The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [62]
I remember in this context, too, a remark of Pursewarden’s which summed up his attitude to our friends. ‘Alexandr ia!’ he said (it was on one of those long moonlit walks). ‘Jews with their cafeteria mysticism! How could one deal with it in words? Place and people?’ Perhaps then he was meditating this cruel short story and casting about for ways and means to deal with us. ‘Justine and her city are alike in that they both have a strong flavour without having any real character.’
I am recalling now how during that last spring (forever) we walked together at full moon, overcome by the soft dazed air of the city, the quiet ablutions of water and moonlight that polished it like a great casket. An aerial lunacy among the deserted trees of the dark squares, and the long dusty roads reaching away from mid-night to midnight, bluer than oxygen. The passing faces had be-come gem-like, tranced — the baker at his machine making the staff of tomorrow’s life, the lover hurrying back to his lodging, nailed into a silver helmet of panic, the six-foot cinema posters borrowing a ghastly magnificence from the moon which seemed laid across the nerves like a bow.
We turn a corner and the world becomes a pattern of arteries, splashed with silver and deckle-edged with shadow. At this far end of Kom El Dick not a soul abroad save an occasional obsessive policeman, lurking like a guilty wish in the city’s mind. Our foot-steps run punctually as metronomes along the deserted pavements: two men, in their own time and city, remote from the world, walk-ing as if they were treading one of the lugubrious canals of the moon. Pursewarden is speaking of the book which he has always wanted to write, and of the difficulty which besets a city-man when he faces a work or art.
‘If you think of yourself as a sleeping city for example … what?
You can sit quiet and hear the processes going on, going about their business; volition, desire, will, cognition, passion, conation. I
mean like the million legs of a centipede carrying on with the body powerless to do anything about it. One gets exhausted trying to circumnavigate these huge fields of experience. We are never free, we writers. I could explain it much more clearly if it was dawn. I long to be musical in body and mind. I want style, consort. Not the little mental squirts as if through the ticker-tape of the mind. It is the age’s disease, is it not? It explains the huge waves of occultism lapping round us. The Cabal, now, and Balthazar. He will never understand that it is with God we must be the most careful; for He makes such a powerful appeal to what is lowest in human nature — our feeling of insufficiency, fear of the unknown, personal failings; above all our monstrous egotism which sees in the martyr’s crown an athletic prize which is really hard to attain. God’s real and subtle nature must be clear of distinctions: a glass of spring-water, tasteless, odourless, merely refreshing: and surely its appeal would be to the few, the very few, real contemplatives?
‘As for the many it is already included in the part of their nature which they least wish to admit or examine. I do not believe that there is any system which can do more than pervert the essential idea. And then, all these attempts to circumscribe God in words or ideas…. No one thing can explain everything: though everything can illuminate something. God, I must be still drunk. If God were anything he would be an art. Sculpture or medicine. But the im-mense extension of knowledge in this our age, the growth of new sciences, makes it almost impossible for us to digest the available flavours and put them to use.
‘Holding a candle in your hand, I mean, you can throw the shadow of the retinal blood-vessels on the wall. It isn’t silent enough. It’s never dead still in there: never quiet enough for the trismegistus to be fed. All night long you can hear the rush of blood in the cerebral arteries. The loins of thinking. It starts you going back alon g the cogs of histor ical action, cause and effect. You can’t rest ever, you can