Commonplace Book

'...Every inch of the earth is, after all, so dangerous. Here, where we stand, a minute or a million years ago, some heart failed. There, at that point to which our dear love is hurrying, the lightning struck, the germ of plague was born, the murderer will stab - a minute or a million years hence - a minute or a million years ago. Living is a matter of missing death by a hair's breadth or an aeon - it doesn't matter which - and dying is a matter of coincidence. If we knew the past and the future of every yard of every path we tread, or of every stone our dear love's foot turns over as he goes - where should we turn for peace? Once we have realised the billions of deaths and horrors that have been, the billions that will be, every inch of the world seems soaked in blood...'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter IX)

Commonplace Book

'...Men and women - especially women - had been judged too much by their capacity for love. This was because people who love, propagate, thought Varvara, and transmit their vulgar standard of love from generation to generation. Just as rabbits transmit their bobtails. Bobtails are a conventional rabbit standard. A rabbit with a long curly tail would be feared, shunned, trampled to death, so the innovation would die untried, unbequeathed, abortive. But its death didn't prove the essential wrongness of long curly tails for rabbits. Genius was probably often heartless. But genius did not often propagate. Strangeness meant physical mortality, so strangeness was rare - never re-born - always new in every manifestation. All the stupid things - cruelty - prostitution - womanly modesty - conventional religion - conventional morality - only survived so rampantly because of the excessive fertility of the stupid.'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'...She knew that he had killed himself by way of revenge on her - he had told her that he would - but she did not know why. What were two me's[sic] to each other, that one should be so necessary to another? A sort of accident, it seemed, happened in young men's blood that made them think that two me's could be kneaded together into an us. Most of them probably lived to find it a mistake. Only dear Sasha had incredibly thrown his me away - poured it out of a cut throat - because he could not double it into an us. Here in this generous world were a million million me's - a million million columns of lonely blood and bone. There was no such thing as a real us.'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'The water climbed up Seryozha's body as he waded deeper and deeper. The garment of delicious coldness, as it wrapped itself higher and higher about him, seemed to be piped by a wire of almost pain - a steel hair of ice or fire, climbing up his legs and his body. His thirsty skin gloried. He threw himself flat in the water, his open mouth just held above the surface. He felt strangely level with the world's floor. All perspective changed to fit eyes only six inches from world level instead of the usual six feet. He saw the darkening sandbanks like clouds, the bullock and the dog like giants, wild geese resting on far-distant sandbanks like tall electric grey ghosts.'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'What was it, this bond of flesh? so material, yet so imperative, so compelling, as to become almost a spiritual, not a bodily, necessity? so transitory, yet so recurrent? dying down like a flame, to revive again? so unimportant, so grossly commonplace, yet creating so close and tremulous an intimacy? this magic that drew together their hands like fluttering butterflies in the hours of sunlight, and linked them in the abandonment of mastery and surrender in the hours of night? that swept aside the careful training, individual and hereditary, replacing pride by another pride? this unique and mutual secret? this fallacious yet fundamental and dominating bond? this force, hurling them together with such cosmic power that within the circle of frail human entity rushed furiously the tempest of an inexorable law of nature?'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part III, Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'...To be approached was entirely unbearable; a desiring or acute glance was in itself an assault; see she must, but to be seen was somehow insult. She loathed touch and always avoided it; the lightest accidental touch rasped her like a cat's tongue. Love of her neighbour was a thing felt stilly, thinly diffused among pitied lovers - puppies - parents - flowers - insects - even things - (she often felt guilty for disappointing things) - even invented things - blank pensioners of her compassionate fancy...'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'He insisted, -

"When did you really become aware of your own heartlessness?"

She sparkled with laughter.

"I think it began life as a sense of humour," she said, "and degenerated gradually into its present state of spasmodic infamy."'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part III, Chapter I)