G: A Novel

• 41. There are quite distinct categories in his own mind into which he fits trees. Ones he likes and ones he does not like (without reason). Ones that are too easy to climb. Ones that frighten him a little to climb. Ones with a view at the top and ones without. There are also more complicated categories. Trees are alive but not alive as animals are. What is the difference? First, the tree is more accessible. Second the tree is more mysterious. Third, the tree is immovable. Fourth the tree can hide him...
• 54. All history is contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the word, where contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past, but in the strict sense: the consciousness of one's own activity as one actually performs it. History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should vibrate in the historian's mind.
• 72. Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits by proposing a continuous present. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment. The barricades break that present.
• 80. The description so far as it goes is accurate. But my power to select (both the facts and the words describing them) impregnates the text with a notion of choice which encourages the reader to infer a false range and type of choice being open to the two pigeons. Description distorts.
• 82. The process of maturing and, later, of aging involves a gradual but increasing withdrawal of the self from the exterior surface of the body... It was only through his eyes that one could still sometimes glimpse that part of his self still capable of response.
• 111. The first handful of blackberries represented all blackberries. Later, a handful of blackberries is a handful of ripe/unripe/over-ripe/sweet/acid, etc., etc., blackberries. Discrimination develops with experience. But the development is not only quantitative. The qualitative change is to be found in the relation between the particular and the general. You lose the symbolically complete nature of whatever is in hand. First experience is protected by a sense of enormous power; it wields magic.
• 133. When he answered Weymann's question: what do you do? by saying: I travel, the answer was neither superficial nor evasive. The constant stranger must continually travel.
• 135. Any attempt at an exhaustive description of what she was experiencing is bound to be absurd. The experience was central to her life: everything that she had been, surrounded her present experience as land surrounds a lake. Everything that he had been was turned to sand and shelved at the borders of this experience to disappear beneath its waters and become its unseen, mysterious lake bed. To express her experience it would be necessary for us to reconstruct around ourselves her unique language. And this is impossible.
• 137. ...I have little sense of unfolding time. The relations which I perceive between things - and these often include casual and historical relations - tend to form in my mind a complex synchronic patter. I see fields where others see chapters.
• 142. ...no two are the same until they leave behavior behind, until they come with him to that moment when everything is simultaneous and every one of them is there together.
• 142. When analyzed, sexual desire has components which are violently nostalgic and lead us as far back as the experience of birth itself: other components are the result of an ineradicable appetite for the unknown, the furthest away, the ultimate of life - which can finally only be found in its negation - death. At the moment of orgasm these two points in time, our beginning and our end, may seem to fuse into one. When this happens everything that lies between them, that is to say our whole life, becomes instantaneous. It is thus that I explain the protagonist of my book to myself.
• 150. This subjunctive world of the woman, this realm of her presence, guaranteed that no action undertaken within it could every possess full integrity; in each action there was an ambiguity which corresponded to an ambiguity in the self, divided between surveyor and surveyed. The so-called duplicity of woman was the result of the monolithic dominance of man.
• 151. The presence of a woman in love could be very eloquent. The way she glanced or ran or spoke or turned to greet her lover might contain the quintessential quality of poetry. This would be obvious not only to the man she loved, but to any disinterested spectator. Why? Because the surveyor and the surveyed within herself were momentarily unified, and this unusual unity produced in her an absolute single-mindedness. The surveyor no longer surveyed.
• 171. When memory connects one experience with another, the nature of the connection may vary considerably. There are connections by contrast, connections by similitude, connections by way of sensuous metaphor, connections of logical sequence, etc., etc. The relation between the two experiences may sometimes be one of mutual comment. In this case the connection is multiform and complex. Yet the comment, although extremely precise, cannot be verbalized any more that a chord in music can be.
• 203. She awaits him as he expected. And yet he is surprised. This combination of surprise and of expectations being precisely fulfilled is unique to moments of sexual passion and is another factor which places them outside the normal course of time.
• 315. If G. had struggled with the four men when they came up to him, their fight might take several pages to describe. He did not struggle. If, on the other hand, he submitted to them without any resistance at all, several pages might be needed to describe his acceptance of death. He did not submit without resistance. What happened can be quickly told and the rest can be conveyed at last by my silence.
• 316. Uninterruptedly receding towards the sun, the transmissions of its reflexions becoming every faster, the sea neither requires nor recognizes any limit. The horizon is the straight bottom edge of a curtain arbitrarily an suddenly lowered upon a performance.