On Morality

Interrogator: 'Do you really think for moment that your  friends would do as much for you as you seem to be ready to do for them?'

Odette: 'Yes, I do but the point is unimportant.  I do not barter loyalty against loyalty.  I am no shopkeeper, Monsieur, and I sell nothing by the pound.  If they were prepared to betray me that would not influence my decision in any way.  I am only responsible to my own conscience.'

Odette

Jerrard Tickell (p.257)

I will not permit the coherence of my moral universe to be affected by the incoherence of somebody else's.

This Week I Be Mostly Reading...

'England is, above all, the country of the amateur, and the wireless operators, couriers and saboteurs who went to France, were therefore amateurs, officers working behind enemy lines. They had a fine contempt for the professional spy. They were ordinary men and women in that they sprang from ordinary walks of life. The don, the stock-broker, the bird-watcher, the doctor, the insurance agent, the shorthand typist, the widow, the anthropologist and the head-waiter...'

Odette
Jerrard Tickell. (p.44)

See Saboteurs.

No Real Job

Nocturnal bride
Wears black tonight
Grainy pictures
Of a faded wedding
I am naked, draped in leaves
My hand clasping my heart
All foliage suffocates

A fragment of my mirror (broken)
A shard of my heart
Books line the walls
Who lives in those leather-bound volumes
Even they are soon to be forgotten
So I devoured you
And I relished every morsel
Torn and bleeding
The grey sky in my head
From some ancient tale
Pale ghosts hovered over me.