Status Updates From The Ill-Made Night

“Do you think it would be fine to be the best knight in the world? Think, then, also, how you would have to defend the title. Think of the tests, such repeated, remorseless, scandal-breathing tests, which day after day would be applied to you-until the last and certain day, when you would fail.”

“‘He is inhuman,” he said at last. ‘But why should he be human? Are angels supposed to be human?’” -Lancelot

Chapter 8. The best chapter in this book. Lancelot is tricked by Elaine and runs to Guenevere and is in a sort of madness. The author writes about how the “seventh sense” develops when one has “knowledge of the world” and almost becomes one that behaves fairly and justly because they are half way to the grave. Passion and rule breaking is prominent before one really knows the world.

“The best knight of the world: everybody envied the self-esteem which must surely be his. But Lancelot never believed he was good or nice. Under the grotesque, magnificent shell with a face like Quasimodo's, there was shame and self-loathing which had been planted there when he was tiny, by something which it is now too late to trace. It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.”

But Lancelot had spent his childhood between knightly exercises and thinking out King Arthur's theory for himself. He believed as firmly as Arthur did, as firmly as the benighted Christian, that there was such a thing as Right. Finally, there was the impediment of his nature. In the secret parts of his peculiar brain, those unhappy and inextricable tangles which he felt at the roots, the boy was disabled by something