The Documents in the Case Read Online Free PDF

Because, for some reason, it does seem to me important to do this job as well as I can — not merely because it will do me good with publishers, and make it possible to embark on the important triviality of marriage, but for some obscure and irrational motive connected with the development of my soul, if I may so allude to it. I am increasingly not clear whether I am a mess of oddly assorted chemicals (chiefly salt and water), or a kind of hypertrophied fish-egg, or an enormous, all-inclusive cosmos of solar-systematically revolving atoms, each one supporting planetfuls of solemn imbeciles like myself.
    But, whatever I am, I must finish the Life and then get on to our life, Bungie, because that somehow does count for something too.Jack
The Same to the Same
    15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater 15th October, 1928
    I knew it, Bungie — I knew it, I knew it! I knew we should be asked downstairs to tea. And we’ve been! Down among the Liberty curtains and the brass Benares ware! Three young women, two bright youths, the local parson and the family. Crockery from Heal’s and everything too conscientiously bright. Mrs Harrison all radiance and very much the centre of attraction.
    3
----
    No sooner had I got there than I was swept into a discussion about ‘this wonderful man Einstein’. Extraordinarily interesting, wasn’t it, and what did I make of it? Displaying all my social charm, I said I thought it was a delightful idea. I liked thinking that all the straight lines were really curly, and only wished I’d known all about it at school, because it would have annoyed the geometry master so much.
    ‘But you do think there’s something in it, don’t you? My husband says it is all nonsense, but what do you say?’
    There was a little stir of triumph about this, and I somehow gathered that the Einstein topic had been deliberately chosen for a purpose. I said guardedly that I believed the theory was now generally accepted by mathematicians, though with very many reserves.
    ‘It really is, is it? Really true that nothing actually exists as we see it? I do hope so, because I have always felt so strongly that materialism is all wrong. There is something so deadening about materialism, isn’t there? I do so wish I knew what life means and what we really are. But I can’t understand these things, and you know, I should so like to, if only I had someone to explain them to me.’
    ‘As far as I can make out,’ I replied, you are really only made up of large lumps of space, loosely tied together with electricity. It doesn’t sound flattering, but there it is.’
    She frowned attractively.
    ‘But I can’t believe that.’
    ‘Why do you want to believe it?’ said Harrison. ‘It’s all words. When it comes to doing anything practical you have to come back to common sense. My friend Professor Alcock—’
    ‘Yes, yes, I know.’ She waved the interruption aside impatiently. ‘But the idea is the real thing, isn’t it? Haven’t they come round to thinking that poetry and imagination and the beautiful things of the mind are the only true realities after all?’
    ‘Of course beauty is the only true reality,’ said Lathom eagerly. ‘But it isn’t always what ordinary people think of as beauty. I mean, it’s not pretty-pretty. When you think a thing, then you create it and it exists. What’s the use of arguing what you make it of? That doesn’t matter to the thing itself, any more than the stuff paints are made of matter to the picture.’
    ‘It matters a good deal in practice,’ said Harrison. ‘Now the Pre-Raphaelites understood that — though, mind you, I don’t think much of the Pre-Raphaelite school myself. Some of their pictures are so remarkably ugly, and so exaggerated in colour. Take that thing of Holman Hunt’s, now—’
    ‘Darling,’ said Mrs Harrison, with emphasis, ‘you’re side-tracking.’
    ‘No, I’m not. I’m coming back to that. What I mean is that the Pre-Raphaelites, especially William Morris, knew a great deal about the material of their