Quotations
From the Brixton letters
“Life here is just like life on an Ocean liner; one is cooped up with a number of average human beings, unable to escape except into one’s own state-room. I see no sign that they are worse than the average, except that they probably have less will-power, if one can judge by their faces, which is all I have to go by. That applies to debtors chiefly.” Letter 2
“Days here succeed each other monotonously but not very disagreeably. I believe I missed my vocation by not being a monk in a contemplative order.” Letter 5
“[Lytton Strachey] judges men by an artist’s standard, by whether they are delightful to contemplate; this places sincerity high among virtues, and makes the Victorians disgusting. But they had immense energy, and they had genuinely (in spite of cant) a wish to improve the world, and they did improve it.” Letter 7
“You have ways of loving which are so marvellous, so sweet, so caressing, that there couldn’t be anything in this world that’s better. I listen again with my imagination to the tender sound of your voice when it expresses love, the divine light that sometimes shines in your eyes, the feeling of your arms when they protect me against all the spectres of hell — and the touch of your lips — but it’s necessary to put an end to imagination, otherwise desire will make me mad.”
“I want to live in a healthy, constructive way, so as to build for the future; it’s the only way to oppose the destruction that operates everywhere.” Letter 8, translation
“[O]ne sees how our generation, in comparison, is a little mad, because it has allowed itself glimpses of the truth, and the truth is spectral, insane, ghastly: the more men see of it the less mental health they retain. The Victorians (dear souls) were sane and successful because they never came anywhere near truth. But for my part I would rather be mad with truth than sane with lies.” Letter 9
“In a normal day, I do 4 hours philosophical writing, 4 hours philosophical reading, and 4 hours general reading — so you can understand my wanting a lot of books.” Letter 12
“… it’s sleeping together that nourishes the instinctive and primitive part of love.” Letter 13, translation
“Being here in these conditions is not as disagreeable as the time I spent as attaché at the Paris Embassy, and not in the same world of horror as the year and a half I spent at a crammer’s. The young men there were almost all going into the Army or the Church, so they were at a much lower moral level than the average criminal.” Letter 15
“Let us keep before our minds constantly the thought of serving the world: not some derivative ‘principle’, nor pride, nor desire to confute our opponents, but the positive desire to nourish life in the world rather than to minister to death.” Letter 18
“I feel mankind in these days like a pitiful dumb animal with an open wound out of which the blood drips and life is oozing away — and one’s own life must go with it, or else one must grow callous for the time. I find selfishness a rest from the unendurable pity. But only temporarily: one’s life is not life unless it is linked on to that of the world.” Letter 20
“When I come out we will go to Ashford, and there will be autumn mornings with dew and white gossamer and yellow leaves against a blue blue sky, and a delicious smell from leaves on the ground — and still evenings with a crisp coolness in the air. And I shall put my arms round you, and kiss your lips till our very souls touch —” Letter 22
“The old world is crumbling and cracking — I do not want the débris to fall upon me, I want to live — … there is still important work I can do in the world.” Letter 24
“One will have to expend oneself to keep alive some kind of civilization and generosity of outlook — to make men remember things that are not merely utilitarian. The thought of the world’s needs is with me day and night, and the determination to help if I can.” Letter 26
“I try to get interested in philosophy but the battles keep battering at my mind and it is hard to grow absorbed in abstract things. I am thankful Venice is apparently saved.” Letter 27
“I can enjoy beauty that makes no pretence to be a revelation, but I cannot believe there is any goodness or beauty in the core of the world. I think whatever goodness or beauty there is to be in the world we must put there — and by ‘we’ I mean a tiny impotent minority of human beings, who can only hope to be left free to do good by being very unobtrusive and constantly pretending that we are doing harm.”
“I was struck by Bakunin’s fear lest he should lose hatred in prison. Hatred of some sort is quite necessary — it needn’t be towards people. But without some admixture of hate one becomes too soft and loses energy. ‘Keep vital’ is the first and great commandment, greater even than loving one’s neighbour — and a great deal that thinks it is love is only lack of vitality leading to lack of combativeness.” Letter 31
“I must, I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet — a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce, and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.” Letter 33
“Love when it is serious and deep and strong is a precious thing in the world — more precious by far than mere human life — and I want to keep it alive, and not let it be killed by force. I want it to be always a background to everything else —” Letter 43
“… all unusual energy is inspired by an unusual degree of vanity. There is just one other motive: love of power.” Letter 44
“This is a hard time for the world — less so for you and me than for most people. We want to emerge from this time with the faculty for work and for joy unimpaired — that is in a way a matter of courage and grit — not the steely courage that leaves one rather inhuman, but something more gay. It is the world’s need that one has to bear in mind. I feel our love all bound up with the world’s need — it is through our love that I find it possible to keep hope alive, and to be ready to lead young men and women on paths of intellectual adventure when the time comes.” Letter 45
“I seek out those few women who are not subservient — quite instinctively.” Letter 46
“I want to stand for life and thought — thought as adventure, clear thought because of the intrinsic delight of it, along with the other delights of life. Against worldliness, which consists in doing everything for the sake of something else, like marrying for money instead of for love — the essence of life is doing things for their own sakes.” Letter 50
“All moral condemnation is utterly against the whole view of life that was then new to me but is now more and more a part of my being.”
“There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the ‘intellectual love of God’.” Letter 53
“I like words to cut like a scimitar, clean, deep cuts, further each time than you would think such an apparently easy blow could penetrate.” Letter 57
“I wonder how you will like me working; you have never seen me thinking about philosophy. I become rather subdued, because my energies are turned inwards — a little vague and absent-minded, seeing nothing — often worried for lack of success, and then so excited and elated that I don’t know how to contain myself.” Letter 59
“Every motor-tyre is made out of the blood of negroes under the lash, yet motorists are not all heartless villains.”
“A good social system is not to be secured by making people unselfish, but by making their own vital impulses fit in with other people’s.” Letter 61
“Thinking needs data, which can only be got adequately from life; and emotion is quite as valuable in itself as thought, if it is the right sort of emotion —” Letter 63
“I have come nearest to expressing myself in the chapter on Education in Social Reconstruction. But it is a very long way from a really full self-expression.” Letter 66
“Philosophical research is not like the work of a clerk or a housemaid: diligence alone is not enough to ensure success in it. One needs also that condition of mind and body in which new ideas come; and for that, diligence, though necessary, is not sufficient.” Letter 67
“This place is making me tired and tame. One has to guard all the time against blind murderous rage, and it makes one tame after a time.” Letter 68
“If only one could begin all over again, and avoid the mistakes one made — but life marches on — always always fix your mind on the FUTURE, never think of the past for one half second — is the only rule of life that makes things bearable.” Letter 70
“You have never yet known unhappiness (though you may think you have), so you haven’t yet as much heart as you will have when you know better what people are enduring.” Letter 72
“Russia rouses the Puritan in me to fury.” Letter 73
“Yes, I dare say you will always think of this as the time when I wrote the best letters — but not the best books. This place is good for letters, but not for serious creative efforts like books. I never can value my thoughts unless they are in a permanent and public form.” Letter 75
“My ambition has grown enormously while I have been here. I must and will do important work: technical philosophy till the war ends, but after that, I think, more the sort of thing Voltaire10 did for his age. I find I must appeal to a larger public than one can reach by technical philosophy. I want to urge freedom in every direction, and creative energy. I want to be an intellectual power in Europe, and I can be if I can put forth enough vitality. My life is only just beginning.” Letter 77
“Remember that everything one has ever lived through comes back to one in prison. Childhood, the early days of my marriage, Cambridge at various stages of the 27 years I was connected with it, times with Ottoline — everything that has made any deep impression on my emotions comes in pictures.”
“O my dear my dear my dearest, all the yearning of the world is in me to you — the yearning of the lonely night-wind that wanders on and on over the sea, kissing each wave in turn and finding no home till it reaches the lonely lover on the shore — the yearning of flame that starts up into the darkness proud and swift and fierce, but is conquered in a moment and fades into blackness — the yearning of all things passionate and sad that have no home here, but seem to have fallen by chance from a heaven to which they cannot return — but in your arms I have returned, Beloved — God help me — I love you —” Letter 78
“You believe in unrestrained sexual competition — a belief which is right but naturally, when one is young and unusually attractive, tho’ I do not believe in outward restraints, yet I think some degree of inward restraint is often necessary if one is not to be unduly unkind.” Letter 79
“I want to stand with you at the rim of the world, and peer into the darkness beyond, and see a little more than others have seen of the strange shapes of mystery that live in that unknown night — terrible shapes, which the touch of your hand makes bearable. I want to bring back into the world of men some little bit of new wisdom. There is a little wisdom in the world: Heraclitus, Spinoza,16 and a saying here and there — I want to add to it, even if only ever so little. It needs great qualities: passion, intellect, concentration, a certain strange kind of courage, the power to bear solitude.” Letter 81
“My months here belong with the happier half of my life.”
“Logic and imagination have fought a long fight in me, but I think they are reconciled at last.” Letter 83
“I am thinking a great deal about knowledge. I feel more and more that in the Analysis of Mind, Desire is the ultimate.” Letter 84
“I was not a solemn stained-glass saint, existing only for purposes of edification; I existed from my own centre, many things that I did were regrettable, I did not respect respectable people, and when I pretended to do so it was humbug. I lied, and practised hypocrisy, because if I had not I should not have been allowed to do my work; but there is no need to continue the hypocrisy after my death. I hated hypocrisy and lies: I loved life and real people, and wished to get rid of the shams that prevent us from loving real people as they really are. I believed in laughter and spontaneity, and trusted to nature to bring out the genuine good in people, if once genuineness could come to be tolerated.” Letter 85
“History has in it a wonderful alchemy for what is hot and violent in passion: it makes one so conscious of the difference between mere self-assertion and real constructiveness.”
“The calm that I struggle after is not of inaction or lack of feeling, but where all feeling is free and large — and when I have achieved it best I love you most, because then I love you with my whole purpose, and as if my love were part of the very life of the universe; and I feel you too, then, eternal in some way I find hard to explain: I mean that the essence of you, which I am loving, is something transcending the individual and belonging to the essential being of the world.” Letter 86
“I found myself thinking today ‘Oh I hope I shall live to be old’ — because I have such endless things I want to do.” Letter 87
“Most people have a key, fairly simple; if you find it, you can unlock their hearts.” Letter 88
“All kinds of delights float before my mind — above all talk, talk, TALK. I never knew how one can hunger for it — The time here has done me good, I have read a lot and thought a lot and grown collected, I am bursting with energy — but I do long for civilization and civilized talk — And I long for the SEA and wildness and wind —” Letter 89
“What is the use of shutting up the body, seeing that the mind remains free? And outside my own life, I have lived, while I have been here, in Brazil and China and Tibet,5in the French Revolution, in the souls of animals and even of the lowest animals.6 In such adventures I have forgotten the prison in which the world is keeping itself at the moment: I am free, and the world shall be.” Letter 90
“It is difficult to see the evil in the world quite truly but without exaggeration or melodrama or emphasis on tragedy, without anger or the wish to hurt, and yet not coldly.” Letter 91
“… you told me to make a place for wildness in my morality, and I asked you what you meant, and you explained. It has been very difficult: my instinctive morality was so much that of self-repression. I used to be afraid of myself and the darker side of my instincts; now I am not.” Letter 94
“I have the feeling that no sleep counts that is not with you — when I sleep with you, my spirit rests as well as my body.”
“Yes, work done is very like being in love — at its best, almost more intoxicating, but much briefer and rarer, and one pays a much higher price for it in expense of spirit.”
“Do you know “Cold in the earth and the deep snow piled above thee” (on her <Emily Brontë’s> brother), especially:
…
I lived on this poem for years, at the worst time of my life.” Letter 95
“Can’t agree with view worth while teach, research not worth while. Can’t think Plato and Aristotle only valuable as lecturers.” Letter 97
“I do feel this time has been extraordinarily profitable to me intellectually, through all the reading I have done. I had not read as much in the five previous years as I shall have in the five months here. And it has been good to have leisure to think what I want to do.” Letter 99
“I did not know your generosity, your largeness of outlook, your power of feeling human life. I felt those things dimly, but did not know them. I had no idea of your force and will-power. It is strange how instinct sometimes outruns knowledge.” Letter 100
“I am not, however, turned against the existence of prisons: the visiting magistrates I have seen might with great advantage be shut up; they are far worse than anybody inside.” Letter 102
“I must stick to leaving N.C.F. Comee. I can’t be just a perfunctory member; I know they will do things I shall disagree with, and I would rather resign without disagreement. If I stay on, I shall not be able to get absorbed in philosophy.”
When I first came in here, I felt that I had got into a tangle through recklessness — risk of being in prison till the end of the war, risk of poverty, great expenditure of energy on pacifism without anything achieved.”
“I see the way clear before me to the realization of a great ambition, the ambition to create and express a well-rounded whole of philosophy, theoretical and practical, in a form interesting to all sorts of people, and with really important bearings on politics and how to live.” Letter 103
“At first, the lack of liberty was so galling that I dreaded being led into some folly — assaulting the Governor or something of that kind. Insane rage was always very near at hand.” Letter 104
“At odd moments I argue theology with the chaplain and medicine with the Doctor, and so the time passes easily.” Letter 105