Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

A Clue to the Exit

London

Chatto & Windus

2000

"They just went rolling on in their parallel curvature, only brought together by storms, like the mind and the body forever separated by the 'explanatory gap' but brought together by the storm of life."

The water was cold. By the time I reached the mouth of the bay I was shivering uncontrollably, but my mind was in a state of despairing calm, my gaze fixed on the grey crease of the horizon where the sea and sky seemed to meet, without in fact doing so. They just went rolling on in their parallel curvature, only brought together by storms, like the mind and the body forever separated by the 'explanatory gap' but brought together by the storm of life. The horizon was the home of delusion, pretending to reconcile the parallel curvature of the world. I must swim out there and denounce its lies. I was beyond the narcissistic impertinence of the lonely tower --'Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie', the winding stair to the crumbling battlements -- beyond all that. I was cold and tired, but I was furious as well, furious with all illusions of reconciliation. And what of intimacy? Was I going to let the vague potency of that word save my life? Was intimacy going to make me turn back and get dressed and stop this silliness and have a hot meal and get a good night's sleep? No. Intimacy was another blurred horizon, pretending to dissolve the observer and the observed, only to resurrect them the moment that the dissolution was recognised. I swam on with savage weariness.
(p. 170

Weather::Storm

Reading

Edward St. Aubyn, A Clue to the Exit (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000).

09/19/2015