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Tuesday, July 09, 2002
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interesting to find a passage that so sums up someone... Interesting to hear Him described in a male voice...
"I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car - not so common among undergraduates in those days - and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my lonliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.
I didn't collect conquests, but my the time I left Oxford I was a dozen girls away from virginity. I found my sexual sucess and the apparently ephemeral nature of love equally pleasing. It was like being good at golf, but despising the game. One was covered all round, both when on played and when one didn't. I contrived most of my affaires in the vacations, away from Oxford, since the new term meant that I could conveniently leave the scene of the crime. There were sometimes a few tedious weeks of letters, but I soon put the solitary heart away, 'assuming repsonsibility with my total being' and showed the Chesterfieldian mask instead. I became almost as neat at ending liasons as at starting them.
This sounds, and was, calculating, but it was caused less by a true coldness than by my narcissistic belief in the importance of the life-style. I mistook the feeling of relief that dropping a girl always brought for a love of freedom. Perhaps the one thing in my favor was that I lied very little; I was always careful to make sure that the current victim knew, before she took her clothes off, the difference between coupling and marrying." The Magus - J. Fowles
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