important and interesting, and if she grew bored she blamed herself severely and compelled her lips to utter enthusiasms. This was the only insincerity in a character otherwise sincere, and it was indeed the intellectual protest of her youth. She was particularly vexed now because she was both in India and engaged to be married, which double event should have made every instant sublime. 

&

Mrs Moore pushed up the shutters and looked out. She had brought Ronny and Adela together by their mutual wish, but really she could not advise them further. She felt increasingly (vision or nightmare?) that, though people are important, the relations between them are not, and that in ( particular too much fuss has been made over marriage; centuries of carnal embracement, yet man is no nearer to understanding man. And to-day she felt this with such force that it seemed itself a relationship, itself a person who was trying to take hold of her hand. 

‘Anything to be seen of the hills?’ ‘Only various shades of the dark.’ . 

&

‘I am informed that an evil action was performed in the Marabar Hills, and that a highly esteemed English lady is now seriously ill in consequence. My answer to that is this: that action was performed by Dr Aziz.’ He stopped and sucked in his thin cheeks. ‘It was performed by the guide.’ He stopped again. ‘It was performed by you.’ Now he had an air of daring and of coyness. ‘It was * performed by me.’ He looked shyly down the sleeve of his own coat. ‘And by my students. It was even performed by the lady herself When evil occurs it expresses the whole of the universe, Similarly when good occurs.’ 

‘And similarly when suffering occurs, and so on and so forth, and everything is anything and nothing something,’ he muttered in his irritation, for he needed the solid ground. 

‘Excuse me, you are now again changing the basis of our discussion. We were discussing good and evil. Suffering is merely a matter for the individual. If a young lady has sunstroke, that is a matter of no significance to the universe. Oh no, not at all. Oh no, not the least. It is an isolated matter, it only concerns herself. If she thought her head did not ache she would not be ill, and that would end it. But it is far otherwise in the case of good and evil. They are not what we think them, they are what they are, and each of us has contributed to both.’ 

‘Youre preaching that evil and good are the same.’ 

‘Oh no, excuse me once again. Good and evil are different, as their names imply. But, in my own humble opinion, they are both of them aspects of my Lord. He is present in the one, absent in the other, and the difference between presence and absence is great, as great as my feeble mind can grasp. Yet absence implies presence, absence is not nonexistence, and we are therefore entitled to repeat: “Come, come, come, come.”’ And in the same breath, as if to cancel any beauty his words might have contained, he added: ‘But did you have time to visit any of the interesting Marabar antiquities?’ Fielding was silent, trying to meditate and rest his brain. 

‘Did you not even see the tank by the usual camping ground?’ he nagged. 

‘Yes, yes, he answered distractedly, wandering over half a dozen things at once. 

‘That is good; then you saw the Tank of the Dagger.’ And he related a legend which might have been acceptable if he had told it at the tea party a fortnight ago. It concerned a Hindu Rajah who had slain his own sister's son, and the dagger with which he performed the deed remained clamped to his hand until in the course of years he came to the Marabar Hills, where he was thirsty and wanted to drink, but saw a thirsty cow and ordered the water to be offered to her first, which, when done, ‘dagger fell from his hand, and to commemorate miracle he built Tank.’ Professor Godbole’s conversations frequently culminated in a cow. Fielding received this one in gloomy silence. 

&

So Mrs Moore had all she wished; she escaped the trial, the marriage, and the hot weather; she would return to England in comfort and distinction, and see her other children. At her son’s suggestion, and by her own desire, she departed. But she accepted her good luck without enthusiasm. She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time — the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation — one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action; we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity. Mrs Moore had always inclined to resignation. As soon as she landed in India it seemed to her good, and when she saw the water flowing through the mosque tank, or the Ganges, or the moon, caught in the shawl of night with all the other stars, it seemed a beautiful goal and an easy one. To be one with the universe! So dignified and simple. But there was always some little duty to be performed first, some new card to be turned up from the diminishing pack and placed, and while she was pottering about the Marabar struck its gong. 

What had spoken to her in that scoured out cavity of the granite? What dwelt in the first of the caves? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity - the undying worm itself. Since hearing its voice, she had not entertained one large thought, she was actually envious of Adela. All this fuss over a frightened girl! Nothing had happened, ‘and if it had,’ she found herself thinking with the cynicism of a withered priestess, ‘if it had, there are worse evils than love.’ The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as love: in a cave, in a church — Boum, it amounts to the same. Visions are supposed to entail profundity but - Wait till you get one, dear reader! ‘Ihe abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots; her constant thought was: ‘Less attention should be paid to my future daughter-in-law and more to me; there is no sorrow like my sorrow,’ although when the attention was paid she rejected it irritably, 

&

They gained Ronny’s private room, where a group of their own sort had collected. None were cowardly, all nervy, for queer reports kept coming in. The Sweepers had just struck, and half the commodes of Chandrapore remained desolate in consequence — only half, and Sweepers from the District, who felt less strongly about the innocence of Dr Aziz, would arrive in the afternoon, and break the strike; but why should the grotesque incident occur? And a number of Mohammedan ladies had sworn to take no food until the prisoner was acquitted; their death would make little difference, indeed, being invisible, they seemed dead already, nevertheless it was disquieting. A new spirit seemed abroad, a rearrangement, which no one in the stern little band of whites could explain. 

&

 For the heat was claiming its own. Unable to madden, it stupefied, and before long most of the Chandrapore combatants were asleep. Those in the civil station kept watch a little, fearing an attack, but presently they too entered the world of dreams — that world in which a third of each man's life is spent, and which is thought by some pessimists to be a premonition of eternity. 

&

No more was then said; but the remark horrified Fielding. He couldn't bear to think of the queer honest girl losing her money and possibly her young man too. She advanced into his consciousness suddenly. And, fatigued by the merciless and enormous day, he lost his usual sane view of human intercourse, and felt that we exist not in ourselves, but in terms of each others’ minds — a notion for which logic offers no support and which had attacked him only once before, the evening after the catastrophe, when from the veranda of the club he saw the fists and fingers of the Marabar swell until they included the whole night sky. 

&

 This false start has been all my own fault. I was bringing to Ronny nothing that ought to be brought, that was why he rejected me really. I entered that cave thinking: Am I fond of him? I have not yet told you that, Mr Fielding. I didn't feel justified. Tenderness, respect, personal intercourse — I tried to make them take the place — of —’ 

‘I no longer want love,’ he said, supplying the word. 

‘No more do I. My experiences here have cured me. But I want others to want it.’ 

‘But to go back to our first talk (for I suppose this is our last one) — when you entered that cave, who did follow you, or did no one follow you? Can you now say? I dont like it left in air.’ 

Let us call it the guide,’ she said indifferently. ‘It will never be known. It’s as if I ran my finger along that polished wall in the dark, and cannot get farther. I am up against something, and so are you. Mrs Moore — she did know. 

‘How could she have known what we don’t?” 

“Telepathy, possibly.’ 

The pert, meagre word fell to the ground. Telepathy? What an explanation! Better withdraw it, and Adela did so. She was at the end of her spiritual tether, and so was he. Were there worlds beyond which they could never touch, or did all that is possible enter their consciousness? They could not tell. They only realized that their outlook was more or less similar, and found in this a satisfaction. Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle; they could not tell. Perhaps the hundred Indias which fuss and squabble so tiresomely are one, and the universe they mirror is one. 

They had not the apparatus for judging.  

‘Write to me when you get to England.’ 

I shall, often. You have been excessively kind. Now that I’m going, I realize it. I wish I could do something for you in return, but I see you've all you want.’ 

‘I think so,’ he replied, after a pause. ‘I have never felt more happy and secure out here. | really do get on with Indians, and they do trust me. It’s pleasant that I haven't had to resign my job. It’s pleasant to be praised by an L.-G. Until the next earthquake I remain as I am.’ 

‘Of course this death has been troubling me.’ 

‘Aziz was so fond of her too.’ 

‘But it has made me remember that we must all die: all these personal relations we try to live by are temporary. I used to feel death selected people, it is a notion one gets from novels, because some of the characters are usually left talking at the end. Now “death spares no one” begins to be real,’ 

‘Dont let it become too real, or you'll die yourself. That is the objection to meditating upon death. We are subdued to what we work in. I have felt the same temptation, and had to sheer off. I want to go on living a bit.’ 

‘So do I.’ 

A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air. Both man and woman were at the height of their powers — sensible, honest, even subtle. They spoke the same language, and held the same opinions, and the variety of age and sex did not divide them. Yet they were dissatisfied. When they agreed: ‘I want to go on living a bit,’ or, ‘I don't believe in God,’ the words were followed by a curious backwash as though the universe had displaced itself to fill up a tiny void, or as though they had seen their own gestures from an immense height — dwarfs talking, shaking hands, and assuring each other that they stood on the same footing of insight. They did not think they were wrong, because as soon as honest people think they are wrong instability sets up. Not for them was an infinite goal behind the stars, and they never sought it. But wistfulness descended on them now, as on other occasions; the shadow of the shadow of a dream fell over their clear-cut interests, and objects never seen again seemed messages from another world. 

And I do like you so very much, if I may say so,’ he affirmed. 

‘T’'m glad, for I like you. Let’s meet again.’ 

“We will, in England, if I ever take home leave.’ 

‘But I suppose youre not likely to do that yet.’ 

‘Quite a chance. I have a scheme on now as a matter of fact.’ 

‘Oh, that would be very nice.’ 

So it petered out. Ten days later Adela went off...

&

‘The fault is entirely mine.’ 

Tangles like this still interrupted their intercourse. A pause in the wrong place, an intonation misunderstood, and a whole conversation went awry. Fielding had been startled, not shocked, but how convey the difference? There is always trouble when two people do not think of sex at the same moment, always mutual resentment and surprise, even when the two people are of the same race. He began to recapitulate his feelings about Miss Quested. Aziz cut him short with: “But I believe you, I believe. Mohammed Latif shall be severely punished for inventing this.’ 

‘Oh, leave it alone, like all gossip — it’s merely one of those half-alive things that try to crowd out real life. Take no notice, it'll vanish, like poor old Mrs Moore's tombs.’ 

&

They wandered over the old fort, now dese admired the various views. The scenery, according to the; standards, was delightful — the sky grey and black, bellyfule of rain all over it, the earth pocked with pools of water and slimy with mud. A magnificent monsoon — the best for three years, the tanks already full, bumper crops possible Out towards the river (the route by which the Fieldings had escaped from Deora) the downpour had been enormous; the mails had to be pulled across by ropes. They could just see the break in the forest trees where the gorge came through, and the rocks above that marked the site of the diamond mine, glistening with wet. Close beneath was the suburban residence of the Junior Rani, isolated by floods, and Her Highness, lax about purdah, to be seen paddling with her handmaidens in the garden and waving her sari at the monkeys on the roof. But better not look close beneath, perhaps — nor towards the European Guest House either. Beyond the Guest House rose another greygreen gloom of hills, covered with temples like little white flames. There were over two hundred gods in that direction alone, who visited each other constantly, and owned numerous cows, and all the betel-leaf industry, besides having shares in the Asirgarh motor omnibus. Many of them were in the palace at this moment, having the time of their lives; others, too large or proud to travel, had sent symbols to represent them. The air was thick with religion and rain.