“What is urgent is not urgent forever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, life itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onwards with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future” so wrote Iris Murdoch in 1954.

Rather odd.

http://livredor.livejournal.com/210557.html

I have been wanting to read something by Iris Murdoch for quite some time, and took the plunge just the other day. I searched out google’s opinion on what her best book was, and this was a high conteneder.

It was a fair novel, interesting enough in its story, though somehow not very engaging. I wonder, however, if it had some satirical elements that would have made it more a product of its age.

It took me a while to get through, but I enjoyed it well enough.