the magus

so cruel a book. i would paste other fragments too, but they are rather graphic. i shall forever remember nicholas's night with julie, though. here's a small fragment on smiles.

'A figure appeared in the door. It was Conchis. He came to where I hung from the frame, and stood in front of me. I closed my eyes. The pain in my arms drowned everything else.
I made a sort of groaning-growling noise through the gag. I did not know myself what it really meant to say: whether that I was in pain or that if I ever saw him again I would tear him limb from limb.
"I come to tell you that you are now elect."
I shook my head violently from side to side.
"You have no choice."
I still shook my head, but more wearily.
He stared at me, with those eyes that seemed older than one man's lifetime, and a little gleam of sympathy came into his expression, as if after all he had put too much pressure on a very thin lever.
"Learn to smile, Nicholas. Learn to smile."
It came to me that he meant something different by "smile" than I did; that the irony, the humorlessness, the ruthlessness I had always noticed in his smiling was a quality he deliberately inserted; that for him the smile was something essentially cruel, because freedom is cruel, because the freedom that makes us at least partly responsible for what we are is cruel. So that the smile was not so much an _attitude_ to be taken to life as the _nature_ of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence. He meant something far stranger by "Learn to smile" than a Smilesian "Grin and bear it." If anything, it meant "Learn to be cruel, learn to be dry, learn to survive."
He gave the smallest of bows, one full of irony, of the contempt implicit in incongruous courtesy, then went.
As soon as he had gone, Anton came in with Adam and the other blackshirts. They undid the handcuffs and got my arms down. A long black pole two of the blackshirts were carrying was unrolled and I saw a stretcher. They forced me to lie down on it and once again my wrists were handcuffed to the sides. I could neither fight them nor beg them to stop. So I lay passively, with my eyes shut, to avoid seeing them. I smelt ether, felt very faintly the jab of a needle; and I willed the oblivion to come fast.'

do read the book. it will be worth reading all its 720 pages.