The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [449]
‘Darley, when I look around that … battlefield at night, I stand in an ecstasy of shame, revelling at the coloured lights, the flares wallpapering the sky, and I say: “All this had to be brought about so that poor Johnny Keats could grow into a man.” That’s what. It is a complete enigma to me, yet I am absolutely certain of it. No other way would have helped me because I was too damned stupid, do you see?’ He was silent for a while and somewhat distrait, drawing on his cigar. It was as if he were going over this last piece of conversation in his mind to consider its validity, word by word, as one tests a piece of machinery. Then he added, but with care and caution, and a certain expression of bemused concentration, like a man handling unfamiliar terms: ‘The man of action and the man of reflection are really the same man, operating on two different fields. But to the same end! Wait, this is beginning to sound silly.’ He tapped his temple reproachfully and frowned. After a moment’s thought he went on, still frowning:
‘Shall I tell you my notion about it … the war? What I have come to believe? I believe the desire for war was first lodged in the instincts as a biological shock-mechanism to precipitate a spiritual crisis which couldn’t be done any other how in limited people. The less sensitive among us can hardly visualize death, far less live joyfully with it. So the powers that arranged things for us felt they must concretize it, in order to lodge death in the actual present. Purely helpfully, if you see what I mean!’ He laughed again, but ruefully this time. ‘Of course it is rather different now that the bystander is getting hit harder than the front-line bloke. It is unfair to the men of the tribe who would like to leave the wife and
kids in relative safety before stumping off to this primitive ordination. For my part I think the instinct has somewhat atrophied, and may be on the way out altogether; but what will they put in its place — that’s what I wonder? As for me, Darley, I can only say that no half-dozen French mistresses, no travels round the globe, no adventures in the peacetime world we knew could have grown me up so thoroughly in half the time. You remember how I used to be? Look, I’m really an adult now —
but of course ageing fast, altogether too fast! It will sound damn silly to you, but the presence of death out there as a normal feature of life — only in full acceleration so to speak — has given me an inkling of Life Everlasting! And there was no other way I could have grasped it, damn it. Ah! well, I’ll probably get bumped off up there in full possession of my imbecility, as you might say.’
He burst out laughing once more, and gave himself three noise-less cheers, raising his cigar-hand ceremoniously at each cheer. Then he winked carefully at me and filled his glass once more, adding with an air of vagueness the coda: ‘Life only has its full meaning to those who co-opt death!’ I could see that he was rather drunk by now, for the soothing effects of the hot shower had worn off and the desert-fatigue had begun to reassert itself.
‘And Pursewarden?’ I said, divining the very moment at which to drop his name, like a hook, into the stream of our conversation.
‘Pursewarden!’ he echoed on a different note, which combined a melancholy sadness and affection. ‘But my dear Darley, it was something like this that he was trying to tell me, in his own rather bloody way. And I? I still blush with shame when I think of the questions I asked him. And yet his answers, which seemed so bloody enigmatic then, make perfect sense to me now. Truth is double-bladed, you see. There is no way to express it in terms of langua ge, this strange bifurcated medium with its basic duality!
Language! What is the writer’s struggle except a struggle to use a medium as precisely as possible,