E. M. Forster

A Novel

Maurice

Rebecca Moraglia

They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.

'I should have gone through life half awake if you'd had the decency to leave me alone. Awake intellectually, yes, and emotionally in a way; but here -' He pointed with his pipe stem to his heart; and both smiled. 'Perhaps we woke up one another. I like to think that anyway.'

'[…] and since you've brought it up I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I've ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.'

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.

Yet he was doing a fine thing - proving on how little the soul can exist. Fed neither by Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward, a lamp that would have blown out, were materialism true. He hadn't a God, he hadn't a lover - the two usual incentives to virtue. But on he struggled with his back to ease, because dignity demanded it. There was no one to watch him, nor did he watch himself, but struggles like his are the supreme achievements of humanity, and surpass any legends about Heaven.

There was something better in life than this rubbish, if only he could get to it - love - nobility - big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend…

'[…] I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now - I can't hang about whining for ever - and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?'

Then darkness rolled up again, the darkness that is primeval but not eternal, and yields to its own painful dawn.

. . . while deceiving others he had been deceived, and mistaken them for the empty creatures he wanted them to think he was. No, they too had insides. "But, O Lord, not such an inside as mine." As soon as he thought about other people as real, Maurice became modest and conscious of sin: in all creation there could be no one as vile as himself: no wonder he pretended to be a piece of cardboard; if known as he was, he would be hounded out of the world. 

Am immense sadness—he had believed himself beyond such irritants—had risen up in his soul. He and the beloved would vanish utterly—would continue neither in Heaven nor on Earth. They had won past the conventions, but Nature still faced them, saying with even voice, "Very well, you are thus; I blame none of my children.“ 

Maurice quotes

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