“Will you go so far in this clandestine life of yours as to marry anybody?” Hobson proceeded.
“No.”
Hobson stared with bright meditative sweetness down the boulevard.
“I think there must be a great difference between your way of approaching Germans and mine,” he said.
“Ay: it is different things that takes us respectively amongst them.”
“You like the national flavour, all the same.”
“I like the national flavour!”—Tarr had a way of beginning a reply with a parrot-like echo of the words of the other party to the dialogue; also of repeating sotto voce one of his own sentences, a mechanical rattle following on without stop. “Sex is nationalized more than any other essential of life. In this it is just the opposite to art.—There is much pork and philosophy in German sex.—But then if it is the sex you are after, it does not say you want to identify your being with your appetite. Quite the opposite. The condition of continued enjoyment is to resist assimilation.—A man is the opposite of his appetite.”
“Surely, a man is his appetite.”
“No, a man is always his last appetite, or his appetite before last; and that is no longer an appetite.—But nobody is anything, or life would be intolerable, the human race collapse.—You are me, I am you.—The Present is the furthest projection of our steady appetite. Imagination, like a general, keeps behind. Imagination is the man.”
“What is the Present?” Hobson asked politely, with much aspirating, sitting up a little and slightly offering his ear.