Iris Murdoch The Sea The Sea Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Iris Murdoch The Sea The Sea. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
Iris Murdoch (The Bell)
emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I've felt as if I didn't exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can't imagine how much alone I've been all my life.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.)
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
let us not waste love, it is rare enough
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--' 'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.
Iris Murdoch (A Severed Head)
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea)
(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
white magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Sometimes I felt I would die by wishing it when I went to sleep but I always woke up again and found I was still there. Every morning finding I'm still me, that's hell." "Well, get out of hell then! The gate's open and I'm holding it!" "I can't. I'm hell, myself.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
A childhood hatred, like a childhood love, can last a lifetime.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
The exercise of power is a dangerous delight.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I may add here that one of the secrets of my happy life is that i have never made the mistake of learning to drive a car. I have never lacked people, usually women, longing to drive me withersoever I wanted. Why keep bitches and bark yourself?
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I am beginning to ramble. It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling up the whole sky. And far far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among these billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
To say we were 'in love', that vague weakened phrase, cannot express it. We loved each other, we lived in each other, through each other, by each other. We were each other. Why was it such pure unadulterated pain?
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
They really wanted to remain always in their own house and their own garden. There are such people.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
You don't understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You're like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don't look--
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.
Iris Murdoch (The Time of the Angels)
The sun shone calm and bright on the grass, refreshed by the rain, on the border of pretty stones, on the sparkling yellow rocks. It was a caricature of a happy scene.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
It is strange to think that when I went to the sea I imagined that I was giving up the world. But one surrenders power in one form, and grasps it in another.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
And she did seem then to go to sleep instantly: the quick flight into oblivion of the chronically unhappy person.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Indeed, now I come to think of it, nearly everything in the world is relevant to my situation.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
... male company, sheer complicit male company: the complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a kind of complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with things, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
He dreamt...he was a huge white egg floating in the sea of turquoise blue, and he was everything that there was.
Iris Murdoch (The Sacred and Profane Love Machine)
Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats. —Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Lauren Martin (The Book of Moods: How I Turned My Worst Emotions Into My Best Life)
How sad for those who cannot enjoy what are after all prime pleasures of daily life, and perhaps for some the only ones, eating and drinking.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
There were good times or goodish times, only the bad times were so—crucial.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
We were eternally divided. And it somehow seemed strange to me that this had not happened earlier, so dangerous were we to each other.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
And I thought, rolling my head to and fro between my hands in anguish, oh if only it could have worked somehow for us two.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Tal como nos conocemos, somos objetos falsos, imposturas, ramilletes de ilusiones” “Los juicios sobre las personas no son jamás decisivos, surgen de resúmenes que inmediatamente hacen pensar en la necesidad de una reconsideración. Los arreglos humanos no son otra cosa que cabos sueltos y cálculos nebulosos, independientemente de cualquier cosa que para consolarnos pueda fingir el arte
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one's aid. For most people common sense is moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You've made it into a story, and stories are false.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changed in my eyes. The whole world was its background. And between me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs. I ran.
Iris Murdoch
If there is any fruitless mental torment which is greater than that of jealousy it is perhaps remorse. Even the pains of loss may be less searching; and often of course these agonies combine, as now they did for me. I say remorse not repentance. I doubt if I have ever experienced repentance in a pure form; perhaps it does not exist in a pure form. Remorse contains guilt, but helpless hopeless guilt which knows of no cure for the painful bite.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I feel I'm living on pain, riding on it, like a sea.
Iris Murdoch (The Sacred and Profane Love Machine)
Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage…
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. The short path is the only path but it is very steep.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I've felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked unfissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
As it is I crawl on everyday towards the tomb. When I wake in the morning I think first of death, do you?
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Lovely country, isn't it. Do you know this part of the world?" "No." He said, suddenly stretching out his hands, "Oh, the sea, the sea—it's so wonderful.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Marriage is brainwashing. Not necessarily a bad thing. Your brain could do with a wash.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Of course one never knows about other people's loves, and I would certainly never know about James's.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
It's not so easy." "What isn't?" "To establish relationships, you can't just elect people, it can't be done by thinking and willing.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Even the few whom we genuinely adore we have to belittle secretly now and then, as Toby and I had to belittle James, just to feed the healthy appetite of our wondrously necessary egos.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I accused Hartley of being a 'fantasist', or perhaps that was Titus's word, but what a 'fantasist' I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I don't think she's had much of a life." "Well, a life is a life." "What does that mean?" "One never knows. I daresay most lives are rotten. It's only when one's young one expects otherwise.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one's stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. 'Undetachable,' I remember, was a word which somehow 'came along' with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
That's how vile I am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish! I think I hate Ireland more than I hate the theatre, and that's saying something!
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
The grass on the other side of the road was a pullulating emerald green, the rocks that grew here and there among the grass were almost dazzlingly alight with little diamonds. The warm air met me in a wave, thick with land smells of earth and growth and flowers.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'. I trust this passing reflection will not lead anyone to doubt the truth of any part of this story! When I come to describe my life with Clement Makin credulity will be strained but will I hope not fail!
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not." "I don't despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare's heroines before I was twelve." "But they don't exist, dear man, that's the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Cel ce venerează,conferă obiectului venerat putere,o putere reală,nu una imaginară,aceasta este sensul dovezii ontologice,una dintre ideie cele mai ambigue pe care le-a făurit inteligenţa omeenească vreodată.Dar această putere este înfiorătoare.Dorinţele şi ataşamentele noastre creează zeii.Şi în momentul în care te eliberezi de un ataşament,vine un altul şi îi ia locul în chip de consolare.Niciodată nu renunţăm total la o plăcere,nu facem decât să o schimbăm pe o alta.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Today there is a pleasant very light haze over the whole sky, and the sea has a misleadingly docile silvered look, as if the substantial wavelets were determined to stroke the rocks as hard as they could without showing any trace of foam. It is a compact radiant complacent sort of sea, very beautiful. There ought to be seals, the waves themselves are almost seals today, but still I scan the water in vain with my long-distance glasses. Enormous yellow-beaked gulls perch on the rocks and stare at me with brilliant glass eyes. A shadow-cormorant skims the glycerine sea. The rocks are thronged with butterflies. The temperature remains high. I wash my clothes and dry them on the lawn. I have been swimming every day and feel very fit and salty. Still no move from Lizzie, but I am not worried. I feel happy in my silence. If the gods have some treat in store for Lizzie and me, good. If not, also good. I feel innocent and free. Perhaps it is all that swimming.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this.
Iris Murdoch (The Sovereignty of Good)
A love without reservation ought to be a life force compelling the world into order and beauty. But that love can be so strong and yet so entirely powerless is what breaks the heart. Love did not move toward life, it moved toward death, toward the roaring sea-caves of annihilation. Or it led to the futility of a little broken bird's egg whose remains were now being washed away by water from the tap. Even so one day God might crack the universe and wash away its fruitless powerless loves with a deluge of indifferent power.
Iris Murdoch (Nice & the Good)
...морето пред мен по-скоро свети, отколкото искри под ласкавото майско слънце. Със започването на прилива то кротко се обляга на сушата, почти необезпокоявано от гънките на вълни или пяна. Там нейде при хоризонта цветът му е разточително лилав, равномерно набразден с ивици смарагдово зелено. Самият хоризонт е виолетов. Близо до брега, където зрението ми се ограничава от надигащите се грамади гърбати жълти скали, има лента от по-бледозелено, ледена и бистра, не така сияйна, матова, а не прозрачна. Намираме се на север и ярките слънчеви лъчи не могат да проникнат в морето. Досами брега водата нежно облива скалите и повърхностният слой все още има цвят. Безоблачното небе е много бледо при виолетовият хоризонт и му придава леки сребристи отблясъци. Там, където морето и небето се сливат, синьото сгъстява боята си и пулсира. Но небето изглежда студено. Дори слънцето изглежда студено.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Singing is of course a form of aggression. The wet open mouths and glistening teeth of the singers are ardent to devour the victim-hearer. Singers crave hearers as animals crave their prey. Intoxicated by their own voices they now roared it out, round and round, Gilbert's fruity baritone, Titus's pseudo-Neapolitan tenor and Rosina's strong rather harsh contralto. I shouted, 'Stop! Stop that bloody row!' But they went on singing at me, their bright eyes, moist with laughter, fixed upon me, waving their arms in time to the tune; until at last they wearied, stopped, and went off into another crazy laughing fit.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
Statements made by distant church bells remind me it is Sunday. Today the sky has become cloudy. I have been watching the clouds and it occurs to me that I have never done this in my life before, simply sit and watch clouds. As a child I would have been far too anxious to ‘waste time’ in this way. And my mother would have stopped me. As I write this I am sitting on my plot of grass behind the house where I have put a chair, cushions, rugs. It is evening. Thick lumpy slate-blue clouds, their bulges lit up to a lighter blue, move slowly across a sky of muddy and yet brilliant gold, a sort of dulled gilt effect. At the horizon there is a light glittering slightly jagged silver line, like modern jewellery. Beneath it the sea is a live choppy lyrical goldeny-brown, jumping with white flecks. The air is warm. Another happy day. (‘Whatever will you do down there?’ they asked.) In a quiet surreptitious way I am feeling very pleased with myself.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
I contemplated her, seeing her young bland face looking at me, now removed as if behind a gauze curtain. She quietly invited me to suffer. There was a great space now, a great silent hall in which this suffering could take place. There was no urgency now, nothing to plan, nothing to achieve. What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? I can do nothing for you any more, my darling. I wondered if I would be fated to live with this love, making of it a shrine which could not now be desecrated. Perhaps when I was living alone and being everyone's uncle like a celibate priest I would keep this fruitless love as my secret chapel. Could I then learn to love uselessly and unpossessively and would this prove to be the monastic mysticism which I had hoped to attain when I came away to the sea?
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)
And all this time I was keeping my eyes open, or trying to, only they kept closing, because I wanted to go on watching the stars, where the most extraordinary things were happening. A bright satellite, a man-made star, very slowly and somehow carefully crossed the sky in a great arc, from one side to the other, a close arc, one knew it was not far away, a friendly satellite slowly going about its business round and round the globe. And then, much much farther away, stars were quietly shooting and tumbling and disappearing, silently falling and being extinguished, lost utterly silent falling stars, falling from nowhere to nowhere into an unimaginable extinction. How many of them there were, as if the heavens were crumbling at last and being dismantled. And I wanted to show all these things to my father. Later I knew that I had been asleep and I opened my eyes with wonder and the sky had utterly changed again and was no longer dark but bright, golden, gold-dust golden, as if curtain after curtain had been removed behind the stars I had seen before, and now I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out. Stars behind stars and stars behind stars behind stars until there was nothing between them, nothing beyond them, but dusty dim gold of stars and no space and no light but stars. The moon was gone. The water lapped higher, nearer, touching the rock so lightly it was audible only as a kind of vibration. The sea had fallen dark, in submission to the stars. And the stars seemed to move as if one could see the rotation of the heavens as a kind of vast crepitation, only now there were no more events, no shooting stars, no falling stars, which human senses could grasp or even conceive of. All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable. And I was no longer I but something pinned down as an atom, an atom of an atom, a necessary captive spectator, a tiny mirror into which it was all indifferently beamed, as it motionlessly seethed and boiled, gold behind gold behind gold. Later still I awoke and it had all gone; and for a few moments I thought that I had seen all those stars only in a dream. There was a weird shocking sudden quiet, as at the cessation of a great symphony or of some immense prolonged indescribable din. Had the stars then been audible as well as visible and had I indeed heard the music of the spheres? The early dawn light hung over the rocks and over the sea, with an awful intent gripping silence, as if it had seized these faintly visible shapes and were very slowly drawing tgem out of a darkness in which they wanted to remain. Even the water was now totally silent, not a tap, not a vibration. The sky was a faintly lucid grey and the sea was a lightless grey, and the rocks were a dark fuzzy greyish brown. The sense of loneliness was far more intense than it had been under the stars. Then I had felt no fear. Now I felt fear. I discovered that I was feeling very stiff and rather cold. The rock beneath me was very hard and I felt bruised and aching. I was surprised to find my rugs and cushions were wet with dew. I got up stiffly and shook them. I looked around me. Mountainous piled-up rocks hid the house. And I saw myself as a dark figure in the midst of this empty awfully silent dawn, where light was scarcely yet light, and I was afraid of myself and quickly lay down again and settled my rug and closed my eyes, lying there stiffly and not imagining that I would sleep again.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea)