## Metadata - Author: [[Barry Unsworth]] - Full Title: Sacred Hunger - Category: #books ## Highlights - ‘Joshua Partridge is the soul of discretion,’ he said. ‘Discretion is his strong suit. He is noted for it, famous for it.’ ‘Famous for discretion?’ ‘That is not the contradiction it seems, sir. ([Location 2200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=2200)) - ‘Sir,’ Partridge said, ‘this is an expanding age, the nation is prospering, our voice is heard in the councils of Europe. As a result of this the cost of everything goes up daily and that must also include gifts, rewards and all manner of pecuniary inducements. Numbers of men are getting richer and greater numbers are getting poorer. Alas, both classes have higher expectations these days.’ The attorney permitted a lean smile to move his jaws. ‘In short, sir,’ he said with a burst, ‘there has been a leap in bribes.’ ([Location 2209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=2209)) - On the line of the horizon there would sometimes appear the brief stain of another ship, like a breath on a distant mirror; but most of the time she could feel herself alone on the ocean, the sole trader of the world, instead of what she was, a member of a vast fleet sent forth by men of enterprise and vision all over Europe, engaged in the greatest commercial venture the world had ever seen, changing the course of history, bringing death and degradation and profits on a scale hitherto undreamed of. That the ship was a mere corpuscle in this nourishing bloodstream was not easy to imagine for the men aboard her. To them she was a universe of routine tasks and routine sounds – the bell marking the half hours, shouted orders, the wash of the waves, the wincing tune of the timbers as they were exercised by the sway of the sea. ([Location 2215](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=2215)) - ‘Time and money, sir,’ the scrawny, sharp-eyed lawyer had said, in the course of collecting the balance of his fee. ‘It generally comes down to that. The right relations between ’em is as important for the man of business as winds and tides for the mariner. And of the two it is the time that matters most. A man is rich so long as his creditors are patient.’ ([Location 2871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=2871)) - The sun, concealed in cloud and low in the sky, made shafts and corridors and vaults to give infinity a baroque ornamentation, ([Location 2987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=2987)) - ‘They cheat us and we cheat them,’ as Barton put it, ‘that is the way the world goes round.’ I dare say it is, but I cannot help suspecting that it was we, rather than the Africans, who gave the globe its first spin in that direction. ([Location 3969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=3969)) - he saw the cruising jaws of crocodiles caught in misty glitters of light. ([Location 4285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=4285)) - Rage to have the better of it, unwillingness to compromise, these were old failings in him, if failings they be. New, however – no older than Ruth’s death – was the swift remorse that would come to him, a feeling like sorrow, at having delivered a wound for the mere sake of argument. The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge – much older than the desire for truth – to command attention, dominate one’s fellows. ([Location 4558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=4558)) - He had no sense of a destination. It came to him that he had never had one. All his destinations had been only breaking loose … But that was not it either. Patiently, like a celibate remembering some cherished episode of love, he began to assemble the details of that first escape, the feel of the metal bar in the dark, the fear and exultation of the splintering wood. No tropical light had ever been so blinding as that of the dim dawn he had stepped into then, no sky at sea so vast as that one. That light, that enlargement, had been destination enough. He had never found it again, he had run ever since between narrowing walls, under lowering skies. ([Location 4852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=4852)) - Paris saw in the eyes the desire for death and recognized it as his own familiar; but in these same eyes that longed for the burden of pain to be removed there was what the surgeon had seen in his own looking-glass while the bread dissolved in his mouth – inveterate, unquenchable, the hope of life, the appeal to be saved. And Paris knew in that same moment that he had done a wicked thing to sail with this ship out of mere despair. ([Location 5007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=5007)) - No one can keep account of damage done to himself. We imagine we have absorbed the shock, the harm, but we have merely caged it, and not in a strong cage either. It waits within the bars for a signal. And however long the wait may be, the leap is always unerring; a man can after twenty years be struck by a horror he thought he had forgotten and it will be green and fresh as ever. Often the pounce comes before the mind knows the signal, as it came to Paris now with the smell of the dank stone, the smell of degradation somewhere ahead of him, a horror almost incredulous that he was lost here, in this place, that he, who had prided himself on his vigilant clarity of mind and ruined himself for it, could have been his own self-deceiver, could have made his own despair a reason for compounding the misery of the world, and that he could have called this monstrous egotism self-abnegation and offered it to a dead woman as a proof of love. The dead could only be mourned. Love is for the living, he thought suddenly, and the thought dispelled his fear. ([Location 5374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=5374)) - ‘Money is sacred, as everyone knows,’ he said. ‘So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form of money, a walking investment. You can do what you like with him, you can work him to death or you can sell him. This cannot be called cruelty or greed because we are seeking only to recover our investment and that is a sacred duty. ([Location 5611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=5611)) - We are a long way from home and justice is a relative concept at the best of times. Three degrees of latitude reverses the whole of jurisprudence … It was Pascal said that, wasn’t it? ([Location 5644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=5644)) - The ships come and trade on the edges. You may think only the edges are fouled with this trade but it is not so. The flood of cheap manufactures, for which the people have no need, destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the demand for goods can only be met by enslaving their fellows. To do this they need muskets in ever increasing quantities – which we supply. And so we spread death everywhere. But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all. The trade is lawful, they say, and that is enough. Well, it is not enough for me. That face on the easel is the face of plunder and death, sir, it is the face of Europe in Africa. It is an unacceptable face to me, sir, and I cannot go on any longer painting it. I have come to the end of portraits, on this coast at least. A man can hold off the truth of things for purposes of making a living – that is legitimate, I suppose, though ignoble. But when the face is there, before your eyes … It cannot simply be expunged, d’you see, as if it had never existed, not when heart and mind have worked together to produce it.’ ([Location 5656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=5656)) - Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it; ([Location 5689](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=5689)) - Paris’s voice was unhesitating now; the droning fluency of nightmare had descended on him. ([Location 5742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=5742)) - the bungling of hot blood, ([Location 8809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=8809)) - the sky took on a look of readiness for the dark, that depthless clarity which is no colour and the womb of all colours. ([Location 8899](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=8899)) - the puffed-out sac collapsed with a comical squeak like a fart of farewell. ([Location 9261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=9261)) - That shuffling, clanking dance to the sound of Sullivan’s fiddle, the mass of listless limbs and faces in the shadow of the awning amidships, the terrible cries from the fetid darkness of the hold, the stench of defecation, the corpses one so like another … Somewhere among those herded, brutalized people, featureless, indistinguishable in misery from the rest, this drive to power still dormant, undeclared. Perhaps it could only have declared itself here, he thought, with a painful sense of paradox. His mind staggered suddenly at the thought of what manifold talents, what capacities for good and ill, had been thrown from the deck of the Liverpool Merchant to feed the sharks. ([Location 9889](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=9889)) - It was Fonga who played Thurso and this too was only to be expected, he thought. Power had its ironies of reversal; the weaker had been coerced or cajoled into performing the detested role of the strong. ([Location 9971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=9971)) - He looked down at the baby, which returned his gaze with singular intensity. Its eyelids were polished and shiny, as if by some gently frictive agency of the air; they were tiny – the narrowest of rims for eyes so amazingly lustrous that they seemed to take up all the face. ([Location 10008](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=10008)) - Her eyes were as bright as the baby’s and Paris saw the reflection of the firelight move in them. Some touch of awe came to his mind. The seated woman, prepared and composed, the simple thatch behind her, the gifts before her on the swept earth, the regard of the baby that seemed full of some precocious knowledge … ‘I ([Location 10017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=10017)) - He was a man impulsive to the point of rashness and ignorant in many ways; but he had felt the need lately to understand the meaning of his life. He was convinced there was a meaning if only he could find the key; and because of this he was always open to wonder, which is where, if anywhere, any such understanding must begin. ([Location 10146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=10146)) - There is a broad division between those who laugh at the perception of incongruities in the world and within themselves, and those in whom laughter is released as a celebration of their own successes, a perception, not of incongruity but of total, triumphant correspondence. ([Location 10443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=10443)) - Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way … Was it always wrong then to believe that the experience of suffering would soften the heart? Those who were fond of declaring that they understood human nature would no doubt conclude so. But as the light strengthened slowly, enabling him to make out the bare furnishings of his cabin, it came to Paris that he did not want to be numbered among these knowing ones, that such understanding was worse than error, worse than hope endlessly defeated. ([Location 10467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=10467)) - His genius was for error. He had blundered once through confusion between obstinate pride and the disinterested promulgation of truth; and then again – though perhaps it was not much different – through the illusion that his own despair was of cosmic import. Throughout the days of the settlement he had mistaken his desire to make amends for a belief in the capacities of the human spirit. And now, ragged and feverish captive, he was blundering again, prating of wisdom and virtue to a man determined to believe him wicked, a man to whom virtue meant well-cut clothes, a proud bearing, money in the bank. ([Location 10576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=10576)) - the treacherous fluency that swept him, ([Location 10605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=10605)) - fervent intimacy ([Location 10606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=10606)) - Of all the injuries that Paris had done him it seemed to him for a moment that this kindness of tone was the worst. ([Location 10619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005X0JSIW&location=10619))