“Oh you don’t, Miriam. One gives you facts and you slide away from them.”
Household life breaks everything up. Comes crashing down on moments that cannot recur.... Thought runs on, below the surface to conclusions, arriving distractingly at the wrong moment.
It always seems a deliberate conspiracy to suppress conclusions. Lunch, grinning like a Jack-in-the-box, in a bleak emptiness. People ought not to meet at lunch time. If the bleakness is overcome it is only by borrowing from the later hours. And the loan is wasted by the absence of after-time, the business of filling up the afternoon with activities; leaving everything to be begun all over again later on.
How can guests allow themselves to arrive to lunch? The smooth young man had come primed for his visit. Carefully talking in the Wilson way; carefully finding everything in the world amusing. And he was not amused. He was a cold selfish baffled young man, lost in a set. Welcomed here as a favoured emissary from a distant potentate....
And now with just the same air of reflected brilliance he was blithely playing tennis. Later on he would have to begin again with his talk; able parroting, screening hard coldness, the hard coldness of the pale yellow-haired Englishman with good features.... A blindfold humanitarian giant? Where are Reich’s English giants? Blind. Amongst the old-fashioned, conservatives? Gentlepeople with fixed ideas who don’t want to change anything? The Lycurgans are not humanitarians. Because they are humanitarians deliberately. Liberals and socialists are humanitarian intellectually, through anger. Humanitarian idealists. The giants are humanitarian unconsciously, through breeding. Reich said the strongest motives, the motives that made history, were unconscious.... Consciousness is increasing. The battle of unconscious fixed ideas and conscious chosen fixed ideas. Then the conservatives must always win! They make socialists and then absorb them. The socialists give them ideas. Neither of them are quite true. Why doesn’t God state truth once and for all and have done with it?
And all the time, all over the western world, life growing more monstrous. The human head growing bigger and bigger. A single scientific fact, threatening humanity. Hypo’s amused answer to the claims of the feminists. The idea of having infants scooped out early on, and artificially reared. Insane. Science rushing on, more and more clear and mechanical.... “Life becomes more and more a series of surgical operations.” How can men contemplate the increasing awfulness of life for women and yet wish it to go on? The awfulness they have created by swaddling women up; regarding them as instruments of pleasure. Liking their cooking. Stereotyping in their fixed mechanical men’s way a standard of deadly cooking that is destroying everybody, teeth first. And they call themselves creators.... Knickers or gym skirts. A free stride from the hips, weight forward on toes pointing straight, like Orientals. Squatting, like a savage, keeping the pelvis ventilated and elastic instead of sitting, knees politely together, stuffy and compressed and unventilated. All the rules of ladylike deportment ruin the pelvis.... Ladies are awful. Deportment and a rigid overheated pelvis. In the kitchen they have to skin rabbits and disembowel fowls. Otherwise no keep. Polite small mouthfuls of squashy food and pyorrhoea. Good middleaged church people always suggest stuffy bodies and pyorrhoea. Somewhere in the east people can be divorced for flatulence.
But the cranks are so uncultured; cut off from books and the past. Martyrs braving ridicule? The salt of the earth, making here and there a new world, unseen? Their children will not be cranks....
A rose fell at her feet flung in through the window.
“Come out and play!”
This is joy. To stand back from the court, fall slack, losing sight of the scatter of watching people round the lawn. Nothing but the clasp of the cool air and the firm little weight of the rough-coated ball in a slack hand. The loose-limbed plunge forward to toe the line. One measuring glance and the whole body a taut projectile driving the ball barely clear of the net, to swish furrowing along the ground.