"The Alexandria Quartet" by Lawrence Durrell *****

• Reading this as part of a LibraryThing.com group read of Middle Eastern Literature
• Originally published as a tetrology between 1957 and 1960
• English author
• Epigraphs:
• "I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved.  We shall have a lot to discuss about that" - S. Freud, "Letters"
• "There are two positions available to us - either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy.  I as whether there can be any hesitation, lovely Therese, and where will your little mind find an argument able to combat that one?" - D.A.F. De Sade, "Justine"
• Vocabulary:
• phthisic:  a wasting disease of the lungs, asthma
• pegamoid:  imitation leather material developed a bit before 1900, used in bookbinding or upholstery
• exiguous:  scanty; meager; small; slender:
• quinquereme:  an ancient Roman galley with five banks of oars on each side
•  porpentine:  like a porcupine
• mumchance:   silent; struck dumb
• trismegistus:   a name variously ascribed by Neoplatonists and others to an Egyptian priest or to the Egyptian god Thoth, to some extent identified with the Grecian Hermes: various mystical, religious, philosophical, astrological, and alchemical writings were ascribed to him.
• khamseen: a hot southerly wind, varying from southeast to southwest, that blows regularly in Egypt and over the Red Sea for about 50 days, commencing about the middle of March.
• hebetude:  the state of being dull; lethargy.
• fatidic: prophetic
• pullulation:    sending forth sprouts, buds, etc.; germinate; sprout.
• desuetude:  the state of being no longer used or practiced.
• mephitic:  offensive to the smell
• "Justine":  
• p.111.....:For my part Justine always reminded me of a somnambulist discovered treading the perilous leads of a high tower; any attempt to wake her with a shout might lead to disaster.  One could only follow her silently in the hope of guiding her gradually away from the great shadowy drops which loomed up on every side."
• "Balthazar":
• p.78:  If Mnemjian is the archives of the City, Balthazar is its Platonic daimon - the mediator between its Gods and its men.
• Book I:  Justine
• p.17....." I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together; the  city which used us as its flora--precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own:  beloved Alexandria!"
• p.22..."I have become one of these poor clerks of the conscience, a citizen of Alexandria"
• p.23..."Our city does not permit anonymity to any with incomes of over two hundred pounds a year."
• p.23..."She could not help but remind me of that race of terrific queens which left behind them the ammoniac smell of their incestuous loves to hover like a cloud over the Alexandrian subconscious."...re:  Justine
• p.25..."There are only three things to be done with a woman, said Clea once.  You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature."
• p.26...."...I studied this small bottle, sadly and passionately reflecting on this horrible old man's love and measuring it against my own; and tasting too, vicariously, the desperation which makes one clutch at some small discarded object which is still impregnated with the betrayer's memory."....reminds me of Orhan Pamuk's "museum of Innocence"
• p.37..."Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman; under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs."...love that!
• p.39..."Anything pressed too far becomes a sin."
• p.39..."...all ideas seem equally good to me; the fact of their existence proves that someone is creating."...love that idea!
• p.50..."These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean."
• p.57..."A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants."...interesting concept
•  p.81..."To love in such an unpremeditated way is something that most people have to re-learn after fifty."...re:  Nessim, Justine's husband
• p.83..."...one must reconcile two extremes of habit and behaviour which are not due to the intellectual disposition of the inhabitants, but to their soil, air, landscape."....Balthazar re:  Alexandria
• p.111..."A mania for self-justification is common both to those whose consciences are uneasy and to those who seek a philosophic rationale for their actions; but in either case it leads to strange forms of thinking."...too true
• p.111..."There are some characters in this world who are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal."
• p.113..."There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self--because she does not know where to find it."
• p.121..."Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment:  only there does its satisfaction lie."
• p.140..."The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs.  They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies."...LOL 
• p.164..."One always falls in love with the love choice of the person one loves."
• p.165..."The four of us were unrecognized complementaries of one another, inextricably bound together.".........Nessim, Justine, narrator, Melissa
• p.171..."One is not an ordinary man if one can say things so pointed that they engage the attention and memory of others."
• p.185..."Whenever I enter a school and see a multitude of children, ragged thin and dirty but with their clear eyes and sometimes angelic expressions, I am seized with restlessness and terror, as though I saw people drowning."...narrator quoting Tolstoy upon starting to teach north of Alexandria
• p.187..."Far off event, transformed by memory, acquire a burnished brilliance because they are seen in isolation, divorced from the details of before and after, the fibres and wrappings of time."
• p.192.."Humility!  The last trap that awaits the ego in search of absolute truth."
• p.193...."Lovers are never equally matched--do you think?  One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow.  Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?"
• p.195..."Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?" 
• Book II:  Balthazar
• p.234..."The golden fish circling so languidly in their great bowl of light--they are hardly aware that their world, the field of their journeys, is a curved one..."......true of humanity as well?
• p.264...".....Egyptians believe the desert to be an emptiness populated entirely by the spirits of demons and other grotesque visitants from Eblis, the Moslem Satan
• Book III:  Mountolive
• Book IV:  Clea
• Review:  I cannot possibly convey the depth and power of this magnificent tetralogy.  It took a very long time to read all four, and the only reason is that it deserved to be savored.  Durrell's prose is exquisite, lyrical and sensual.  I feel as though I have lived, or at least extensively visited, Egypt.  The entire British colonial period, its conflicts, its impact, its deviousness, all are exemplified by characters of both British and Egyptian origins.  The reader is seduced by language that is poetic and whose descriptiveness is equal to Dickens, yet far surpasses that master of language in its lushness and exotic flavor.  That is probably a function of the times and life experience of the author, yet in a way it is a comparison of culture.  Dickens' London is dank, dark, malodorous.  Durrell's Egypt is textured, mysterious, and sensual.  I guess I love reading both, but would most like to visit Durrell's Egypt.  It is an immense reading project, but definitely well worth it!
• P.S.:  I gave up on notes and just gave myself over to the book......lazy, I know