The Young Lions

p. 225

“It all started when he reached up to the copy of Yeats’ The Herne’s Egg and Other Plays on the library shelf. If he had reached for another book he wouldn’t have bumped into Roger and he wouldn’t have lived here and he wouldn’t have met Hope and she would probably be lying in another bed now, with another man watching her, thinking, I love her, I love her. If you thought about it you stared into the shouting pit of madness. No plan to anything. No plan to loving or dying or fighting or anything. But the equation ‘Man plus his intentions equals Accident’ is impossible to believe. The plan must be there but cleverly camouflaged, the way a good playwright disguises his plot. At the moment you die, perhaps everything is clear to you. You say, ‘Oh, now I see, that’s why that character was introduced in the first act.’”