Status Updates From All That Is

“Everything he had wanted to be, she was offering him. She had been given to him as a blessing, a proof of God. He had never really been paid. He had never been paid in the one true coin. She had held him casually in her hand, he had known what she was thinking. They might have lain like that and talked for days or been silent. The afternoon had been unforgettable.”

‘I’m having a lot of trouble,’ she said. ‘I can’t seem to do things, I don’t know why. When you die,’ she said, ‘what do you think happens to you?’
‘You’re not going to die.’
‘I know, but what do you think happens?’
‘Something glorious.’
‘Oh, Philip. Only you would say something like that. Do you know what I think?’
‘What?’
‘I think that whatever you believe will happen’

“You lived, said Lorca, by dying and being remembered. Meija’s death, in 1934, was like an apprenticeship for his own, prefigured but not yet known. The fierce storm that would tear the country apart was already gathering. The boy with the white sheet was coming, the bucket of quicklime was ready, and the smoothed-over dirt of the bull ring was already in shadows.”

“He loved her for not only what she was but what she might be, the idea that she might be otherwise did not occur to him or did not matter. Why would it occur? When you love you see a future according to your dreams.”

Eerste boek v Salter vond ik echt een ontdekking. Deze - over de ontwikkelingen vh liefdesleven ve man - een beetje saai. Vluchtige relaties en verhoudingsn in uitgeverswereldje net na de oorlog. Leuk inkijkje, mooie landschapomschrijvingen maar aan eind vh boek vond ik iedereen wel erg aloyaal en sloot het toch wat gedesillusioneerd af.

“Malcolm believes in Malraux and Max Weber: art is the real history of nations. In the details of his person there is evidence of a process not fully complete. It is the making of a man into a true instrument. He is preparing for the arrival of the great artist he one day expects to be, an artist in the truly modern sense which is to say without accomplishments but with the conviction of genius.”