For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges

himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done – a
judgment that is necessarily hampered, bot only by the scope and limits of his
imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

Eleanor Catton
The Luminaries
January 25, 2015

A secret always has a strengthening effect upon a newborn friendship, as does the shared
impression than an external figure is to blame: the men of the Crown have become united
less by their shared beliefs, we observe, than by their shared misgivings–which are, in the
main, externally directed. In their analyses, variously made, of Alastair Lauderback,
George Shepard, Lydia Wells, Francis Carver, Anna Wetherell, and Emery Staines, the
Crown men have become more and more suggestive, despite the fact that nothing has
been proven, no body has been tried, and no new information has come to light. Their
beliefs have become more fanciful, their hypotheses less practical, their counsel less
germane. Unconfirmed suspicion tends, over time, to become wilful, fallacious, and prey
to the vicissitudes of mood–it acquires all the qualities of common superstition–and the
men of the Crown Hotel, whose nexus of allegiance is stitched, after all, in the bright
thread of time and motion, have, like all men, no immunity to influence.

Eleanor Catton
The Luminaries
Tags: 19th century, crime, mystery, New Zealand

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