John Fowles

The dark figure on the raised white terrace; legate of the sun facing the sun; the most ancient royal power. Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling and consuming. A man was standing on top of the bluff, ashily silhouetted against the night sky. The object of the meta-theatre is precisely that – to allow the participants to see through their first roles in it. But that is only the catastasis. For him even the most painful social confrontations and contrasts, which would have stabbed the conscience of even the vulgarest nouveau riche, were stingless. Without significance except as vignettes, as interesting discords, as pleasurable because vivid examples of the algedonic polarity of existence. His batrachian lips pursed into a smile, and he dug again into the honey. I reached out and snicked a white thread that hung from her sleeve. Once more I was a man in a myth, incapable of understanding it, but somehow aware that understanding it meant it must continue, however sinister its peripeteia. In another minute there was no letter; but, as with every other relationship in my life, an eschar of ashes. The word is rare, but exact. His mouth had been struck or kicked. The lips were severely contused, reddened. He stopped speaking for a moment, like a man walking who comes to a brink; perhaps it was an artful pause, but it made the stars, the night, seem to wait, as if story, narration, history, lay imbricated in the nature of things; and the cosmos was for the story, not the story for the cosmos. But once again there came this strange surprise that the emitters stood all around me. I was not receiving from any one direction, but from all directions. Though once again, direction is too physical a word. I was having feelings that no language based on concrete physical objects, on actual feeling, can describe. I think I was aware of the metaphoricality of what I felt. I knew words were like chains, they held me back; and like walls with holes in them. The goat figure, his satanic majesty, came forward with an archidiabolical dignity […] I had […] days when I ached for a conversable girl. The island women were […] dour and sallow-faced, and about as seducible as a Free Church congregation. I knew, with one of those secret knowledges that can exist between two people, that her suicide was a direct result of my having told her of my own attempt – I had told it with a curt meiosis that was meant to conceal depths; and she had called my bluff one final time. I knew a stunned plunge of disappointment and a bitter anger. What right had he to issue such an arbitrary ukase? ‘Crush the cockatrice,’ he groaned, from his death-cell. ‘I am dead in law’ – but of the girl he denied that he had ‘attempted to vitiate her at Nine years old’; for ‘upon the word of a dying man, both her Eyes did see, and her Hands did act in all that was done’.