Favorite Lines
Hugh Laurie: So to you language is more than just a means of communication?
Stephen Fry: Er, of course it is, of course it
is, of course it is. Language is a whore, a
mistress, a wife, a pen-friend, a check-out girl,
a complimentary moist lemon-scented
cleansing square or handy freshen-up
wipette. Language is the breath of God, the
dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of
dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun
when you pull from an old bookshelf a
forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language
is the faint scent of urine on a pair of
boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered
childhood birthday party, a creak on the
stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted
pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a
leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer,
the underside of a granite boulder, the first
downy growth on the upper lip of a
Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since
overrun by an old Wellington boot.
(Fry and Laurie are perhaps best-known for playing
Jeeves and Wooster in the BBC adaptation).
I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension
that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our
surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien
thing that has entered into our self; because everything
intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away;
because we stand in the middle of a transition where we
cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too
passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into
our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even
there any more, is already in our blood. And we do not learn
what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing
has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes
into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come,
perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the
future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself
in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so
important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because
the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our
future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other
noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as
if from outside. The more still, more patient and more open
we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the
more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better
do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny,
and when on some later day it "happens" (that is, steps forth
out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin
and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary and
toward this our development will move gradually that nothing
strange should befall us, but only that which has long
belonged to us. We have already had to think so many of our
concepts of motion, we will also gradually learn to realize
that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people,
not from without into them. Only because so many have not
absorbed their destinies and transmuted them within
themselves while they were living in them, have they not
recognized what has gone forth out of them; it was so strange
to them that, in their bewildered fright, they thought it must
only just then have entered into them, for they swear never
before to have found anything like it in themselves. As people
were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they are
even yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come.
The future stands firm . . . but we move in infinite space.
How should it not be difficult for us?
-- Rilke