Lord, let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down.

 

There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand open graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper.

 

There it was, sure enough, right opposite the front door as I went in, shining in the dim afternoon: the white marble relief of Mithra, a naked youth in a peaked Phrygian cap, clasping the sacred bull, which had the dog and the snake that were Darkness and Evil threatening its throat and its balls.

But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead.

 

The tempo is now changing. In just a short while this chapter will be looked back upon as the good old days when men loved one another and peace reigned on earth.

A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend.

 

in the garden at the back of the house the heat of this June morning – the month that scorches Paris – was already shrivelling the lovely deep blue of a pool of forget-me-nots within their edging of pinks.

I make smoke go up on your right, I light a fire on your left. The kingship upon [two lines too fragmentary for translation; rest, about fourteen lines, destroyed]

 

I’d rather live in a more equal world at a slower pace.

As our German peasants are cupped or bled at certain seasons, so do the English working people now consume patent medicines to their own injury and the great profit of the manufacturer. One of the most injurious of these patent medicines is a drink prepared with opiates, chiefly laudanum, under the name Godfrey’s Cordial. 

 

Three things enchanted him: / white peacocks, evensong / and faded maps of America.

Faces that wait in the mirrors of unknown dressing rooms, unseen in the depths of the glass like fish in dusty pools, fish that will rise up out of the obscure profundity when they spot the one who anxiously scrutinises his own reflection for the face it lacks, man-eating fish waiting to gobble up your being and give you another instead…