- Anthony Burgess / A Dead Man in Deptford

"- Does he not also tell some legend of a unity capriciously split by the gods, so that half goes wandering in search of half? But that is a pretty doctrine of male soul and female soul conjoined if they are lucky, which is rare, after an eternity of seeking.

- Male and female are grossly conjoined following nature’s wish that they breed. There is an airier or more spiritual mode of conjunction.

They drank and drinking looked each other in the eye or eyes. Thomas Walsingham said:

- Well, we have known each other some ten minutes and you are already anatomising unnatural love.

Kit blushed. He said hurriedly:

- Unnatural love is a bad phrase. What is against nature is sin, so the religions say. But what makes man what he is is unnatural if we raise him as
we must above eating, dunging, begetting, dying.

- Well, these be high or deep matters for a morning cup and a first meeting. In youth is pleasure. (Kit started: someone, perhaps he himself, had said that that previous day or night that seemed now much in the past.) I mean that thought is the enemy of doing. My grave cousin is always saying that thought both makes and undoes life’s fabric. If, he says, he thinks too much on racks and thumbscrews and what he calls the apparatus of the finding of truth then he grows sick. And yet, he says, what is the big conflict but a grinding of thought against thought. Some think that bread can be God and some that bread is bread and God but a hovering thought over it. And some that the Pope is the devil. It was different a hundred years back. Thoughts change and become perilous. What, then, are the things that do not change? In youth is pleasure.

He pledged that in a draining of his tankard. Kit did not drain his. He said:

- I beg pardon for bringing in the high or deep matters. Altus in Latin is both deep and high. I was seeking some answer to the question how a man can have a conviction that he is drinking with an old friend -

- You feel that? That we are old friends?"