Excerpts
All this amused Don Fabrizio, and in people of his character and standing the fact of being amused makes up four-fifths of affection. [p.60]
(‘all this‘ is: ‘[Tancredi’s] intelligence; that quick adaptability, that wordly penetration, that innate artistic subtlety with which [Tancredi] could use the demagogic terms then in fashion while hinting to inititates that for him, the Prince of Falconeri, it was only a momentary pastime)
His discomfort…must have deeper roots somewhere in one of those reasons which we call irrational because they are buried under layers of self-ignorance. [p.92]
What would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for anyone wanting to guide others? [p.148]
“You see, Don Pietrino, the “nobles”, as you call them, aren’t so easy to understand. They live in a world of their own, created not directly by God but by themselves during centuries of highly specialised experiences, of their own worries and joys; they have a very strong collective memory, and so they’re put out or pleased by things which wouldn’t matter at all to you and me, but which to them seem vitally connected with their heritage of memories, hopes, caste fears. Divine Providence has willed that I should become a humble member of the most glorious Order in an Eternal Church whose eventual victory has been assured; you are at the other end of the scale, by which I don’t mean the lowest but the most different. When you find a thick bush of marjoram or a well-filled nest of Spanish flies (you look for those too, Don Pietrino, I know) you are in direct communication with the natural world which the Lord created with undifferentiated possibilities of good and evil until man could exercise his own free will on it; and when you’re consulted by evil old women and eager young girls, you are plunging back into the dark abyss of centuries that preceded the light from Golgotha.’
The old man looked at him in amazement; he had wanted to know if the Prince of Salina was satisfied or not with the latest changes, and the other was talking to him about aphrodisiacs and light from Golgotha. ‘All that reading’s driven him off his head, poor man.’
‘But the “nobles” aren’t like that; all they live by has been handled by others. They find us ecclesiastics useful to reassure them about eternal life, just as you herbalists are here to procure them soothing or stimulating drinks. And by that I don’t mean they’re bad people; quite the contrary. They’re just different; perhaps they appear so strange to us because they have reached a stage towards which all those who are not saints are moving, that of indifference to earthly goods through surfeit. Perhaps because of that they take so little notice of things that are of great importance to us; those on mountains don’t worry about mosquitoes in plains, nor do the people in Egypt about umbrellas. Yet the former fear landslides, the latter crocodiles, which are no worry to us. For them new fears have appeared of which we’re ignorant; I’ve seen Don Fabrizio get quite testy, wise and serious though he is, because of a badly ironed collar to his shirt; and I know for certain that the Prince of Lascari didn’t sleep for a whole night from rage because he was wrongly placed at one of the Viceroy’s dinners. Now don’t you think that a human being who is put out only by bad washing or protocol must be happy, and thus superior?’
Don Pietrino could understand nothing at all now: all this was getting more and more nonsensical, what with shirt collars and crocodiles. He was still upheld, though, by a basis of good rustic commonsense. ‘But if that’s what they’re like, Father, they’ll all go to Hell’.
..’although it may not seem so, they are in fact less selfish than many others; the splendour of their homes, the pomp of their receptions, have something impersonal about them, something not unlike the grandeur of churches and of liturgy, something which is in fact ad maiorem gentis gloriam, and that redeems a great deal.’ [pp.158-60]
One of those family quarrels we all know with deeply entangled roots, impossible to cure because neither side speaks out clearly, each having much to hide. [p.165]
The few hundred people who made up ‘the world’ never tired of meeting each other, always the same ones, to exchange congratulations on still existing. [p.171]
Char in Oxford 