Step 47: Birdsong quotes

“When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.” - Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

Below are my favorite quotes from the book BIRDSONG, written by Sebastian Faulks. It is a really wonderful book set in two different times--both the present and during the First World War.  It is a story of faith, love, friendship, family...but ultimatley a story about if it's possible to find any meaning in our lives. Really beautifully written. I hope you enjoy the quotes.

Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

*Throughout the building the floors made distinctive sounds beneath the press of feet, so that with its closed angles and echoing air, the house was always a place of unseen footsteps.

*The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings that normally we keep locked up in the heart. The great composers of the past were able to do this; to make the hairs of your head stand on end!

*Music is a democratic form of art. You don’t need money to buy it or education to study it. All you need is a pair of ears. The gift of God at birth.

*When any art is put to practical ends it loses its essential purity.

*But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.

*This blood was supposed to be shameful, but she had never thought of it that way. She valued it because it spoke of some greater rhythm of life that would lead them away from the narrow boredom of childhood. Though she could never quite reconcile herself to the fact that this secret thing that promised new life and liberation should manifest itself in the color of pain.

*I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reasons and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive.

*He watched as she spoke and wondered if he could have told that she was lying. Nothing in her manner was different. One day she might lie to him and he would never know. Perhaps all women had this ability to survive.

*The strain of his anguish lasted for another year, then went cold in him. He had no sensation of healing, no awareness that time had soothed him or lent him a longer perspective in which to view his passion. He experienced it only as a loss of memory. Her presence, which he had felt permanently in his mind, abruptly disappeared. He was left with the feeling of emotions undischarged, of a process uncompleted. The coldness enabled him to live more easily, to respond with some degree of conviction to other people. However, the sudden chill loss of her also made him uneasy. Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

*He saw half of his platoon die under the shells of the enemy’s opening bombardement. He grew used to the sight and smell of torn human flesh. He watched the men harden to the mechanical slaughter. There seemed to him a great breach of nature which no one had the power to stop.

*As the fever in his abandoned body reached its height and he moved toward the welcome of oblivion, he heard a voice, not human, but clear and urgent. It was the sound of his life leaving him. Its tone was mocking. It offered him, instead of the peace he longed for, the possibility of return. He could go back to his body and to the brutal perversion of life that was lived in the turned soil and torn flesh of the war, to the awkward, compromised, and unconquerable existence that made up human life on earth. The voice appealed to his sense of shame and of curiosity unfulfilled: but if he did not heed it he would surely die.

*His innocence was not the same thing as ignorance; it was a powerful quality of goodness that was available to all people: it was perhaps what the prayer book called a means of grace, or a hope of glory.

*It seemed to Jack that if an ordinary human being, his own son, no one particular, could have this purity of mind, then perhaps the isolated deeds of virtue at which people marveled in later life were not really isolated at all; perhaps they were the natural continuation of the innocent goodness that all people brought into the world at their birth. If this were true, then his fellow-human beings were not the rough, flawed creatures that most of them supposed. Their failings were not innate, but were the result of where they had gone wrong or been coarsened by their experiences; in their hearts they remained perfectible.

*He remembered a day when another woman had lain naked like this, her legs parted in front of his eyes, and he had kissed her there, allowing his tongue to open her, as though this unlocking would provide a way into her deepest self. He remembered her gasp of surprise. He had obliterated himself in her; he had purged his longing and desire; he had lodged and invested himself in her body. In her trust and love for him, he had deposited the unresolved conflicts of his life. Perhaps his self was still in her—betrayed and unhealed. The body was only flesh, but she had taken hers away from him; and in her physical absence there was more than missing flesh: there was abandonment.

*He found something more than humility, a feeling of complete inconsequence. He felt no fear for his blood and muscle and bone, but the size of what had begun, the number of them now beneath the terrible crashing of the sky, was starting to pull at the moorings of his self-control. He found the word Jesus in his mouth. He said it again and again beneath his breath. It was part prayer, part profanity. Jesus, Jesus…

*I believe his death was God’s will. We would have kept him, but God knew best.

*Nothing was divine any more; everything was profane. Bloodied beyond caring, he watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity there was still horror.

*He stood on the river bed, trying to hold himself together. The noise pressed against the skull on both banks of the river. It would not diminish. He tried to calm his thoughts. Bryne was dead. It was not his death that mattered; it was the way the world had been dislocated. It was not all the tens of thousands of deaths that mattered; it was the way they had proved that you could be human yet act in a way that was beyond nature.

*They were built to endure and to resist; they looked like passive creatures adapting to the hell of circumstances that oppressed them. They had locked up in their hearts the horror of what they had seen, and their jovial pride in their resilience was not convincing. They boasted in a mocking way of what they had seen and done; but in their sad faces wrapped in rags were the burdens of their unwanted knowledge. They did not feel hardened or strengthened by what they had seen; instead they felt impoverished and demeaned.

*I heard a voice. There was something beyond me. All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond…flesh, the moment of being alive…then nothing. I had searched in superstition but there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so tender. I regretted that I had paid It no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me…I saw that those simple things might be true… I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. But now I see that you can believe in something without it compromising the burden of your own existence.

*He’s not afraid of gas or shells or being buried. He’s frightened that it doesn’t make sense, that there is no purpose. He’s afraid that he has somehow strayed into the wrong life.

*It seems as though the random violence of the world runs supreme; there is no point in trying to find an explanation.

*I have made this mistake in my life: not once but twice I have loved someone more than my heart would bear.

*The hedgerows were deep and ragged where he walked, covered with the lace of cow parsley. The air had a feeling of purity, as though it had never been breathed; it was just starting to be cool with the first breeze of evening. He stopped, and leaned against a gate. The quietness of the world about him seemed to stand outside time; there was no human voice to place it.

*Nothing was immoral or beyond redemption, all could be brought together, understood in the long perspective of forgiveness; he clung to the wood, he wanted to be forgiven for all he had done; he longed for the unity of the world’s creation to melt his sins and anger, because his soul was joined to it.

*She smiled at him. It was the first time he had seen her smile, and he believed it was the most extraordinary expression he had seen on a human face. It began with a slow widening of the lips, then the pale skin of her face became radiant, not with blood but with an inner light that made it shine. At last it reached her eyes, which developed squares of brilliance as they narrowed into trusting humor. It was not just her expression but her whole face that had changed into something forgiving and serene.

*Once upon a time there was a very attractive girl. She had lots of friends, a very good job, a flat in town, and everyone envied her. Then, as time when on, her friends got married and had babies and this girl became a very attractive woman. But she didn’t get married. The older she got, the more she pretended it didn’t matter to her, but the more, deep down inside, she longed for children and a husband. Part of the problem was that the more she pretended, the more she frightened men off. Because they, poor little creatures, believed her when she said she was happy.

*Our own choices might not be so good as those that are made for us.

*Of all the human beings that I have met, if I had to choose one to hold my hand before death, I would chose my son. He died though two years ago. I miss him. I loved him so much. My world was in his face. I wondered what my life had been about until he came along. It was nothing. I treasured each word he gave me. I made myself remember each thing he did. It was as though I knew it wouldn’t be for long. He was from another world, he was a blessing too great for me.

*At some deep level, far below anything his exhausted mind could reach, the conflicts of his soul dragged through him like waves grating on the packed shingle of a beach. The sound of his life calling to him on a distant road. He looked into the face of the man who stood in front of him and his fists went up from his sides like those of a farm boy about to fight. But then his arms began to spread and open. Levi looked at this wild-eyed figure, half-demented, his brother’s killer. For no reason he could tell, he found that he had opened his own arms in turn, and the two men fell upon each other’s shoulders, weeping at the bitter strangeness of their human lives.