Status Updates From Howards End

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مثير للاهتمام

‘All the same, London’s creeping…And London is only part of something else, I’m afraid. Life’s going to be melted down, all over the world.’

Death alone still charmed him, with her lap of poppies, on which all men shall sleep…the crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.

Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly, but to an after-life in the city of ghosts, while from others - and this was the death of Wickham Place - the spirit slips before the body perishes.

He walked with her to the station, passing through those streets [of Oxford] whose serried beauty never bewildered him and never fatigued. The lovely creature raised domes and spires into the cloudless blue, and only the ganglion of vulgarity round Carfax showed how evanescent was the phantom…

…the old Henry fronted her, competent, cynical, and kind. He had made a clean breast, had been forgiven, and the great thing now was to forget his failure, and to send it the way of other unsuccessful investments. Jacky rejoined Howards End and Dulcie Street, and the vermillion motor-car, and the Argentine Hard Dollars, and all the things and people for whom he had never had much use and had less now.

‘…He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life.’

‘…the real thing’s money, and all the rest is a dream.’

‘You’re still wrong. You’ve forgotten Death…If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing’s if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death — not morbidly, but because He explains…

Henry treated a marriage like a funeral, item by item, never raising his eyes to the whole, and ‘Death, where is thy sting? Love, where is thy victory?’ one would exclaim at the close.

Round every knob and cushion in the house sentimental gathered, a sentiment that was at times personal, but more often a faint piety to the dead, a prolongation of rites that might have ended at the grave.

He had hitherto supposed the unknown to be books, literature, clever conversation, culture. One raised oneself by study, and got upsides with the world.

His had scarcely been a tragic marriage. Where there is no money and no inclination to violence tragedy cannot be generated. He could not leave his wife, and he did not want to hit her. Petulance and squalor were enough.

London was beginning to illuminate itself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of Spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendor, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling…

It assumes that preparation against danger is itself good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed…Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning — the city inhaling — or the same thoroughfares in the evening — the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face.

“We never discuss anything at Howard’s End.”

“Then you ought to!” said Margaret. “Discussion keeps a house alive. It cannot stand by bricks and mortar alone.”

“It cannot stand without them,” said Mrs. Wilcox… 😂

“You will admit, though, that the Continent—it seems silly to speak of “the Continent“, but really it is all more like itself than any part of it is like England.”