quotes worth sharing

I've spent a lot of time lately with a 1945 novel by Rumer Godden called Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time. The simplicity of its premise—like many other modernist novels, it's the story of an English family home—is deceptive. Take Three Tenses is a family history, yes, but it's also an experiment with time and narrative agency, an extended explication of T. S. Eliot's "East Coker" (one of the Four Quartets), a meditation on memory and consciousness, and a war memorial. Copies are hard to come by, as the book went out of print decades ago, but it's a fascinating read.

As I've been reworking a paper on Take Three Tenses for an upcoming conference, I've been particularly preoccupied with the passage below. Consider in context: late 1940 to early 1941, London, the Blitz.

"Things are serious just now," said Pax with his cheek against hers. "You have to treat them seriously but it is of no use to be afraid. I should be afraid if it made us any safer, but it doesn't. You have to think, I think, that anything we do in any time, the smallest thing, like ordering the paper to come every day or promising to go out to dinner next Wednesday week, or getting a new tube of toothpaste, particularly the large size that lasts twice as long, is an act of faith. It is an act of faith to think or hope or plan, but I intend to go on doing it. There are dozens of things I want. I intend to go on as if I shall get them all." (222)

I have nothing to add. But lovely and powerful, no?

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