Orlando: A Biography

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

He — for there could be no doubt of his sex

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.

‘Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts,’

Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters.

Of wall or substance there was none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit as for the coming of a dead Queen.

So she was now darkened, stilled, and become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self.

Fame! she repeated. A poet — a charlatan; both every morning as regularly as the post comes in.

Thirty-six; in a motor-car; a woman. Yes, but a million other things as well.

For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.