T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 241

- 7 - 26.1.28 "Do not worry about Philby. He is really a very good Fellow: only a natural opponent: and he suffers from an excess of personal feeling. To him a person is bigger than a movement or idea or principle. He is also very radical in home politics, and a man with a grievance. Such a pity, for as I say, he is really a fine administrator, and a good scholar. His writing is bad, and he is no politician: but I respect him too much to wish to see him attacked. Indeed he can't afford to be attacked, for his past is all a confusion." 29.3.28 "We must be travelling different ways. You are getting exasperated, hating the dullness and stupidness of mankind, and especially of writing mankind. I'm losing my cutting edge, and therefore understand better, sympathise with, people like Wells and Bennett and the rest, who slide down the easy slope into fatuity. Only I'll try to slide down silently. A man whose buttons are coming off should not exhibit himself. So I won't write any more. There is a defaitiem about this business: and I find that even marking-time (which I once thought the F.A.W. task) is too difficult for me. Now it is standing still, or sitting still, and letting its current carry me. While you are in the Air Force you have the illusion of belonging to so much: of being 'understood and supported and accompanied and paralleled by ever so many thousands of your likes. (Footnote by I.B.: Literally likes). You are one man against the world. I've dodged (no, too dodged too active a word) all that loneliness, and am one cell in a honeycomb. Just an empty thing for my employers to make use of. That's perhaps why I want to be employed, now, always." 19.5.28 "This is rather a stupid letter. Virtue has gone out of me, not in the New Testament sense; but finally, I think. The orange is squeezed dry. Nothing but the climate of England can revive this flesh: and even that will not do it, unless the Net, can maintain depressions over Iceland, in abundance, in sequence, for ever and ever." 5.8.28 "Send me another poem whenever you remember Belisarius. To desire such otols is not to deny my satisfaction. I like sunlight, just. And the sun does not demand a diploma-in- Justice from us all." (N.B. ... A reference to the tradition that Belisarius had his eyes put out and passed the remainder of his life sitting in the streets of Constantinople, begging. Lawrence appears to have found this event a more apt historic parallel to his own case than Alexander's. He several times referred to Belisarius in correspondence and conversation with me, expressing the wish that I would deal with him. L.H.) 27/8/28 "My leading this ramshackle but joyous life wouldn't be justified if I took things, it's the happy knowledge that I'm not doing things which makes me so pleased with life."