Passage to india
Discuss the following passage; in particular the ways Forster presents Mrs Moore’s state of mind.
‘Quite right, now enjoy yourselves, and when you come back, tell me all about it.’ And she sank into the deckchair. If they reached the big pocket of caves, they would be away nearly an hour. She took up her writing pad and began, ‘Dear Stella, Dear Ralph’, then stopped, and looked at the queer valley and their feeble invasion of it. Even the elephant had become a nobody. Her eye rose from it to the entrance tunnel. No, she did not wish to repeat that experience. The more she thought over it, the more disagreeable and frightening it became. She minded it much more now than at the time. The crush and the smells she could forget, but the echo began, in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she had chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur: ‘Pathos, piety, courage - they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.’ If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same – ‘ou-boum’. If one had spoken with the tongues of angels and pleaded for all the unhappiness and misunderstanding in the world, past, present and to come, for all the misery men must undergo whatever their opinion and position, and however much they dodge or bluff – it would amount to the same, the serpent would de`scend and return to the ceiling. Devils are of the North and poems can be written about them, but no-one could romanticise the Marabar, because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness, the only quality that accommodates them to mankind. She tried to go on with her letter, reminding herself that she was only an elderly woman who had got up to early in the morning and journeyed too far, that the despair creeping over her was merely her despair, her personal weakness and that even if she got a sunstroke and went mad the rest of the world would go
‘Quite right, now enjoy yourselves, and when you come back, tell me all about it.’ And she sank into the deckchair. If they reached the big pocket of caves, they would be away nearly an hour. She took up her writing pad and began, ‘Dear Stella, Dear Ralph’, then stopped, and looked at the queer valley and their feeble invasion of it. Even the elephant had become a nobody. Her eye rose from it to the entrance tunnel. No, she did not wish to repeat that experience. The more she thought over it, the more disagreeable and frightening it became. She minded it much more now than at the time. The crush and the smells she could forget, but the echo began, in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she had chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur: ‘Pathos, piety, courage - they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.’ If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same – ‘ou-boum’. If one had spoken with the tongues of angels and pleaded for all the unhappiness and misunderstanding in the world, past, present and to come, for all the misery men must undergo whatever their opinion and position, and however much they dodge or bluff – it would amount to the same, the serpent would de`scend and return to the ceiling. Devils are of the North and poems can be written about them, but no-one could romanticise the Marabar, because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness, the only quality that accommodates them to mankind. She tried to go on with her letter, reminding herself that she was only an elderly woman who had got up to early in the morning and journeyed too far, that the despair creeping over her was merely her despair, her personal weakness and that even if she got a sunstroke and went mad the rest of the world would go