Brideshead Revisited: Key Quotations: Chapter 4 (Book 3)



Brideshead Revisited: Key Quotations: Chapter 4 (Book 3)

Discuss the description of summer on pp. 280-281 and compare this to earlier descriptions of summer at Oxford / Brideshead / Venice…

One afternoon in November Julia and I stood at a window in the drawing-room watching the wind at work stripping the lime trees, sweeping down the yellow leaves, sweeping them up and round and along the terrave and lawns, trailing them through puddles and over the wet grass, pasting them on walls and window-panes, leaving them at length in sodden piles against the stonework.

‘We shan’t see them in spring,’ said Julia; ‘perhaps never again.’

‘Once before,’ I said, ‘I went away, thinking I should never return.’

‘Perhaps years later, to what’s left of it, with what’s left of us…’ (p. 281)

We went up, all three together, to the old nursery. Julia and I always spent part of our day there. Nanny Hawkins and my father were the two people who seemed impervious to change, neither an hour older than when I first knew them. (P. 282)

‘I wanted him [Sebastian] to come home with me [Cordeilia], but he wouldn’t. He’s got a beard now, you know, and he’s very religious.’ (p. 283)

‘Perhaps,’ I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke – a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace – ‘perhaps all our loves are erely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-[psts and paving stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.’

I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me dailhy in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days.’ (p. 284)

Discuss Cordelia’s depiction of Sebastian on pages 289-290, up to:

I thought of the youth with the teddy-bear under the flowering chestnuts. ‘It’s not what one would have foretold,’ I said.

‘…I’ve seen so much suffering in the last few yea there’s so much coming for everybody soon. It’s the spring of love…’ (p. 290)

It was thus that I had rejoiced to see her nights without number, and that night, watching her as she sat between the firelight and the shaded lamp, undable to look away for love of her beauty, I suddenly thought, ‘When else have I seen her like this? Why am I reminded of another moment of vision?’ And it came back to me that this was how she had sat in the liner before the storm; this was how she had looked, and I realised that she had regained what I thought she had lost for ever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say ‘Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?’ (p. 291)

And another image came to me, of an arctic hut and a trapper alone with his furs and oil lamp and log fire; everything dry and ship-shape and warm inside, and ouatside the last blizzard of winter raging and the snow piling up against the door. Wuite silently a great weight forming against the timber; the bolt straining in its socket; minute by minute in the darkness outside the white heap sealing the door, until quite soon when the wind dropped and the sun came out on the ice slopes and the thaw set in a block would move, slide, and tumble, high above, gather weight, till the whole hillside seemed to be falling, and the little lighted place would open and splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine.’ (p. 291)

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