Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited

That day, too, I had come not knowing my destination. It was Eights Week. Oxford--submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding in--Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days--such as that day--when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour (p. 21).

I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning (Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited [Little, Brown, 1945], p. 225).

(Although Evelyn Waugh's account of England's smart set in the 1920's and 30's is probably better read in one's youth, along with the novels of Thomas Wolfe, I thought it was interesting on a couple of counts -- in part, for its nostalgic longing for England's pre-WWI past; in part for its aversion to modernity (apparently he regarded James Joyce's later novels with the same loathing and despair that some regard our own post-modern age), and more in part for its conservative embrace of traditional Catholic faith. In this regard, his account of the drunken Sebastian Flyte, who ends up in a monastery near the end of the novel, is reminiscent of Graham Greene's whiskey priest in Power and the Glory, or even of the fallen Kichijiro in Shusaku Endo's Silence. While the tale of the narrator's off, on, off-again love for Sebastian's sister, Julia, is the stuff of which Hollywood films are made, and while the prose is as baroque as the fountain at the doorstep of the Brideshead mansion, I still think Waugh is an exquisite stylist, in love with the rhythms of the English language. I also think that Waugh is half in love with the debauchery that the novel ostensibly condemns. As in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, there is a genuine tension here between the novel's sermon and its unsettling affection for bone marrow and spices -- for the very whiskey, wine, and cocktails that flow throughout these tipsy pages.)