Vernon Sproxton Quotes

There are good books, indifferent books, and bad books. Amongst the good books some are honest, inspiring, moving, prophetic and improving. But in my language there is another category: there are Ah! Books. This is one of them. Ah! Books are those which induce a fundamental change in the reader's consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. Ah! Books are galvanic. They touch the nerve centre of the whole being so that the reader receives an almost palpable physical shock. A tremor of excited perception ripples through the person.

Ah! Books don't come all that often, at least not my way. Andre Malraux's The Psychology of Art was one of them. It was published just after the war. It was too expensive to buy but I located a copy of this luminous book in the Manchester Art Gallery; and i had to make several journeys by motor-cycle, often through sleet and snow until I had finished it. From time to time I wanted to get up on the table to proclaim its truth to all around me, or slap my next-desk neighbour over the back and say, 'There you are; just get hold of that!' Once I nearly did but just in time I noticed he was reading a text on the structure of plastics. By now, of course, I know that some people can get as much aesthetic pleasure out of contemplating the formula for a long molecule as others do from beholding a mural by Piero della Francesca. Technologists have their Ah! Moments too!

Fynn disguise nobody but Fynn. At the time of writing I have known him for a couple of years. But there is another way in which I have known him all my life. For there is about him that transparent vulnerability which makes for a total and immediate correspondence with anyone who is prepared to throw prejudices to the wind and celebrate life as a lump of mysterious and joyful awe. But all the speculation about a trained scientist or theologian with imaginative leanings and communications was pretty well wide of the mark. Fynn, thank God, was not trained as either of these. Intelligent to the eyelashes and with a gargantuan appetite for knowledge, Fynn was early advised to eschew (may his adviser rest in peace) universities and other institutions for the purveying of processed thought. Some of his most formative thinking took place far from the quads and colleges and punted rivers amongst the small streets, warehouses, and canals of the East End. But with his modest job and his Woolworth's do-it-yourself laboratory he produced thought to which few PhD's have approximated.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into the realm beyond words ... It is like that small mirror in the fairy tales - you glance in it and what you see is not yourself; for an instant you glimpse the Inaccessible, where no horse or magic carpet can take you. And the soul cries out for it.

I could hardly wait for following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T.B. Macaulay walking from London to meet the Cambridge coach bearing the next installment of Waverley novels.