make an imaginary addendum

You have Heep saying “humble” for the comfort of others, you have Walter Murdoch being humble for himself; there is the idea that happiness means some region of ignorance being maintained and even policed, not unacknowledged but actively defied with force and effort. Heep puts his whole life into it and is an embodiment of an innocent desire for goodness, light and truth -- not his own desire but the innocent desire of other people; he is other people's curdled innocence, and is a revenant of innocence that rots everything when he approaches it: friendship, marriage, sonliness, whatever, here he is, sort of a physical thing between yourself and the sprawling black unsolvable darkness. It is not Agnes who dulls down the horrors, it is him.

(When I think back to whoever-it-was's notion that Agnes is a totem more than she is a character, I want to see them in an invisible partnership, Heep the active repellant-of-darkness, Agnes the static repellent, and both of them occurring in orbit around David like neutrons.)

Murdoch's favourite police weapon is this phrase: “A blow-out on tripe and onions.”

Until I knew it, I was in the habit of using another formula, the saying of a character in Dickens -- in Great Expectations, if I remember rightly -- 'Wot larks!’ That, too, was a comfort; but Lady Dorothy’s formula is more invariably comforting.

Lady Dorothy, in the middle of a discussion about her friends' favourite foods, “wonderful things which only a chef of genius can prepare, and which are to be seen only on the tables of the very rich,” said, “Oh, gimme a good blow-out on tripe and onions.” Use it, says Murdoch: it will bring you back to basics.

Similarly when I read in Mr Bertrand Russell an account of the universe as modern science presents it to our view, ending with the words, ‘only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built’ -- the obvious comment that springs to one’s lips at once, is ‘Wot larks!’ But this, though comforting, is not wholly convincing. The right comment is ‘All right; and now, let’s have a blow-out on tripe and onions.’ The moment you have said that, you know that your soul is saved.

You should use it when you talk back to a book or when you rewrite a speech in your head. “To make an imaginary addendum to the Governor-General’s message, -- something like ‘To mark the universal grief, the Government House blow-out on tripe and onions has been postponed for a week’ -- relieved the tension of one’s mind.”

The formula is always inward and mental, never used aloud, and Heep's formula works best too, inside the closed system of a prison. See chapter sixty-one of David Copperfield.