O Prazer da Leitura (136)

Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his 'self' as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (135)

Roland was so used to the pervasive sense of failure that he was unprepared for the blood-rush of success. He breathed differently. The dingy little room humped around in his vision briefly and settled at a different distance, an object of interest, not of choking confinement. He reread his letters. The world opened. […] How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one’s own existence. Nothing in what he had written had changed and everything had changed.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (134)

Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated,I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small virtue to claim, a very negative achievement to hang my whole life on.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (133)

What is read and understood and contemplated and intellectually grasped is our own, madam, to live and work with. A lifetime's study will not make accessible to us more than a fragment of our own ancestral past, let alone the aeons before our race was formed. But that fragment we must thoroughly possess and hand on. Hoc opus, hic labor est. There is, I am tempted to assert, no easy way, no short cut: we are, in attempting those, like Bunyan's Ignorance who found a path to Hell at the very gate of the City of Heaven.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (132)

He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself.

He thought about the death mask. He could and could not say that the mask and the man were dead. What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (131)

All old stories, my cousin, will bear telling and telling again in different ways. What is required is to keep alive, to polish, the simple clean forms of the tale which must be there - in this case the angry Ocean, the terrible leap of the horse, the fall of Dahud from the crupper, the engulfment etc etc. And yet to add something of yours, of the writer, which makes all these things seem new and first seen, without having been appropriated for private or personal ends.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (130)

Maud considered. She said, 'In every age, there must be truths people can't fight - whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we've modified it. We aren't really free to suppose - to imagine - he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely - but not in the large plan.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (129)

You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of unsatisfied love - my dear - and so it may be indeed - for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to being in love, when they do not simply state, that they are in love, that they seek love - for this fresh damsel, or that lively young woman - in order to find a fresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (128)

I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in her muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet about the chaste sweetness of her face and the intuitive goodness shining in her walk. But now I think - it might have been better, might it not, to have held on to the desire to be a Poet?

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (127)

It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-abîme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of a good burgundy. And yet, natures such as Roland's are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive. (What an amazing word "heady" is, en passant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera—though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.)

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (126)

There were times when [he] allowed himself to see clearly that he would end his working life, that was to say, his conscious thinking life, in this task, that all his thoughts would have been another man's thoughts, all his work another man's work. And then he thought it did not perhaps matter so greatly... It was a pleasant subordination, if he was a subordinate.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (125)

There are readings—of the same text—that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are—believe it—impersonal readings—where the mind's eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind's ear hears them sing and sing.

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O prazer da Leitura (124)

Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes appeared, followed by impeccably creased matt charcoal pinstriped light woollen legs, followed by the beautifully cut lower hem of a jacket, its black vent revealing a scarlet silk lining, its open front revealing a flat muscular stomach under a finely-striped red and white shirt. Val’s legs followed, in powder-blue stockings and saxe-blue shoes, under the limp hem of a crêpey mustard-coloured dress, printed with blue moony flowers. The four feet advanced and retreated, retreated and advanced, the male feet insisting towards the basement stairs, the female feet resisting, parrying. Roland opened the door and went into the area, fired mostly by what always got him, pure curiosity as to what the top half looked like.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (123)

A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (122)

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (121)

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

Possession, A. S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (120)

We two remake our world by naming it

Together, knowing what words mean for us 

And for the other for whom current coin

Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool,

And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun,

Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now

Particularly our sun...

Possession, A.S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (119)

This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.

Possession, A.S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (118)

Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, 'in love', romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared.

Possession, A.S. Byatt

O Prazer da Leitura (117)

Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.

Possession, A. S. Byatt