Asiem | असीम’s Reviews > Brideshead Revisited > Status Update

She was unmistakably their sister, without any of Julia's or Sebastian's grace, without Brideshead's gravity. She seemed brisk and matter-of-fact, steeped in the atmosphere of camp and dressing-station, so accustomed to gross suffering as to lose the finer shades of pleasure.

"I have the fancy for rather spicy things, you know, not for the shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis - not that, not Jane Austen, not M-m-miss M-m-mitford."

'Why did you marry her?'
'Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she's the ideal wife for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian.'
'You loved him, didn't you?'
'Oh yes. He was the forerunner.'

More even than the works of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artists's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. In such buildings England abounded...

But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that whenever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

'But my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all.'
'Can't I?'
'I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.'
'Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea.'
'But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea.'
'But I do. That's how I believe.'

These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity.