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Blue Voyage

Book by Conrad Aiken · 3 quotes · Community, Ego, Feeling

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Blue Voyage Quotes

“This is merely the announcement of that perfect communion of which I have often dreamed. They have lost their individualities, certainly—but was individuality necessary to them? Or is it possible that, having lost their personalities, they have lost that alone by which harmony or discord was perceptible? Or is it only that their individualities have been refined by self-awareness, so that the feelings no longer intrude, nor the passions tyrannize, bringing misery?…”

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“Who is this little, this pathetic, this ridiculous Demarest? We laugh at him, and also we weep for him; for he is ourselves, he is humanity, he is God. He makes mistakes. He is an egoist. He is imperfect—physically, morally, and mentally. Coffee disagrees with him; angostura causes him anguish; borborigmi interrupts his sleep, causing in his dreams falls of cliffs and the all-dreaded thunderstone; his ears ache; his nostrils, edematous; frontal headaches… Nevertheless, like ourselves, whose disabilities differ from his only in details, he struggles—why? to avoid the making of mistakes, to escape the tyrant solipsism, and to know himself; like us, he endeavors to return to God. Let him cry out as he will, let him protest his skepticism ever so loudly, he is at heart, like every other, a believer in perfection!”

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“What is man that thou art mindful of him? Melancholy. Men, in a smoking room, recounting their conquests to one another. Was it, as always assumed, a mere boastfulness, a mere rooster crow from the dunghill? No… It was the passionate desire to recreate, to live over again those inestimable instants of life, so tragically few, so irrecoverably lost. ‘That reminds me of one time when I was staying——’ Yes, you can see the wretched man trying to summon them back, those few paltry episodes, and make of them, for his solace, a tiny immortal bouquet.”

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