The Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

sand. She gave more space to the peculiarly bulbous hairy legs of Miss Wood than to the kind note from Father Rowell. She was occasionally distressed by the extent to which the events and solid objects around her were only remarkable in so far as she ‘collected’ them for the journal. In moments of solitude she was increasingly obsessed by a sense that her life was weightless and meaningless; she told herself sometimes that she had made of the journal a moral compulsion to treat her life and its details as though they were real. But this was not what it felt like, however the journal gave solidity to round, hot girls in pink dressing-gowns and even noted, carefully, their cracked and dirty toe-nails.
    It seemed, lately, that the journal was becoming an increasingly necessary means of distinguishing between what was realand what was imagined. Once she had used it for the opposite purpose, recording moorland rapes and battles alongside vicarage tea-parties with indifferent skill as though the one ran into the other as she had imagined Oxford ran into the past. Daily events had been landmarks, tips of icebergs useful for locating events in the inner drama. Empty rooms had been – were – peopled. Helen Waddell had once seen Peter Abelard peering in through a hospital window. Charlotte Brontë had seen the Duke of Zamorna leaning against a school mantelshelf and had felt exhilarated and faint. They had played with fear, too; they had deliberately blurred the edges that divided the real from the fantastic. It might be that they too had been hunted, in the long run, and had feared to be absorbed, submerged with no hope of return.
    And once the journal had been only raw material for some large imaginative work – something finished and formed, which would, like a magnet, polarize all these unrelated scraps so that they lay in concentric circles or stood and pointed all one way like fur. It was still a guarantee of possible significant communication; it existed and was fluent.
    She spent some space on elaborating the physical differences between Simon Moffitt as she saw him now and Simon as she had known him. This was painful, but not without excitement. She ended. ‘He has achieved a professional mode of communication, and this has changed him. He is harder; this I expected; but he is also larger. Or so he seems. I find this distressing.’
    She thought a moment and then added, ‘
Notes on the winged snake.
This is interesting. I should like to know whether you remember my views on this idea, put to you now nearly twenty years ago. I notice that you used some of my quotations last week. The serpent is traditionally, as I told you, a symbol for our horror at finding ourselves necessarily embodied.
It is the brute.
A creature reduced to a mouth and a stomach. On thy belly shalt thou go, etc. In the myth of Psyche, Psyche’s curiosity discovers Eros embodied as a serpent. The neo-Platonic interpretation is that this curiosity has transformed spirituallove to bodily lust. The limiting, debasing animal functions. Keats knew this feeling. There is a marginal note in his
Paradise Lost
at the point where Satan informs the brutal sense of the serpent which gives a feeling of distress at physical confinement quite in excess of what Milton meant to convey. He says something like “Whose spirit does not ache at the smothering and confinement – the unwilling stillness – the ‘
waiting close
’?”
Do we not know this, Simon?
So, of course, we give the creature wings.
    “The butterfly the ancient Grecians made
    The soul’s fair emblem, and its only name —
    But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
    Of mortal life! For in this earthly frame
    Ours is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame,
    Manifold motions making little speed,
    And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.”
    ‘Coleridge. Psyche means both butterfly and soul. A nice comment, both on my myth, and on your butterflies, which, as you told us, feed on