Howards End - E. M. Forster

It felt a bit like a Jane Austen or Charles Dickens book, from-the-bourgeois-for-the-bourgeois kind of book, just that the bourgeois did not stay the same and thus also the books differ. It is just a gut feeling and the impression I had, it might well be wrong.

C’è una cosa che succede solo in alcuni libri e corrisponde ad un certo stile narrativo - il narratore (deve esserci un narratore) prende un episodio appena accaduto e lo eleva a legge universale. This is of course very pleasant to read because it is of course not how reality works but how one dreams and dreads it would be.

Eine Auswahl:

Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secrets to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart - almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die - neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

Helen, after a decent pause, continued her account of Stettin. How quickly a situation changes! In June she had been in a crisis; even in November she could blush and be unnatural; now it was January, and the whole affair lay forgotten. Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

And even the influx of officials, even the return of the doctor, vulgar and acute, could not shake her beliefe in the eternity of beauty. Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding. One could open the heart to Mr Mansbridge and his sort without discovering its secrets to them, for they wanted everything down in black and white, and black and white was exactly what they were left with.

The novel reinforces the idea of the necessity to name one’s home, with all the difficulties it entails. It is barbaric not to name a home. My flat does not have a name yet.