Adversaria (4)
‘At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end’ —Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, p. 171)
‘…psycho-analysis brings out the worst in everyone.’ —Sigmund Freud (The History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement [in the Standard edition, vol. 14], p. 39)
‘The best part of life are the hours we spend in bed. The ego has a marvelous faculty for finding its way around in the dark. Trust the ego and not your flash-light.’ —Henry Miller (The Book of Conversations with David Edgar, p. 17)
‘We forget, nowadays, the scarcity of treats that made a piece of self-made toast extraordinarily exciting: something you would spend your whole teens striving towards.’ —Ysenda Maxtone Graham (Terms and Conditions, p. 198)
‘“Polk-Mowbray was a perfectly normal well-balanced Englishman then. He had all the fashionable weaknesses of the eighteenth-century gentleman. He fenced, he played the recorder.” […] Antrobus leaned forward and said with portentous triumph: “He wrote good English in those days.” Then he sat back and stared impressively at me down the long bony incline of his nose. He allowed the idea to soak in. Of course what he meant by good English was the vaguely orotund and ornamental eighteenth-century stuff which was then so much in vogue. A sort of mental copperplate prose’ —Lawrence Durrell (Esprit de Corps, p. 21)
There was a chest of drawers under the window with a label gummed to the top: worthless sentimental souvenirs. I opened the top drawer. It was crammed to the brim and covered with a piece of sewing, on which Grand had pinned another notice: it is dangerous to open this drawer! I shut it quickly and pulled out the next. It was extremely heavy and revealed yet another notice: beware! open this drawer at your peril.
I drew back breathing deeply with frustration. […] Beware, indeed! It was all tommyrot. Of course I must unpack.
‘Finally, and this is highly significant, he sent out a staff circular saying that any of the secretaries caught using phrases like quid pro quo, sine qua non, ad hoc, ab initio, ab ovo and status quo would be transferred. This was a bombshell. We were deprived at a blow of practically our whole official vocabulary.’ —Lawrence Durrell (Esprit de Corps, p. 23)
‘I really ought to say a good deal more, or a great deal less. It is an improvisation, like everything I am writing here. It is born of the moment’ —Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, p. 171)
‘…he had been very subdued that winter and apart from confessing that he was clairvoyant at parties and dabbling in astrology he had lived an exemplary life of restraint.’ —Lawrence Durrell (Esprit de Corps, p. 79)