She set out from the house of friends to meet the darkened daylight … perhaps the sudden tapping of thunder-drops upon her thin blouse. The street was a livid grey, brilliant with hidden sunlight.
The present can be judged by the part of the past it brings up. If the present brings up the happiness of the past, the present is happy.
Purgatory. The waters of Lethe and Eunoe “forgetfulness and sweet memory”; and then Heaven. The Catholics are right about expiation. If you are happy in the present something is being expiated. If life contains moments of paradise you must be in purgatory looking across the vale of Asphodel. You can’t be in hell. … Yet hell would not be hell without a knowledge of heaven. If once you’ve been in heaven you can never escape. Yet Dante believed in everlasting punishment.
Bathing in the waters of Lethe and Eunoe unworthily is drinking one’s own damnation. But happiness crops up before one can prevent it. Perhaps happiness is one long sin, piling up a bill. … It is my secret companion. Waiting at the end of every dark passage. I did not make myself. I can’t help it.
Brilliant … brilliant ; and someone was seeing it. There was no thunderstorm, no clouds or pink edges on the brilliant copper grey. She wandered on down the road hemmed by flaring green. The invisible sun was everywhere. There was no air, nothing to hold her body separate from the scene. The grey brilliance of the sky was upon the pavement and in the green of the park, making mauve shadows between the trees and a mist of mauve amongst the further green. The high house fronts stood out against the grey, eastern-white, frilled below with new-made green, sprouting motionlessly as you looked … white plaster houses against the blue of the Mediterranean, grey mimosa trees, green-feathered lilac of wisteria. Between the houses and the park the road glared wooden grey, dark, baked grey, edged with the shadowless stone grey of the pavement. Summer. Eternity showing . …