摘记

Here my last love died — There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death. One day, not long before ‘this last day in camp, as I lay awake before reveille, in the Nissen hut, gazing into the complete blackness, amid the deep breathing and muttering of the four other occupants, turning over in my mind what I had to do that day — had I put in the names of two corporals for the weapon-training course? Should I again have the largest number of men overstaying their leave in the batch due back that day? Could I trust Hooper to take the candidates class out map-reading? — as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm her jealousy and self-seeking and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.
He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.
Et in Acardia Ego：
I too am in Arcadia (Latin). Arcadia was celebrated in ancient times (by the Roman poet Virgil, among others) as a rural paradise where one could find innocence and true understanding. This meaning persisted throughout western civilisation until modern times. The original Arcadia was a central area of the Peloponnese in Greece. It is actually a mountainous and dangerous region but a people who exhibited generosity, simplicity and contentedness supposedly inhabited it in ancient times.
The point of the motto Et in Arcadia ego is that Death is speaking it. Even in the happiest times, Death is saying, decay and disaster are not far away. It seems that the phrase dates back to the early Renaissance (the fifteenth century) as it has not been traced any earlier; but it had a lively existence in many paintings and writings of that period.
Sebastian entered — dove-grey flannel, white crêpe de Chine, a Charvet tie,
and the sweet scent of the tobacco, merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.
‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ said Sebastian. ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
Time spent on a good second is time thrown away.
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.
He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.
 I could tell him that all the wickedness of that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro, heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the wine, renders it undrinkable, so, that it must lie in the dark year in, year out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table.
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity
in great gobs of scum, the images of disaster; a loaded gun held carelessly at a stile, a horse rearing and rolling over, a shaded pool with a submerged, stake, an elm bough falling suddenly on a still morning, a car at a blind corner; all the catalogue of threats to civilized life rose and haunted me;
Thus, looking through strong lenses, one may watch a man approaching from afar, study every detail of his face and clothes, believe one has only to put out a hand to touch him marvel that he does not hear one and look up as one moves, and then, seeing him with the naked eye, suddenly remember that one is to him a distant speck, doubtfully human
THE languor of Youth — how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth — all save this — come and go with us through life. These things are a part of life itself; but languor — the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead.
always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe, and Aloysius in a good temper…It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer
tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones, was indeed a life-giving spring.
 I think they are very good if they do not go on too long.’
Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year’s memories.
The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of June had died with the gillyflowers whose scent at my windows now yielded to the damp leaves, smouldering in a corner of the quad.
Oh, Charles, what has happened since last term? I feel so old.’
‘I feel middle-aged. That is infinitely worse. I believe we have had all the fun we can expect here.’
Of the University he said: ‘No, I was never here. It just means you start life three years behind the other fellow.’
His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palms of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the slope that had never known the print of a boot, there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist — only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain and cough his heart out among the rum bottles.
He said more than one can bear to remember, even at twenty years’ distance. 
These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures. I wondered, as the train carried me farther and farther from Lady Marchmain, whether perhaps there was not on her, too, the same blaze, marking her and hers for destruction by other ways than war. Did she see a sign in the red centre of her cosy grate and hear it in the rattle of creeper on the window-pane, this whisper of doom?
even our small circle of intimates, so lively in the summer sunshine, seemed dimmed and muted now in the pervading fog, the river-borne twilight that softened and obscured all that year for me. 
The Charity matinée was over, I felt; the impresario had buttoned his astrakhan coat and taken his fee and the disconsolate ladies of the company were without a leader. Without him they forgot their cues and garbled their lines; they needed him to ring the curtain up at the right moment; they needed him to direct the lime-lights they needed his whisper in the wings, and his imperious eye on the leader of the band; without him there were no photographers from the weekly press, no prearranged goodwill and expectation of pleasure. No stronger bond held them together than common service; now the gold lace and velvet were packed away and returned to the costumier and the drab uniform of the day put on in its stead. For a few happy hours of rehearsal, for a few ecstatic minutes of performance, they had played splendid parts, their own great ancestors, the famous paintings they were thought to resemble; now it was over and in the bleak light of day they must go back to their homes; to the husband who came to London too often, to the lover who lost at cards, and to the child who grew too fast.
Thus with Julia and Lady Marchmain I reached deadlock, not because we failed to understand one another, but because we understood too well. With Brideshead, who came home to luncheon and talked to me on the subject — for the subject was everywhere in the house like a fire deep in the hold of a ship, below the water-line, black and red in the darkness, coming to in acrid wisps of smoke that oozed under hatches and billowed suddenly from the scuttles and air pipes — with Brideshead, I was in a strange world, a dead world to me, in a moon-landscape of barren lava, a high place of toiling lungs.
A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne — that was how it felt, sitting opposite Sebastian at dinner that night.
But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.
 had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed.
I had left behind me — what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, ‘the Young Magician’s Compendium’, that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double, and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle.
‘I have left behind illusion,’ I said to myself. ‘Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions — with the aid of my five senses.’
I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.
life has few separations as sharp as that.
I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a, reminder that the world was an older, and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope.
How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days; the world was open to be explored at leisure. I was so full of Oxford that summer; London could wait, I thought.
and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.
He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.
Why drink? If you want to be intoxicated there are so many much more delicious things.
MY theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of wartime.
These memories, which are my life — for we possess nothing certainly except the past — were always with me.
For nearly ten dead years after that evening with Cordelia I was borne along a road outwardly full of change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my painting — and that at longer and longer intervals — did I come alive as I had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be youth, not life, that I was losing. 
But, as the years passed, I began to mourn the loss of something I had known in the drawing-room of Marchmain House and once or twice since, the intensity and singleness and the belief that it was not all done by hand — in a word, the inspiration.
I looked at my watch; it was four o’clock, but neither of us was ready to sleep, for in that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
‘D’you want to change?’
‘It’s the only evidence of life.’
‘Here I am,’ I thought, ‘back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.
It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy.
‘You loved him, didn’t you?’
‘Oh yes. He was the forerunner.’
Once I said, ‘You are standing guard over your sadness.’
‘It’s all I have earned. You said yesterday. My wages.’
‘An I.O.U. from life. A promise to pay on demand.’
my bowels shrivel within me at the things she said. 
and I was back in Oxford looking out over Christ Church meadow through a window of Ruskin-Gothic.
Charles has done something,” I said; “not all he will do, not all he can do, but something
Sometimes said Julia, ‘I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.’ 
All I can hope to do is to put my life in some sort of order in a human way, before all human order comes to an end. （想到张爱玲，希望人们希望有靠得住的东西，于是结婚了。）
same ingredients, differently dispensed, 
perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that other have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in. our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.’
and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.
‘Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time;