The Unquiet Grave is a literary work by Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English intellectual, literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon and wrote Enemies of Promise , which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of...

 written in 1944 under the pseudonym Palinurus. It comprises a collection of aphorisms, quotes, nostalgic musings and mental explorations.

Palinurus

Palinurus

Palinurus, in Roman mythology, is the helmsman of a ship of the Trojan hero Aeneas, whose descendants would one day found the city of Rome. As the price for the safe passage of Aeneas and his people from Sicily to Italy, Palinurus loses his life, one on behalf of many Palinurus, in Roman mythology,...

 was the pilot of Aeneas

Aeneas

Aeneas , in Greco-Roman mythology, was a Trojan hero, the son of the prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite. His father was the second cousin of King Priam of Troy, making Aeneas Priam's second cousin, once removed. The journey of Aeneas from Troy , which led to the founding a hamlet south of...

's ship in the Aenead who fell overboard as an act of atonement for the angry gods, and whose spirit wandered in the underworld. Connolly uses the theme to explore his feelings and review his situation as he approaches the age of forty presenting a very pessimistic and self-deprecating account. Into this he brings quotes from some of his favourite authors Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...

, Thomas de Quincy, Nicolas Chamfort

Nicolas Chamfort

Nicolas Chamfort was a French writer, best known for his witty epigrams and aphorisms. He was secretary of Louis XVI's sister, and of the Jacobin club.-Life:...

 and Flaubert as well as snatches from Buddha, Chinese philosophy and Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

. The title The Unquiet Grave

The Unquiet Grave

"The Unquiet Grave" is an English folk song in which a young man mourns his dead love too hard and prevents her from obtaining peace. It is thought to date from 1400 and was collected in 1868 by Francis James Child, as Child Ballad number 78....

is taken from an English folk song of the same name.

The twelvemonth and a day being up,

The dead began to speak

"Oh who sits weeping on my grave,

And will not let me sleep"?-

The book is in four parts entitled Ecce Gubernator ("Here is the pilot"), Te Palinure Petens ("Looking for you, Palinurus") and La Clé des Chants ("The key of songs") and Who was Palinurus. The first two contain similar sets of musing, while the third contains more recollections with veiled references to Connolly's life in France. The last gives an account Palinurus's history.

Quotes

• '"The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence"
• "There is no pain in life equal to that which two lovers can inflict on each other".
• "When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest actions, but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized."
• "A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he starts forth, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts, and to second-rate friends"
• "Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form."
• "'Dry again?' said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. 'So would you be,' replied the Rock-Pool, 'if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea."
• "Morning tears return; spirits at their lowest ebb. Approaching forty, sense of total failure; not a writer but a ham actor whose performance is clotted with egotism; dust and ashes; 'brilliant'. - that is not worth doing. Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style,—which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity"
• "Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk."
• "No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning."
• "Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable."
• "Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out."
• "The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream."
• "The dread of loneliness is keener than the threat of bondage; and so we marry, again and again."

External links

• The complete review's Review