In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt's sons'd been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, you've got three sons, by Friday you've got none. Lady Albertina had just, y'know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally.
Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father__ generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don__ recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization__ architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer__ profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, __ook, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!__ow vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn__, the wolves and blizzards would be at one__ throat all the sooner.
Cloud Atlas
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Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father__ generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don__ recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization__ architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer__ profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, __ook, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!__ow vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn__, the wolves and blizzards would be at one__ throat all the sooner.
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The collective consciousness of mankind defines the existence and sustainability of this civilization.
(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")
Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.