[b]John Fowles from The Magus
I want to tell you what’s really happened.
Not now. Please not now. Whatever’s happened, come and make love to me.
And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.[/b]
In other words, he tells her what happened. With the twins, for example.
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.
So, how am I being here?
History has superseded the ten commandments of the Bible; for me they had never had any real meaning, that is, any other than a conformitant influence. But sitting in that bedroom, staring at the glow of the fire on the jamb of the door through to the sitting room, I knew that at last I began to feel the force of this super-commandment, summary of them all; somewhere I knew I had to choose it, and every day afresh, even though I went on failing to keep it. Conchis had talked of points of fulcrum, moments when one met one’s future. I also knew it was all bound up with Alison, with choosing Alison, and having to go on choosing her every day. Adulthood was like a mountain, and I stood at the foot of this cliff of ice, this impossible and unclimbable: Thou shalt not inflict unnecessary pain.
Like that in particular isn’t [often] just a point of view.
When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. ‘You like it,’ she said. ‘You say you’re isolated, boyo, but you really think you’re different.’
Goddamnit, he thought, I really am!
Maurice once said to me – when I had asked him a question rather like yours – he said, “An answer is always a form of death” There was something else in her face then. It was not implacable; but in some way impermeable. “I think questions are a form of life.”
I know: what if it’s both?
I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilization, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history or science to know then. I know now it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.
Of course if all is hazard then we ourselves are too.