Theodore Savage quotes

“All the same,” Markham nodded, “it’s worth thinking over. …

Man in the mass, as a crowd, can only feel; there is no such thing as a mass-mind or intellect⁠—only mass desires and emotions.

That is what I mean by saying that Meyer—whatever his intelligence or sanity—is the instrument of instinctive emotion. … And instinctive emotion, Holt—until it has been hurt—is damnably and owlishly courageous. It isn’t clever enough to be afraid;

… He laughed suddenly and pushed the bottle across the table. “Do you know where we are now—you and I and all of us? On the crest of the centuries. They’ve carried us a long roll upwards and now here we are—on top!

In five more minutes⁠—three hundred little seconds⁠—we shall hear the crest curl over.

… Meanwhile, have a drink!”

“Five minutes,” said Markham. … He laughed suddenly and pushed the bottle across the table. “

Do you know where we are now⁠—you and I and all of us? On the crest of the centuries.

They’ve carried us a long roll upwards and now here we are—on top! In five more minutes—three hundred little seconds—we shall hear the crest curl over. … Meanwhile, have a drink!”

There was no other sound for the twelve booming strokes of the hour: it was only as the last beat quivered into silence that there broke the moving thunder of a multitude.

“Over!” said Markham. “Hear it crash?⁠ ⁠… Well, here’s to the centuries⁠—after all, they did the best they knew for us!”

In the wreck of civilization, of its systems, institutions and polity, there endured longest that form of order which had first evolved from the chaos of barbarism—the disciplined strength of the soldier. …

A people retracing its progress from chaos retraced it step by step.

He had lost the power of interest in all that was not personal, material and immediate; and, as the uncounted days dragged out into weeks, even the thought of Phillida, once an ever-present agony, ceased to enter much into his daily struggle to survive.

He starved and was afraid: that was all. His life was summed up in the two words, starvation and fear.

At night, as a rule, he sheltered in a house or deserted farm-building that stood free for anyone to enter—sometimes alone, but as often as not in company. Starved rabble, as long as it hunted for food, avoided its rivals in the chase;

once the neighbours were stripped of their all and there was nothing more to prey on, the group fell apart or its members turned on each other.

In the life predatory man had ceased to be creative; in a world where no one could count on a morrow, construction and forethought had no meaning.

… And all the time there was this in us—this raw, red thing—and I never even touched it, never guessed what we were without our habits. … Do you know where we made the mistake?”—he turned suddenly to Theodore, thrusting out a finger—“

We were not civilized⁠—it was only our habits that were civilized; but we thought they were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.

Underneath, the beast in us was always there—lying in wait till his time came. The beast that is ourselves, that is flesh of our flesh—clothed in habits, in rags that have been torn from us.”

As we made them they fastened on us—set their claws in us—and they have taken our minds from us as well as our bodies. As we made them, they followed the law of their life.

We created life without a soul; but it was life and it went its own way.

”

… Theodore, setting foot in the wood for the first time—seeking refuge, a hiding-place to cower in—was suddenly in presence of the green life unchanging, that blessed and uplifted by its very indifference to the downfall and agony of man.

The windflowers, thrusting through brown leaves, were as last year’s windflowers⁠—a delicate endurance that persisted.

… He had entered a world that had not altered since the days when he lived as a man.

… As he wrestled instinctively other hands grasped him; he was the held and helpless captive of three or four who clutched him by throat, wrist and shoulder. …

By that token he was back among men.

“University!” The word (so it seemed to him) was snatched at.

“You’re a college man?”

“I was at Oxford,” Theodore told him.

… What these outcasts, these remnants of humanity feared above all things was a revival of the science, the mechanical powers, that had wrecked their cities, their houses and their lives and made them—what they were. …

In knowledge was death and in ignorance alone was a measure of peace and security;

hence, fearing lest he was of those who knew too much, they had tempted him to confess to forbidden knowledge, to boast of it—that, having boasted, they might kill him without mercy, make an end of his wits with his life.

It was a rhythmical formula, its phrasing often Biblical; instinctively the prophet, when he framed his new ritual, had followed the music of the old. …

Written pages and the stonework of churches might perish, but the word that was spoken endured.⁠ ⁠…

“I do swear and take oath, before God and before man, that I will walk humbly all my days and put from me the pride of the intellect.

“Whatever you think,” he insisted, “you mustn’t say it—to anyone.”

“I know,” she snuffled obediently, “I shan’t say nothing⁠ ⁠… but, oh Gawd, oh Gawd⁠—aren’t we ever going to be ’appy again?”

He knew what she was weeping for—shaking with miserable sobs; the evenings at the pictures, the little bits of machine-made finery, the petty products of “devil’s knowledge” that had made up her daily life.

every morning when she came out of the hut the first thing she did was to look up at the sky. … And some day one was bound to come. When things had settled down and got straight, it was bound to. …

But it never did; and in the end she ceased to look for it.

His attempts—they were many in the first few years—to break away from his world and his bondage of ignorance were made always with cunning precaution and subterfuge;

The process, unhindered, was certain as sunrise; the important little streets that humanity had built for its vanished needs and its vanished business would be absorbed into an indifferent wilderness, in all things sufficient to itself.

The rigid important little streets had been no more than an episode in the ceaseless life of the wilderness; an episode ending in failure, to be decently buried and forgotten.

He plodded aimlessly through street after street that was fordable till the shell of a “County Infirmary” mocked at Ada’s hopes and recalled the first purpose of his journey; a gaunt sodden building, the name yet visible on walls that sweated fungi and mould.

“

That same wicked man⁠—who was also very wise⁠—told me something else that is as true for you as it was for me;

he said that we never know anything except through our own experience.

He stroked the grubby face as he released it.

“That’s the Law, son; and all that matters you’ll learn that way. That way and no other⁠—just as we did.”

In time he found himself recalling, with strange interest, the fairytales of his childhood; he spent long hours re-weaving and piecing them together, searching his memory for half-remembered fragments of what had once seemed fantasy or nonsense invented for the nursery.

It was the new world that taught him that man invents nothing, is incapable of pure invention; that what seem his wildest, most fantastic imaginings are no more than ineffective, distorted attempts to set down a half-forgotten experience.

What had once appeared prophecies he saw to be memories;

the Day of Judgment, when the heavens should flame and men call upon the rocks to cover them, belonged to the past before it belonged to the future. The forecast of its terrors was possible only to a people that had known them as realities;

The instinctive politics of a squalid village were in miniature the policy of vanished nations, and untraditioned little headmen, like dead and gone kings, quelled internal feuds by diverting attention to the danger that threatened from abroad.

The foundations of community life in the new world, like the foundations of community life in the old, were laid in the selfishness of fear;

but for all its base origin the life of the community imposed upon its members the essential virtues of the soldier and citizen, a measure of discipline and sacrifice. From these, in time, would grow loyalty and pride in sacrifice;