Fiona’s Reviews > Under The Net > Status Update

What is urgent is not urgent forever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, life itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death

If like myself you are a connoisseur of solitude, I recommend to you the experience of being alone in Paris on the fourteenth of July. On that day the city lets down it tumultuous hair, which the high summer anoints with warmth and perfume. In Paris every man has his girl; but on that day every man is a sultan. Then people flock together and sweep chattering about the city like flights of brilliantly coloured birds.

Arriving in Paris always causes me pain, even when I have been away for only a short while. It is a city which I never fail to approach with expectation and leave with disappointment. There is a question which only I can ask and which only Paris can answer; but this question is something which I have never yet been able to formulate. Certain things indeed I have learnt here: for instance, that my happiness has a sad

I find that sea voyages promote reflexion. Not that the night ferry can strictly be called a sea voyage in the ordinary sense. A necessary element in the experience of travelling by boat is the smell; whereas one of the special features of the night ferry is that one encounters the kin-aesthetic sensations of a boat combined with the olfactory sensations of a train.

We stood beside the iron lions on the Viaduct. The intense light of evening fell upon the spires and towers of St Bride to the south, St James to the north, St Andrew to the west, and St Sepulchre, and St Leonard Foster and St Mary-le-Bow to the east. The evening light quieted the houses and the abandoned white spires. Farringdon Street was still wide and empty.

what you do, of course that is true and uninteresting. What I speak of is the real decision as we experience it; and here the movement away from theory and generality is the movement toward truth. All theorising is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net

There are some parts of London which are necessary and others which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earls Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river. I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason. Dave lived west of Earls Court, and this was another thing I had against him. He lived off the Goldhawk Road, in one of those reddish black buildings

perhaps, I should say a word about myself. My name is James Donaghue, but you needn’t bother about that, as I was in Dublin only once, on a whisky blind, and saw daylight only twice, when they let me out of Store Street police station, and then when Finn put me on the boat for Holyhead. That was in the days when I used to drink. I am something over thirty and talented, but lazy. I live by literary hack-work,

She is not beautiful: that is an adjective which I use sparingly; but she is both pretty and attractive. Her prettiness lies in her regular features and fine complexion, which she covers over with a peach-like mask of make-up until all is as smooth and inexpressive as alabaster. Her hair is permanently waved in whatever fashion is declared to be the most becoming. It is a dyed gold.