"The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind"

 

On opening Justine one is seized every time. It is, as Durrell says, today. His adopting of the present, in an expansive invention of retrospection, is not artlessly hammered by the announcement of a perpetual, mobile date of conscious-ness. This is a device of urgency, and the voice is of the Classics, not of age. But why is this?

    I see at last that none of us 
    is properly to be judged for 
    what happened in the past. It 
    is the city which should be 
    judged though we, its children, 
    must pay the price.















Lawrence Durrell
Justine
  a novel
1957
op. cit.