Commonplaces: Dementia

… on emerging into the open air once again, I was saddened to see, in one of the otherwise deserted aviaries, a solitary Chinese quail, evidently in a state of dementia, running to and fro along the edge of the cage and shaking its head every time it was about to turn, as if it could not comprehend how it had got into this hopeless fix.

The Rings of Saturn
W.G. Sebald

Commonplaces: Marriage

January 4 1976

Marriage is ultimately an agreement - or conspiracy - between two people to treat each other as having each the right to be loved absolutely. If there is not this understanding, there is no marriage; if there is this understanding, all the things that are supposed to go with marriage - children, sex, etc., are secondary. For this reason, whereas marriage between two people of the opposite sex who are physically attached to one another fails if there is no such bond of understanding, marriage between two people of the same sex may be immensely binding, and marriage in which there are no children, perhaps even no sex, may be extremely real.

Journals 1939-1983
Stephen Spender

Commonplaces

Ever since I came across W.H. Auden's commonplace book, the name of which I forget, I've been collecting extracts that appeal to me in one way or another. It's the most impersonal, and knowing, form of autobiography there is, and a blog, which is also impersonal and knowing, seems a good place to store/expose it. So I'll start with one that feels particularly apposite at the moment. It comes from Under My Skin, by Doris Lessing:

... it is a commonplace of sociology and psychology that a group anywhere, no matter what its first inspiration, political, literary, even criminal, tends in the end to become ‘religious’ ...