The first time I found a home in literature was when I read E. M. Forster's "Howard's End" in 1992. In this work, I discovered a link to eternal truths that I did not know existed. Here was a writer that could be all at once humorous ("... he had no guiding principle beyond a certain preference for mediocrity"), cutting ("The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them"), practical ("Money is the fruit of self-denial") and profound ("Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him... Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us"). I was completely undone by the complex beauty of his poetic prose, and the essential clarity of his thought. It may have taken me three months or more to crawl through the 250 page novel - my original copy is overwhelmed by yellow highlights and margin notes - as I contemplated every single word, but the experience of reading this book was transformational. Here are two of the better known passages:"... she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it, we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it, love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy going... It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."
"The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility."
