A God in Ruins

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“The purpose of Art is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.” SYLVIE BERESFORD TODD — 15

‘True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth,’ ” Teddy said. “What?” (Pardon, Teddy thought. — 779

“Gerrard Winstanley,” he said. “The True Levellers. The Diggers. No?” — 780

Teddy thought he knew Nancy—before the war he did know her—but now she was a continual surprise. He had imagined that in marriage he and Nancy would cleave to each other and become one—in some vague biblical sense of the word—whereas in fact he was constantly aware of the difference between them and she frequently unbalanced him when he had expected—hoped—her to root him. They had been childhood sweethearts, or — 994

Teddy didn’t believe art (“Art,” he thought, acknowledging his mother) should be didactic, it should be a source of joy and comfort, of sublimation and of understanding. (“Itself,” in fact.) It had been all these things to him once. Nancy, however, tended towards pedagogy. — 1006

the oeufs en cocotte—eggs baked in the oven inside huge beef tomatoes. A saddle — 1238

Then there was breakfast, of course, taken at the big table in the domain kitchen. Not the gruel-like porridge ladled out at boarding school or the unsurprising egg and bacon of Fox Corner. Instead he sliced open half a freshly baked baguette, wadded the inside with Camembert and dipped it into a bowl of scalding strong coffee. He forgot all about this way of greeting the day when he returned home and then, decades later, when he was living in sheltered accommodation at Fanning Court, it came back to him suddenly and, inspired by the richness of the memory, he bought a baguette from Tesco’s (“baked on the premises”—yes, but from what?) and a small round of unripe Camembert, and poured his morning coffee into a cereal bowl rather than the usual mug. It was not the same. Not at all. — 1243

He found a title first, calling his debut upon the literary stage A Bower Quiet for Us, taken from Keats’s “Endymion”: A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. “Oh, how — 1308

The pleasure to be had from the cup and saucer of an acorn, the unfurling frond of a fern, the pattern on the feather of a hawk. The transcendent beauty of the dawn chorus in an English bluebell wood. He omitted France, the solid blocks of colour, the hot slices of sunshine. They would not be to the taste of a man who had fought on the Somme. — 1363

“Best to avoid morbid thoughts,” — 1645

All these people, he thought, tied to Bertie by a thin red thread, yet she would never know them. — 1656

Death was the end. Sometimes it took a whole lifetime to understand that. — 1666

it. He discovered the little wrinkled apple in his pocket and ate it in two bites. It tasted sour when he had expected it to be sweet. — 1797

The dead were legion and remembrance was a kind of duty, he supposed. Not always related to love. — 1998

It is the blight man was born for. That was Hopkins, wasn’t it? It is Margaret you mourn for. Those lines had always moved him, he remembered— — 2122

Teddy didn’t really understand the attraction of the dark side for the young these days. Perhaps because they had never experienced it. They had been brought up without shadows and seemed determined to create their own. Sunny had confessed yesterday that he’d “quite like” to be a vampire. — 2219

And he also knew that there would be no more hankering for something else, something beyond, for the hot slices of colour or the intensity of war or romance. That was all behind him, he had a different kind of duty now, not to himself, not to his country, but to this small knot of a family. — 2499

He hadn’t seemed familiar in any way and it struck Teddy that perhaps he had never really known him. Perhaps he had never known any of them. It had just seemed so because of the circumstances they had found themselves in. This older version of Mac seemed rather self-satisfied to — 3179

Soon (now even) it would become a cascade of last times. — 4778

He had seemed fierce and noble but in the end he was as disappointing as everyone else. “Did — 4904

As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference. — 4906

The doors to the rooms were kept open so that each room was a little vignette, the wreckage inside on display, like some awful zoo or a museum of horrors. Some — 5039

But time was an artificial construct, wasn’t it? Zeno’s arrow staggering and stuttering its way to some fictional end — 5125

She had ordered a meringue in Bettys last night. It was very good but it was not the meringue perdu of her childhood. — 5168

That was the trouble with faith, Teddy thought, by its very nature it was impossible. He didn’t believe in anything any more. Trees, perhaps. Trees and rocks and water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer. — 5282

little more every day, like a magnificent, neglected ruin, had once been a bomber pilot, — 5692