I was turned on to this book of wisdom by an interview I read last year of Donna Tartt. "The Unquiet Grave" is actually a journal written by Mr. Connolly (1903-74), an English critic, during the devastation of WWII and filled with his reflections on society, aging, the breakup of his marriage and the war. It's a collection of aphorisms, epigrams and quotations from masters of European lit.
I wholeheartedly agree with the cover quote of Ernest Hemingway, "A book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough." I will share a few of the gems I've found:
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"There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives; and since it can be minimized by obeying a few simple rules, rules which approximate to Christian marriage, they provide, even to the unbeliever, its de facto justification. It is when we begin to hurt those whom we love that the guilt with which we are born becomes intolerable, and since all those whom we love intensely and continuously grow part of us, and as we hate ourselves in them, so we torture ourselves and them together."
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"A love affair is a grafting operation. 'What has once been joined, never forgets.' There is a moment when he graft takes; up to then is possible without difficulty the separation which afterwards comes only through breaking off a great hunk of oneself, the ingrown fibre of hours, days, years."
______
"In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion.
`And their revenge is as the tiger's spring,
Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet as real
Torture is theirs, what they inflict they fell.'
When every unkind word about women has been said, we still have to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it."
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"There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating. Analyse in this way the hatred of ideas or of the kind of people whom we have once loved and whose faces are preserved in Spirits of Anger. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; the child who fears noise becomes the man who hates them."
_____
"`Whatever you blame, that you have done yourself.' Groddeck"
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A MUST for any thinker's library.
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Top reviews from other countries
Suzette A. Hill
Literary bliss!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 28, 2018
