The Waves Quotes

He was found in the gutter. His blood gurgled down the gutter. His jowl was white as a dead codfish. I shall call this ‘death among the apple trees’ forever. There were the floating, pale-grey clouds; and the immitigable tree; the implacable tree with its greaved silver bark. The ripple of my life was unavailing. I was unable to pass by. There was an obstacle. ‘I cannot surmount this unintelligible obstacle,’ I said. And the others passed on. But we are doomed, all of us by the apple trees, by the immitigable tree which we cannot pass.

“I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.”

“I see a slab of pale yellow,” said Susan, “spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.”

“I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.”

“I see a globe,” said Neville “hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.”

“I see a crimson tassel,” said Jinny, “twisted with gold threads.”

“I hear something stamping,” said Louis, “A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.”

“Look at the spider’s web on the corner of the balcony,” said Bernard. “It has beads of water on it, drops of white light.”

“The leaves are gathered around the window like pointed ears,” said Susan.

[…]

“Islands of light are swimming on the grass,” said Rhoda. “They have fallen through the trees.”

“I was running,” said Jinny, “after breakfast. I saw the leaves moving in a hold in the hedge. I thought, ‘That is a bird on its nest.’ I parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving. I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What moves the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. ‘Is he dead?’ I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving though there is nothing to move them.

The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone. The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other painfully stumbles amid hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert. The kitchen door slams. Wild dogs bark far away. Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join—so—and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire and I am outside of it, crying ‘Oh, save me, from being blown forever outside the loop of time!’

Now I will lean sideways as if to scratch my thigh. So I shall see Percival. There he sits, upright among the smaller fry. He breathes through his straight nose rather heavily. His blue, and oddly inexpressive eyes, are fixed with pagan indifference upon the pillar opposite. He would make an admirable churchwarden. He should have a birch and beat little boys for misdemeanors. He is allied with the Latin phrases on the memorial brasses. He sees nothing; he hears nothing. He is remote from us all in a pagan universe. But look—he flicks his hand at the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime. Dalton, Jones, Edgar and Bateman flick their hands to the backs of their necks likewise. But they do not succeed.

I am now a boy only with a colonial accent holding my knuckles against Mr. Wickham’s grained oak door. The day has been full of ignominies and triumphs concealed from fear of laughter. I am the best scholar in the school. But when darkness comes I put off this unenviable body—my large nose, my thin lips, my colonial accent—and inhabit space. I am then Virgil’s companion, and Plato’s. I am then the last scion of one of the great houses of France. But I am also one who will force himself to desert these windy and moonlit territories, these midnight wanderings, and confront grained oak doors. I will achieve in my life—Heaven grant that it be not long—some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.

An elderly and apparently prosperous man, a traveller now gets in. And I at once wish to approach him; I instinctively dislike the sense of his presence, cold, unassimilated, among us. I do not believe in separation. We are not single. Also I wish to add to my collection of valuable observations upon the true nature of human life. My book will certainly run to many volumes embracing every known variety of man and woman. […] A smoke ring issues from my lips (about crops) and circles him, bringing him into contact. The human voice has a disarming quality—(we are not single, we are one). As we exchange these few but amiable remarks, about country houses, I furbish him up and make him concrete.

When I say to myself, ‘Bernard,’ who comes? A faithful, sardonic man, disillusioned, but not embittered. A man of no particular age or calling. Myself, merely. It is he who now takes the poker and rattles the cinders so that they fall in showers through the grate. ‘Lord,’ he says to himself, watching them fall, ‘what a pother!’ and then he adds, lugubriously, but with some sense of consolation, ‘Mrs. Moffat will come and sweep it all up—’ I fancy I shall often repeat to myself that phrase, as I rattle and bang through life, hitting first this side of the carriage and then the other, ‘Oh, yes, Mrs. Moffat will come and sweep it all up.’ And so to bed.

My charm and flow of language, unexpected and spontaneous as it is, delights me too. I am astonished, as I draw the veil off things with words, how much, how infinitely more than I can say I have observed. More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images. This, I say to myself, is what I need: why, I ask, can I not finish the letter than I am writing? For my room is always scattered with unfinished letters. I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is to come. Blundering, but fervid, I see myself buzzing round flours, humming down scarlet caps, making blue funnels resound with my prodigious booming.

I am one person—myself. I do not impersonate Catullus, whom I adore. I am the most slavish of students, here with a dictionary; there is a notebook in which I enter curious uses of the past participle. But one cannot go on for ever cutting these ancient inscriptions clearer with a knife. Shall I always draw the red serge curtain close and see my book, laid like a block of marble, pale under the lamp? That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkept; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.

But who am I […]? I think sometimes (I am not twenty yet) I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people. […] What I give is fell. I cannot float gently, mixing with other people. I like best the stare of shepherds met in the road; the stare of gipsy women beside a cart in a ditch suckling their children as I shall suckle my children. For soon in the hot midday when bees hum around the hollyhocks my lover will come. […] I shall have children […]; a kitchen where they bring the ailing lambs to warm in baskets…

My silk legs run smoothly together. The stones of a necklace lie cold on my throat. My feet feel the pinch of shoes. […] I am arrayed, I am prepared. This is the momentary pause; the dark moment. The fiddlers have lifted their bows.

Now the car slides to a stop. A strip of pavement is lighted. […] This is the prelude, this is the beginning. I glance, I peep, I powder. All is exact, prepared. My hair is swept in one curve. My lips are precisely red. I am ready now to join men and women on the stairs, my peers. […] Like lightning we look but do not soften or show signs of recognition. Our bodies communicate. This is my calling. This is my world. […] the servants, standing here and again here, take my name, my fresh, my unknown name, and toss it before me. I enter.

If I could believe […] that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. […] I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do—I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate […] I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass you call life. […] And I have no face. […] I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.

But I only come into existence when the plumber, or the horse-dealers, or whoever it may be, says something which sets me alight. Then how lovely the smoke of my phrase is, rising and falling, flaunting and falling, upon red lobsters and yellow fruit, wreathing them into one beauty. But observe how meretricious the phrase is—made up of what evasions and old lies. Thus my character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as yours are. There is some fatal streak, some wandering and irregular vein of silver, weakening it. […] I went with the boasting boys with little caps and badges, driving off in big brakes—there are some here tonight, dining together, correctly dressed before they go off in perfect concord to the music hall; I loved them. For they bring me into existence as certainly as you do.

“By applying the standards of the West, by using the violent language that is natural to him, the bullock-cart is righted in less than five minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. he rides on; the multitude cluster round him, regarding him as if he were—what indeed he is—a God,” [said Bernard.]

“[…] and look—the outermost parts of the earth […] India for instance, rise into our purview. The world that had been shrivelled, rounds itself; remote provinces are fetched up out of darkness; we see muddy roads, twisted jungle, swarms of men, and the vulture that feeds on some bloated carcass as within our scope, part of our proud and splendid province, since Percival […] advances down a solitary path, has his camp pitched among desolate trees, and sits alone, looking at the enormous mountains.”

Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape […] to a hollow here many-backed steep hills come down like birds’ wings folded. There, on the short, firm turf, are bushes, dark leaved, and against their darkness, I see a shape, white, but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. But it is not you, it is not you, it is not you; not Percival, Susan, Jinny, Neville, or Louis. […] It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second now, even here, I reach my object and say, ‘Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe. Here is the end.’

But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another. And sometimes I begin to doubt if there are stories. What is my story? What is Rhoda’s? What is Neville’s? There are facts, as, for example: ‘The handsome young man in the grey suit, whose reserve contrasted so strangely with the loquacity of the others, now brushed the crumbs from his waistcoat and, with a characteristic gesture at once commanding and benign, made a sign to the waiter, who came instantly and returned a moment later with the bill discreetly folded upon a plate.’ That is truth; that is the fact, but beyond it all is darkness and conjecture.

Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon he oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.

Certainly, one cannot read this poem without effort. The page is often corrupt and mud-stained, and torn and stuck together with faded leaves, with scraps of verbena and geranium. To read this poem one must have myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water in at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster. One must put aside antipathies and jealousies and not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spiders’ delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drainpipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror. […] One must be sceptical but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely.

My life is not a moment’s bright spark like that on the surface of a diamond. I go beneath ground torturously, as if a warder carried a lamp from cell to cell. My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day. There is always more to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity to be reprimanded. Broken and soot-stained are these roofs with their chimney cowls, their loose slates, their slinking cats and attic windows. I pick my way over broken glass, among blistered tiles, and see only vile and famished faces.

“Yet, Louis,” said Rhoda, “how short a time silence lasts. Already they are beginning to smooth their napkins by the side of their plates. ‘Who comes?’ says Jinny; and Neville sighs, remembering that Percival comes no more. Jinny has taken out her looking-glass. Surveying her face like an artist, she draws powder-puff down her nose, and after one moment of deliberation, has given precisely that red to her lips that the lips need. Susan, who feels scorn and fear at the sight of these preparations, fastens the top button of her coat, and unfastens it. What is she making ready for? For something, but something different.”

“They are saying to themselves,” said Louis, “‘it is time. I am still vigorous,’ they are saying, ‘My face shall be cut against the black of infinite space.’ They do not finish their sentence. ‘It is time,’ they keep saying.”

Life is pleasant, life is good. The mere process of life is satisfactory. Take the ordinary man in good health. He likes eating and sleeping. He likes the snuff of fresh air and walking at a brisk pace down the Strand. Or in the country there’s a cock crowing on a gate; there’s a foal galloping round afield. Something always has to be done next. […] So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose—so it seems.

Life is pleasant; life is good; after Monday comes Tuesday and Wednesday follows Tuesday.

Yes, but after time with a difference. It may be that something in the look of the room one night, in the arrangement of the chairs, suggests it. […] Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs to the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels, ‘There are figures without features robed in beauty, doomed yet eternal.’

And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda, and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked, I felt, ‘I am you.’ This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome. […] Here on my brow is the low I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape of my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes fill with Susan’s tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread, the pillar Rhoda saw, and fell the rush of the wind of her flight when she leapt.

Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilisation is burnt out. […] But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort—sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping. There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening in the sky; some sort of renewal. […] The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and rise again.