Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.
(Nobody could mistake him for one of the world's great prose stylists, and I am a trifle dubious about his rules - language that is stripped down for action has its own beauty and utility, but so do persiflage, frivolity, joyous reveling in words for words' sake - but I am perpetually seduced by his moral clarity. I remember reading Down and Out in Paris and London on a bush taxi between Franceville and Lastourville and being so absorbed that I barely noticed the stinking bushmeat under my seat.)
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1 commentaire:
Well said.
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