Orlando: A Biography

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream.

He — for there could be no doubt of his sex

what with his glowing cheeks, his dark curls, his black and crimson cloak, he looked as if he were burning with his own radiance, from a lamp lit within.

It was not to seek ‘life’ that Orlando went among them; not in quest of ‘reality’ that he left them.

Elizabethans that they have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book learning; none of our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing and to be unable to read a virtue;

nor their vegetables even. Everything was different.

Moreover, nature has tricks of her own. Once look out of a window at bees among flowers, at a yawning dog, at the sun setting, once think ‘how many more suns shall I see set’, etc. etc. (the thought is too well known to be worth writing out) and one drops the pen, takes one’s cloak, strides out of the room, and catches one’s foot on a painted chest as one does so. For Orlando was a trifle clumsy.

Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window?

they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed.

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice. Girls were roses, and their seasons were short as the flowers’. Plucked they must be before nightfall; for the day was brief and the day was all.