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Elizabeth Harrower Books

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The Watch Tower

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Down in the City

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“Clare summarily called up her dear ones and relations out of books. They knew her. What did it matter if there had never been anyone about to talk to? These others knew the real world was not tables and chairs and meat and vegetables—or that, given food and shelter, you could surely agree to, had obligations to—venture out? With her head on her folded arms, she stood dreaming.”

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Book:The Watch Tower
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“No, it seemed that there was more than that to restrain her among many factors, fear of contamination. She would not willingly have touched a box of matches belonging to him. So erratic, vicious and dangerous, so inaccessible to reason and human feeling had he demonstrated himself to be, and so bent on the spiritual destruction of those about him, that the very artifacts he handled seemed to sicken. His eyes, merely by looking, spread the contagion, so that the fabric and foundations of the house were diseased; the silver Jaguar that he drove as though it were a weapon of war was diseased. She herself. She herself. She shuddered. What wasn’t? The wind? The sky?”

FearLoathing
Book:The Watch Tower
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“Perhaps this was the greatest difference of all between people? It did seem to be a very great difference. How odd—all to look like one and yet to be, in a sense, two species. This permanent awareness of what was so, regardless of her whims of the moment, regardless of what it would be pleasant to believe, or not pleasant, this solid bedrock was what she was, what she was about. What could there be in its place if you were differently constituted? What use (the question came) had she ever made of this supposedly valuable possession? What use did she ever intend to make of it? Oh, some. Some use, she promised. Because she could not die till that was done. And she sighed and frowned in abstraction, understanding what did not seem very understandable: that she was not yet good enough to die, could not afford it yet on any account.”

Human NatureSelf Knowledge
Book:The Watch Tower
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“What I do understand is that at any point in a woman’s life she may come across something like a cement pyramid in the middle of the road. Another person. People. She’s capable of sitting there, convinced that it would be impossible to forsake her position, till it becomes a private Thermopylae. This sort of block was probably designed for the survival of our species, but the cost’s high. What makes men superior is that they don’t – on the whole – stop functioning forever because of another person . . . .”

MenLoveWomenAustralian LiteratureAustralian Writers
Book:In Certain Circles
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“In some new way, since they had come to live in this house, it seemed to Clare that words, silences, gestures and the absence of gestures, being present, being absent, had all come to seem more meaningful than they were, to mean something other than what they meant. There was the effect of striking C natural and hearing B flat, so that the mind registered small disagreeable shocks constantly, as if a scientist with a new machine was playing tricks on it.”

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Book:The Watch Tower
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“For five days the city had wilted under a hard sky, sweltering in a temperature that stayed fixed in the middle nineties. Even at night there was no relief from the heat. Pyjamas and nighties stuck clammily to damp skin. Half-clad, self-pitying figures rose, exasperated by insomnia, to stumble through darkened rooms in search of a cooler plot than their bed, hoping that, all accidentally, they might waken any gross sleeper the house contained. Cold water ran hot from the taps, and the roads turned to tar.”

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Book:Down in the City
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“The city, to her, meant a few particular blocks - the best blocks - lying together in a neat rectangle, linked by arcades and department stores; three streets one way, cut by four at right angles, bound at the top by gardens, self-enclosed at the bottom and either end. Three or four times a week she walked the streets of these blocks, smelt the coffee, the flowers, the rich expensive leather, the cosmetics.”

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Book:Down in the City
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“in old times, whole communities used the method of passive resistance to redress a grievance. The technique was to sit motionless in a public place, without food and exposed to the weather, until the ruler agreed to the people’s demands. Sometimes, when he was particularly tyrannical, his subjects would desert the land, leaving the ruler to live in loneliness and mend his ways. In ancient India it was considered the duty of a wise man to abandon the kingdom when all methods of weaning a king from bad ways had failed.”

HistoryIndiaHinduismNonviolent ResistancePassive Resistance
Book:The Watch Tower
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“A most tremendous inertia which sprang from the paralysis of a will too long suppressed shackled her. She could do nothing. The habit of living each day as it came, grateful, after it had passed, for any hours that gave even the appearance of concord, had rendered her incapable of forethought. She had achieved this state with much painless suffering, committing murder by proxy. In truth, at the deepest level, she did not know what to do, and knew what she would do.”

Apathy
Book:The Watch Tower
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