I want to set out my own queer love
experiences too, such as they are, for they troubled and distressed
and swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to contain all sorts of
irrational and debatable elements that I shall be the clearer-headed
for getting on paper. And possibly I may even flow into descriptions of
people who are really no more than people seen in transit, just
because it amuses me to recall what they said and did to us, and
more particularly how they behaved in the brief but splendid glare of
Tono-Bungay and its still more glaring offspring. It lit some of them
up, I can assure you! Indeed, I want to get in all sorts of things. My
ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than austere....
Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in every
chemist's storeroom, it still assuages the coughs of age and brightens
the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but its social glory,
its financial illumination, have faded from the world for ever. And I,
sole scorched survivor from the blaze, sit writing of it here in an air
that is never still for the clang and thunder of machines, on a table
littered with working drawings, and amid fragments of models and notes
about velocities and air and water pressures and trajectories--of an
altogether different sort from that of Tono-Bungay.
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