Laurie Thinking He's In Love With Adrian After Surgery Is Funny To Me Because The Literal Next Thing

“Give me to be beautiful within,” Socrates had prayed, “and for me let outward and inward things be reconciled together.” (99)

A little tribute piece to what is probably, definitely my favorite comfort novel, The Charioteer by Mary Renault.

The Andrew description is so so similar to the Ralph one. Fair hair and tanned skin obviously but there are so many details, he's even wearing grey like the school uniform. A proper post will follow but in the meantime omG

I completely forgot the line you mentioned about Andrew’s mind being where it should have been, but your comments about it are spot on! Andrew is too saddened by Laurie leaving, and then too distracted by refusing his demands, that he cannot think enough to come up with a way to comfort Charlot, his actual charge. It really makes the whole thing 10x sadder. I'm definitely gonna have to go back and reread that scene now, just to get a clearer sense of it all!

Re: 'the loss of that relationship feels real to me' I think is because it is a real loss. Laurie loved Andrew, and always felt their relationship to be real even when Ralph didn't, but by the end he can never see him again. It's heartbreaking.

Actually, both times I read the book, I came away happy for Laurie but also very sad and I think his relationship with Andrew (and Andrew's whole storyline) is the reason why. If you think about it, at the end of the book, Laurie is put in the exact same position Ralph was all those years ago at school: here is someone who adores him, and who refuses to believe that he's done what he's been accused of simply because he cannot fathom that he'd do it. And what does Laurie do? Exactly what Ralph did: he tells the truth, gives Andrew the Phaedrus and goes away. But what will happen to Andrew after this? We don't know and neither does Laurie. He may die in the next 5 years, but even if he doesn't, it seems hopelessly optimistic to envision a similar happy ending to Laurie's for him.

Propaganda for Andrew's moral code....

Time for a bit of Andrew love I think.

@telltaleangelina I loved your post about Ralph/Laurie’s philosophy of life compared with Andrew’s, which so resonated with me - they have a kind of heroic idealism which is very attractive, and apart from anything else it supplies most of the drama and action of the book!

But it also made me want to think more about Andrew and his motivations. So, inspired by the 'Hot Austen men' polls, here is some propaganda for Andrew. At fifteen he had to decide whether to throw in his lot with the military side of his family or the pacifist one, and it is made clear he took this decision seriously:

“I thought all around it. I thought there might conceivably even be some circumstances when I felt it was right to kill. If I knew whom I was killing and the circumstance and the nature of the responsibility. What I finally stuck at was surrendering my moral choice to men I'd never met, about whose moral standards I knew nothing whatever."

He becomes a CO not to abrogate moral responsibility but so that he can take responsibility for his actions.  Later he and Laurie have this exchange:

“One has to draw the line where one sees it oneself."

"Is that what you call the inner light?"

"If you like, yes."

So the thing that strikes me about the Charlot incident is that his principled stance is not blind faith or rigidity of thought. His main regret is that fighting with Laurie prevented him finding a solution to the problem.  He says:

“If I ... if my mind had been where it should have been, I'd have known what ought to be done, something would have come to me."

Laurie says:

"I do this kind of thing. I get steamed up about things that happen to people till I've got to do something or burst, and if it turns out to do more harm than good, hell, what's the odds, it did good to me. At school for instance. A man -- one of the boys I mean, was going to be sacked, and because I liked him I took for granted he couldn't have done it, and I was all set to have raised hell and involved a lot of other people. And all the time he'd done it after all."

Laurie admits that actually it feels good to ‘do’ something, even if the other person doesn't want it. It is easy to see that both of them have a valid point when it comes to the practicalities.  But for me, the point is that as long as they are trying to impose their will on each other, and operating from a place of ego, there is no possibility of finding another solution.  There are a hundred things they could have done to ease Charlot’s last moments if they had stopped thinking about themselves for one moment.  I think it's interesting for example that Laurie is the only person Charlot still recognises but he wants to 'outsource' comfort to someone else.

And then I realised that when Laurie is referring back to his 16 year old self getting 'steamed up' it is Ralph who points out to him that however much he might ‘want’ to ‘do’ something, it will be hurting other innocent people such as his own family (and very likely including Ralph himself).

Often, Laurie is annoyed at Ralph's inability to stand by.  The bit on the stairs at the party, for instance, and the bit where he tells Ralph "You can't eat and breathe for me, or live for me. No one can."  Pretty strong stuff to say to the man you just made passionate love to a moment ago! And let's not forget the comment about the drunk trying to mend the watch.

Sometimes I think the really sad thing is that Laurie is locked in to a different system of morality (The Phaedrus), one which means he is Andrew’s mentor and protector and Andrew is the innocent and therefore had no real moral agency. I'm not sure that means he could have or should have been with Andrew as a romantic partner, but the loss of that relationship feels real to me.

And finally....I think you have made me understand something that has always puzzled/amused me a little bit about the arguments that Laurie/Ralph have. He uses all those military analogies that seem to suggest that even while he sees that Ralph is trying to dominate him and battles with it, he is also, kind of, comfortable with it. And maybe it is that he sees himself in Ralph, he completely understands why Ralph is behaving the way he does. I always find that so touching (a little bit funny too, especially the captain shouting 'fire'!)

why couldn't it just be that jem saw Jessie get belial's marks stripped off of him and that's what he was talking about when he told Emma about it

“Dear friend, — Your sweetness intimidates” Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Sarah Tuckerman (January 1880)

Always really funny when I read a book where I relate to the main character, really see myself in them and understand their pain completely, and the reviews and comments are all "what an insufferable whiny bitch, i can't stand them"

Hello there, I would love to hear all your thoughts on 'The Last of the Wine'!

Hey, thanks for the ask! I really loved Last of the Wine! Alexias was a lovely character, and it was really interesting to watch his development and the development of his relationship with Lysis! He was so sweet in the beginning and then he became harder as the book went on; his father said that he once thought Alexias was 'too soft' to be a soldier, and I think he was right to feel that way at a certain point! His entire character progression was a trip to get through!

I absolutely loved the writing, which was beautiful as always, and there are some parts of the story I don't think I'm going to forget about anytime soon; the story of Phaedo (I cried), the moment Alexias exposes his brother and asks him 'bear no ill-will to me' (I cried), quotes like 'at Gurgos's once I lay awake considering how to kill him. But already it was too late,' 'I saw death reach out for you; and I had no philosophy,' 'if there be any god who concerns himself with the lives of men, the god himself must suffer with me,' etc. etc. It was just so good but very disturbing in some points...sometimes, you never stop to wonder why people do the things they do and only see that what has been done is evil. In a way, this is good; evil things ought to be derided as such no matter the circumstances, but in another way it is unfair and unhelpful. This is how I feel about a lot of the last third of the book: I understand why and how certain things happened, I just wish that they hadn't happened.

Something that made me laugh though and which I will think about forever are the few scenes where it's apparent Mary Renault is writing with a modern audience in mind, like the absolutely hilarious scene where Alexias is afraid of asking Xenophon if he only likes girls because he doesn't want to offend him 😭 or the scene where Alexias, assuring his dying father of vengeance, says: "Am I so base of soul as to forgive my enemies?" They're really cool scenes because they kind of play with the expectations of a modern audience and subvert common sentiments and understandings in modern culture and society; the opposite situation in the Xenophon scene would seem likelier to a modern person (especially at the time Mary Renault was writing) with Xenophon worrying about offending Alexias by asking him if he likes boys. And it's really a head-trip to read that question asked by Alexias because it's a direct contradiction to the common and widely known sentiment of forgiveness and loving your enemies within Christianity...this becomes 10x funnier 10 pages later when Alexias accidentally stumbles onto the whole point of Christianity 'God with us' 😭😭😭 I love the whole sequence of these scenes because they seem written specifically to challenge the reader; to get it through your mind that this was a foreign place and time, and these people are foreign to us; they have an understanding different from our own...but maybe not completely different at the same time.

Anyway, I don't know if this makes sense, my thoughts are kind of all over the place with this one but the tldr version of it is: I loved it! The writing was beautiful! It made me sad!

I would like an Alastair/Jem friendship 😤😤

Psyche entering Cupid’s Garden, 1903, John William Waterhouse

Medium: oil,canvas

Gideon: Sophie and I are having a baby.

Alastair: That's gre--

Gideon, slamming adoption papers on the table: It's you, sign here.