Doris Lessing- good and bad

learned more from a 3 minute record babe

good and bad in everyone

“Yet of that group I will say simply, without further analysis that

George was a good person, and that Willi was not. That

Maryrose and Jimmy and Ted and Johnnie the pianist were

good people, and that Paul and Stanley Lett were not. And

furthermore, I'd bet that ten people picked at random off the

street to meet them ... would instantly agree with this

classification-would, if I used the word good, simply like that,

know what I meant.” (Ibid.)

“So all I can say is that before going to sleep I ‘understood’ why I had to sleep, and what the projectionist would say, and what I would have to learn. Though I knew it already; so that the dreaming itself already had the quality of words spoken after the event, or a summing-up, for emphasis’ sake, of something learned.

As soon as the dream came on, the projectionist said, in Saul’s voice, very practical: ‘And now we’ll just run through them again.’ I was embarrassed, because I was afraid I’d see the same set of films I had seen before — glossy and unreal. But this time, while they were the same films, they had another quality, which in the dream I named ‘realistic’; they had a rough, crude, rather jerky quality of an early Russian or German film. Patches of the film slowed down for long, long stretches while I watched, absorbed, details I had not had time to notice in life. The projectionist kept saying, when I had got some point he wanted me to get: ‘That’s it, lady, that’s it.’ And because of his directing me, I watched even more closely. I realized that all the things to which I had given emphasis, or to which the pattern of my life had given emphasis, were now slipping past, fast and unimportant. The group under the gum-trees, for instance, or Ella lying in the grass with Paul, or Ella writing novels, or Ella wanting death in the aeroplane, or the pigeons falling to Paul’s rifle — all these had gone, been absorbed, had given place to what was really important.”