rowan’s Reviews > The Magus > Status Update

But then the mysteries began.

I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamentally aesthetic one; to do something that would end my life sensationally, significantly, consistently. It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one. A deal to be remembered, not the true death of a true suicide, the death obliterate.
And the voice; the light; the sky.

[have you ever caught curable syphilis but felt so stupid about it, you contemplated suicide? Nick Urfe has.]

It was like a journey into space. I was standing on Mars, knee-deep in thyme, under a sky that seemed never to have known dust or cloud.

The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner was turned, was that I had escaped; and hardly less clearly, but much more odiously, that she loved me more than I loved her, and that consequently I had in some indefinable way won. So on top of the excitement of the voyage into the unknown, the taking wing again, I had an agreeable feeling of emotional triumph.

Greece -- why hadn't I thought of it before? It sounded so good: 'I'm going to Greece.' I knew no one (...) who had been there before. I got hold of all the books I could find on the country. It astounded me how little I knew about it. I read and read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.

I remember one day when we were standing in one of the rooms at the Tate. Alison was leaning slightly against me, holding my hand (...) I suddenly had a feeling that we were one body, one person, even there; that if she had disappeared it would have been as if I had lost half of myself. A terrible deathlike feeling, which anyone less cerebral and less self-absorbed than I was then would have realized was simply love.

I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity thing that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was that I was not a cynic by nature; only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.