Rites of Passage

In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.

Allow me to tell you, Mr Taylor", said I, but quietly as the occassion demanded, "that one gentleman does not rejoice at the misfortune of another in public".

We are motionless. The sea is polished. There is no sky but only a hot whiteness that descends like a curtain in every side, dropping, as it were, even below the horizon and so diminishing the circle of the ocean that is visible to us. The circle itself is of a light an luminescent blue. Now and then some sea creature will shatter the surface and the silence by leaping through it. Yet even when nothing leaps there is a constant shuddering, random twitches and vibrations of the surface, as if the water were not only the home and haunt of all sea creatures but the skin of a living thing, a creature vaster than Leviathan.

Philosophy and religion - what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?

Such are the varied fabrics of the human tapestry that surrounds me!

I turned to her again and found her to be thoughtful. Not I mean that she was solemn- no, indeed! But beyond the artificial animation of her countenance there was some expression with which I must confess I was not familiar. It was - do you not remember advising me to read faces?- it was a directed stillness of the orbs and eyelids as if while the outer woman was employing the common wiles and archnesses of her sex, beyond them was a different and watchful person!

Uncontrolled drunkenness and its consequences is an experience every man ought to have at least once in his life or how is he to understand the experience of others?

In the not too ample volume of man's knowledge of Man, let this sentence be inserted. Men can die of shame.

Sir, you have used your birth and prospective position to get yourself an unusual degree of attention and comfort-I do not complain-dare not! Who am I to question the customs of our society, or indeed the laws of nature? In a sentence, you have exercised the privileges of your position. I am asking you to shoulder its responsibilities.

Or may I stay with the Greeks? It is a play. Is it a farce or a tragedy? Does not a tragedy depend on the dignity of the protagonist? Must he not be great to fall greatly? A farce, then, for the man appears now a sort of Punchinello. His fall is in social terms. Death does not come into it. He will not put out his eyes or be pursued by the Furies—he has committed no crime, broken no law—unless our egregious tyrant has a few in reserve for the unwary.