was very upset.
â Saying what? he said then. Please tell me what I said. If you heard me saying something then please tell me what it was.
I couldnât stand it. I knew I had to do something. I snapped.
â Oh fuh-fuh-for Godâs sake, Dr Mukti! I bawled, with my voice now in a higher register than his. Will you stop this nonsense once and for all, for goodnessâ sake! I heard what you said! I know what youâre trying to say â that my intentions towards Marcus Otoyo were somehow dishonourable and that all this talk of literature is just asmokescreen of some kind. Well, let me tell you something â how about you and that Pandit take off and go back home: back to India or wherever it is you came from! What do you think of that, Tom Thumb? Any views on that, Mahatma fucking Gandhi? Anything to say about that, have you, foxy? Well? Well? Wuh-wuh-well?
10 The Mysteries of Protestants
Thankfully, all of those minor little turbulences are well past now, long since over and consigned to the dustbin of history. And, like so many events throughout the course of my life, I am in the fortunate position of being capable now of recollecting them in an almost luxurious and sleepily random fashion â lying here on my soft velvet cushions in the Happy Club listening to my CDs of the Carpenters and Tony Bennett and all the others and thinking again about poor old Dr Mukti. Whose good points I can appreciate now without the slightest hint of rancour. As I can, in actual fact, with almost everyone Iâve known over the years, with whom I have been connected â Marcus Otoyo, happily, included. Whose poise and refinement, intelligence and erudition really were, by any standards, quite remarkable for their time. And in such a quiet, unprepossessing place. I can see how their uniqueness might have come to impress me in the way that they did. How in so many ways he came to embody the spirit of radiant, adolescent wonder itself â a spirituality and longing I could find nowhere else. And which was so perfectly described in the writings of James Joyce. Who belonged to no age in particular, and who infinitely, culturally and artistically, if one was honest, wassuperior to anything emerging from the narcissistic, throw-away, congratulatory, complacent and fly-by-night sixties.
I embraced every word that I found in
A Portrait,
surrendering to their âpassionate euphonyâ. And became convinced that Marcus Otoyo was a kindred spirit in this regard, that he had been thinking along those lines too. You could tell, I persuaded myself, by the way he carried himself: mysteriously detached, at one remove from the world in which he lived. Sometimes at night I would think of him praying: not in a remote, stark frigid Protestant cathedral but in a warm and big-hearted Catholic one, where the altar was heaped with fragrant masses of flowers, and where in the morning light the pale flames of the candles among the white flowers were clear and silent as his own soul.
I thought of him blinded by his tears and the light of Godâs mercifulness, all but bursting into hysterical weeping as he watched the warm calm rise and fall of the girlâs breast that day on the strand. With the glowing image of the Eucharist uniting in an instant his bitter and despairing thoughts. While sacrificing hands upraised the chalice flowing to the brim. So far distant from the Gothic grey grimness of what was left of Thornton Manor. And the lives of all who had lived there: in a place which, beside this, was the colour of dust. The shade of the gravestone that was Henry Thorntonâs face. No, a book such as Robert Louis Stevensonâs
A Childâs Garden of Verses
meant nothing to him, not in any real human way. Maybe not in any way at all.
Yet another indication of Catholic sentiment: unreliable, quite despicable emotionalism.
One troubled night I dreamt of Henry Thornton, my eyes snapping open, still seeing him
â Saying what? he said then. Please tell me what I said. If you heard me saying something then please tell me what it was.
I couldnât stand it. I knew I had to do something. I snapped.
â Oh fuh-fuh-for Godâs sake, Dr Mukti! I bawled, with my voice now in a higher register than his. Will you stop this nonsense once and for all, for goodnessâ sake! I heard what you said! I know what youâre trying to say â that my intentions towards Marcus Otoyo were somehow dishonourable and that all this talk of literature is just asmokescreen of some kind. Well, let me tell you something â how about you and that Pandit take off and go back home: back to India or wherever it is you came from! What do you think of that, Tom Thumb? Any views on that, Mahatma fucking Gandhi? Anything to say about that, have you, foxy? Well? Well? Wuh-wuh-well?
10 The Mysteries of Protestants
Thankfully, all of those minor little turbulences are well past now, long since over and consigned to the dustbin of history. And, like so many events throughout the course of my life, I am in the fortunate position of being capable now of recollecting them in an almost luxurious and sleepily random fashion â lying here on my soft velvet cushions in the Happy Club listening to my CDs of the Carpenters and Tony Bennett and all the others and thinking again about poor old Dr Mukti. Whose good points I can appreciate now without the slightest hint of rancour. As I can, in actual fact, with almost everyone Iâve known over the years, with whom I have been connected â Marcus Otoyo, happily, included. Whose poise and refinement, intelligence and erudition really were, by any standards, quite remarkable for their time. And in such a quiet, unprepossessing place. I can see how their uniqueness might have come to impress me in the way that they did. How in so many ways he came to embody the spirit of radiant, adolescent wonder itself â a spirituality and longing I could find nowhere else. And which was so perfectly described in the writings of James Joyce. Who belonged to no age in particular, and who infinitely, culturally and artistically, if one was honest, wassuperior to anything emerging from the narcissistic, throw-away, congratulatory, complacent and fly-by-night sixties.
I embraced every word that I found in
A Portrait,
surrendering to their âpassionate euphonyâ. And became convinced that Marcus Otoyo was a kindred spirit in this regard, that he had been thinking along those lines too. You could tell, I persuaded myself, by the way he carried himself: mysteriously detached, at one remove from the world in which he lived. Sometimes at night I would think of him praying: not in a remote, stark frigid Protestant cathedral but in a warm and big-hearted Catholic one, where the altar was heaped with fragrant masses of flowers, and where in the morning light the pale flames of the candles among the white flowers were clear and silent as his own soul.
I thought of him blinded by his tears and the light of Godâs mercifulness, all but bursting into hysterical weeping as he watched the warm calm rise and fall of the girlâs breast that day on the strand. With the glowing image of the Eucharist uniting in an instant his bitter and despairing thoughts. While sacrificing hands upraised the chalice flowing to the brim. So far distant from the Gothic grey grimness of what was left of Thornton Manor. And the lives of all who had lived there: in a place which, beside this, was the colour of dust. The shade of the gravestone that was Henry Thorntonâs face. No, a book such as Robert Louis Stevensonâs
A Childâs Garden of Verses
meant nothing to him, not in any real human way. Maybe not in any way at all.
Yet another indication of Catholic sentiment: unreliable, quite despicable emotionalism.
One troubled night I dreamt of Henry Thornton, my eyes snapping open, still seeing him
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