Life's Pleasures Quote by Charles Morgan

Morgan turns a summer evening into a quiet apocalypse: the ordinary cosmos drains away and leaves only the body and its consolations. “Lakes that hold our moons” is a deliberately extravagant image, the kind that risks purple but earns its keep by making perception feel physical. Lakes “hold” moons the way memory holds light; they’re reflective surfaces that let us pretend the world is larger, gentler, more coherent than it is. Then, in a single, unsettling verb, that whole apparatus is “sucked into the earth.” It’s not that the moon disappears; it’s that the reflective medium vanishes, taking our romantic scaffolding with it.

The specific intent is to describe a threshold state: those June evenings when the mind stops needing metaphysics. Morgan isn’t arguing against beauty; he’s showing how beauty can be stripped down to appetite and contact without becoming crude. Wine and “the touch of a hand” are pointedly modest substitutes for celestial spectacle, insisting that intimacy is not a consolation prize but the surviving reality when the symbolic world collapses.

The subtext is modern disillusion wearing pastoral clothes. Written by a mid-century novelist who lived through the moral aftershocks of two world wars, Morgan’s lyricism carries a faint suspicion of grand narratives. The moons and lakes read like inherited romantic language; the earth swallowing them suggests history’s gravity, the way crisis makes the ornamental feel dishonest. What remains is not despair but a smaller, tougher form of faith: sensation, companionship, the present tense.