life is lived on other pages

I look up and down the dormitory and there’s hardly a sound except for pages being turned, and here and there a pen scratching. It’s like this every evening. And not just letters either. Diaries. Poems. At least two would-be poets in this hut alone. Why? you have to ask yourself. I think it’s a way of claiming immunity. First-person narrators can’t die, so as long as we keep telling the story of our own lives we’re safe. Ha bloody fucking ha.

“

—	The Ghost Road, Pat Barker. (via birdcage)

Mather was middle aged, furrow-cheeked, sandy-haired, shrewd.

‘All right, drop your drawers, bend over.’

They always went for the arse, Prior thought, doing as he was told. An army marches on its stomach, and hobbles on its haemorrhoids. He felt gloved fingers on his buttocks, separating then, and thought, Better men than you have paid for this.

‘I see you’ve got asthma.’

There? ‘Yes, sir.’

“

—	The Ghost Road by Pat Barker. (p9)

nevertravelled:

One of my problems with the baths is that I’m always dressed. Officers bathe separately. And… Well, it’s odd. One of the things I like sexually, one of the things I fantasize about, is simply being fully dressed with a naked lover, holding him or her from behind. And what I feel (apart from the obvious) is a great tenderness - the sort of tenderness that depends on being more powerful, and that is really, I suppose, just the acceptable face of sadism.

The Ghost Road, Pat Barker.

He was thinking that the whole of Kath’s life had been constriction »

nevertravelled:

He was thinking that the whole of Kath’s life had been constriction into a smaller and smaller space. As children they’d both had a hundred acres of safe woods and fields to roam in, but from that point on his life had expanded: medical school, round the world as a ship’s doctor, Germany, the Torres Straits, India, Australia, the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides. And over the same period the little girl who’d rambled all day through woods and fields had become the younger of the two Miss Rivers, scrutinized by her father’s parishioners, the slightest breach of decorum noted, and then, after father’s retirement, a small house in Ramsgate, deteriorating health, confinement to the house, then to the bedroom, then to the bed. And yet she was no more intrinsically neurasthenic than he was himself. But a good mind must have something to feed on, and hers, deprived of other nourishment, had fed on itself.

The Ghost Road, Pat Barker.

What do I think? I think what you’re saying is basically a conspiracy theory, and like all conspiracy theories, it’s optimistic. What you’re saying is, OK, the war isn’t being fought for the reasons we’re told, but it is being fought for a reason. It’s not benefiting the people it’s supposed to be benefiting, but it is benefiting somebody. And I don’t believe that, you see. I think things are actually much worse than you think because there isn’t any kind of rational justification left. It’s become a self-perpetuating system. Nobody benefits. Nobody’s in control. Nobody knows how to stop.

“

—	The Ghost Road by Pat Barker. (p144)

Ada had a great stock of books. A few romances, which she read with every appearance of enjoyment, gurgles of laughter erupting from the black bombazine like a hot spring from volcanic earth. But she preferred penny dreadfuls, which she read propped up against the milk bottle as she prepared the evening meal. Fingerprints, translucent with butter, encrusted with batter, sticky with jam, edged every page. Bloody thumbprints led up to one particularly gory murder. All the books had murders in them, all carried out by women. Aristocratic ladies ranged abroad, pushing their husbands into rivers, off balconies, over cliffs, under trains or, in the case of the more domestically inclined, feminine type of women, remained at home and jalloped them to death. Only the final pages were free of cooking stains, and for a long time this puzzled him, until he realized that, in the final chapter, the adulterous murderesses were caught and punished. Ada had no truck with that. Her heroines got away with it.

“

—	The Ghost Road by Pat Barker. (p71)

…The extraordinary thing is that everybody’s slightly nervous about these tunnels, far more than about the guns that rumble and flicker and light up the sky as I write. And it’s not a rational fear. It’s something to do with the children whom the Pied Piper led into the mountain, who never came out again or Rip Van Winkle who came out and found years and years had passed and nobody knew him…

“

—	Prior from The Ghost Road by Pat Barker. I love this passage even if it is slightly clichéd. In my experience this is a near universal consequence of war. (via blahblahbollocks)