Without Lifting A Finger

Was bumping around the Net, reading about the use of "writing therapy" in mental health. Found several things of interest, including this quote by Graham Greene (from his book Ways of Escape ): Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

The Superior said, ‘We all analyse motives too much. I said that once to Father Thomas. You remember what Pascal said, that a man who starts looking for God has already found him. The same may be true of love—when we look for it, perhaps we’ve already found it.’

Nobody cared that a small dissident group who had nothing to do with the local tribe sang their own hymns apart. Only the doctor, who had once worked in the Lower Congo, recognized them for what they were, trouble-makers from the coast more than a thousand kilometres away. It was unlikely that any of the lepers could understand them, so he let them be. The only sign of their long journey by path and water and road was an unfamiliar stack of bicycles up a side-path into the bush which he had happened to take that morning. ‘E ku Kinshasa ka bazeyi ko: E ku Luozi ka bazeyi ko….’ ‘In Kinshasa they know nothing: In Luozi they know nothing.’ The proud song of superiority went on: superiority to their own people, to the white man, to the Christian god, to everyone beyond their own circle of six, all of them wearing the peaked caps that advertised Polo beer. ‘In the Upper Congo they know nothing: In heaven they know nothing: Those who revile the Spirit know nothing: The Chiefs know nothing. Th...

Parkinson leaned forward on the bed and then swayed back like a Chinese wobbling toy made in the likeness of the fat God of Prosperity. He said, ‘Do you consider that the love of God or the love of humanity is your principal driving force, Querry? What in your opinion is the future of Christianity? Has the Sermon on the Mount influenced your decision to give your life to the lepers? Who is your favourite saint? Do you believe in the efficacy of prayer?’ He began to laugh, the great belly rolling like a dolphin. ‘Do miracles still occur? Have you yet visited Fatima?’

‘There are enough problems without sex I can assure you. St Paul wrote, didn’t he, that it was better to marry than burn. Marie will stay young long enough to save me from the furnace.’ He added quickly, ‘Of course I’m only joking. We have to joke, don’t we, about serious things. At the bottom of my heart I believe very profoundly in love.’ He made the claim as some men might claim to believe in fairies.

‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving –for ever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money –without hesitation? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax.’

Martins sat on a hard chair just inside the stage door of the Josefstadt Theatre. He had sent up his card to Anna Schmidt after the matinée, marking it ‘a friend of Harry’s’. An arcade of little windows, with lace curtains and the lights going out one after another, showed where the artists were packing up for home, for the cup of coffee without sugar, the roll without butter to sustain them for the evening performance. It was like a little street built indoors for a film set, but even indoors it was cold, even cold to a man in a heavy overcoat, so that Martins rose and walked up and down underneath the little windows. He felt, he said, rather like a Romeo who wasn’t sure of Juliet’s balcony.

‘What is terrible?’ ‘A child like that.’ ‘Yes. Both parents were lost. But it is all right. She will die.’ Scobie watched the bearers go slowly up the hill, their bare feet very gently flapping the ground. He thought: It would need all Father Brûle’s ingenuity to explain that. Not that the child would die—that needed no explanation. Even the pagans realized that the love of God might mean an early death, though the reason they ascribed was different, but that the child should have been allowed to survive the forty days and nights in the open boat—that was the mystery, to reconcile that with the love of God. And yet he could believe in no God who was not human enough to love what he had created. ‘How on earth did she survive till now?’ he wondered aloud.

‘I’ve known it for years. You don’t love me.’ She spoke with calm. He knew that calm—it meant they had reached the quiet centre of the storm: always in this region at about this time they began to speak the truth at each other. The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being—it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and ties are worth a thousand truths. He involved himself in what he always knew was a vain struggle to retain the lies. ‘Don’t be absurd, darling. Who do you think I love if I don’t love you?’ ‘You don’t love anybody.’ ‘Is that why I treat you so badly?’ He tried to hit a light note, and it sounded hollowly back at him. ‘That’s your conscience,’ she said, ‘your sense of duty. You’ve never loved anyone since Catherine died.’ ‘Except myself, of course. You always say I love myself.’ ‘No, I don’t think you do.’ He defended himself by evasions. In this cyclonic centre he was powerless to give the comfor...

Somewhere in the darkness two rats scuffled. These waterside rats were the size of rabbits. The natives called them pigs and ate them roasted; the name helped to distinguish them from the wharf rats, who were a human breed.

It was quite true. There was a retort in this colony to every accusation. There was always a blacker corruption elsewhere to be pointed at. The scandalmongers of the secretariat fulfilled a useful purpose—they kept alive the idea that no one was to be trusted. That was better than complacence. Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed. He felt a sudden affection for Yusef. He said, ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right. One day, Yusef, you’ll find my foot under your fat arse.’ ‘Maybe, Major Scobie...

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah’s enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn’t that what the devil is supposed to be? I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints,...

Unfortunately Kindle erases the breaks. Oh, well ... * We played for the division of matches and then the real game started. It was uncanny how quickly Vigot threw a four-two-one. He reduced his matches to three and I threw the lowest score possible. ‘Nanette,’ Vigot said, pushing me over two matches. When he had got rid of his last match he said, ‘Capitaine,’ and I called the waiter for drinks. ‘Does anybody ever beat you?’ I asked. ‘Not often. Do you want your revenge?’ ‘Another time. What a gambler you could be, Vigot. Do you play any other game of chance?’ He smiled miserably, and for some reason I thought of that blonde wife of his who was said to betray him with his junior officers. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘there’s always the biggest of all.’ ‘The biggest?’ ‘“Let us weigh the gain and loss,”’ he quoted, ‘“in wagering that God is, let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose you lose nothing.”’ I quoted Pascal back at him—it was the only passage I r...

Started dipping into it just this morning. A friend told me it was a pretty good read. Graham Greene (IMHO) always feels like he's writing for the silver screen. Not necessarily a bad thing. Anyway, the beginning -- slants on love, opium, political intrigue, Baudelaire -- have piqued my interest. We' ll see how that goes. * The snippet from The Quiet American : ‘Don’t worry. He’ll come. Make me another pipe.’ When she bent over the flame the poem of Baudelaire’s came into my mind: ‘Mon enfant, ma soeur …’ How did it go on? Aimer à loisir, Aimer et mourir Au pays qui te ressemble. *