HINTS AND SYMBOLS {Waugh and Lewis}
Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others 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.
—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisted: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but, if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
—C.S. Lewis, ‘The Weight of Glory’
• Anthony Andrews as Sebastian Flyte, Diana Quick as his sister Julia Flyte, and Aloysius the teddy-bear, in a publicity shot for the 1981 television miniseries Brideshead Revistited •
November 19, 2013