Mundane

Only looking up at the sky did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised.

Suddenly aware of and appalled by what he had spent his day doing, he asked if she could entertain herself for twenty minutes (and she was probably here on some very mundane piece of business, he cautioned himself desperately) while he cleaned up.

Then Cadwallader scored again, making things level, but Luna did not seem to have noticed; she appeared singularly uninterested in such mundane things as the score, and kept attempting to draw the crowd’s attention to such things as interestingly shaped clouds and the possibility that Zacharias Smith, who had so far failed to maintain possession of the Quaffle for longer than a minute, was suffering from something called “Loser’s Lurgy.”“Seventy-forty to Hufflepuff!” barked Professor McGonagall into Luna’s megaphone.“Is it, already?” said Luna vaguely.

“I admire your self-denial, your sacrifice, to forsake your grand subjects for the mundane—” 46 52862_Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.qxd 2/12/2003 8:39 AM Page 47

Keep this near your heart”—as he spoke he lifted a little silver crucifix and held it out to me, I being nearest to him—“put these flowers round your neck”—here he handed to me a wreath of withered garlic blossoms—“for other enemies more mundane, this revolver and this knife; and for aid in all, these so small electric lamps, which you can fasten to your breast; and for all, and above all at the last, this, which we must not desecrate needless.” This was a portion of Sacred Wafer, which he put in an envelope and handed to me.

Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, “and it's going to take a hundred thousand hours.” Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, “We are no longer in the mundane universe.

Suze, are you there?” Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts’ deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands?

And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.

When you return to this mundane sphere from your visionary world, you would seem to leave a Neapolitan spring for a Lapland winter—to quit paradise for earth—heaven for hell!

In short, their attitude was not that which one would have expected in men who professed to despise all trivialities, all foolish mundane conventions, and indeed everything, except their own personal interests.

Despite every attempt at mundane thoughts, she could not drive away the sharklike circling of all those others within her.

And other, more mundane drainages: a crack appeared in the mighty Bhakra Nangal Hydro-Electric Dam, and the great reservoir behind it flooded through the fissure … and the Narlikar women’s reclamation consortium, impervious to optimism or defeat or anything except the lure of wealth, continued to draw land out of the depths of the seas … but the final evacuation, the one which truly gives this episode its title, took place the next morning, just when I had relaxed and thought that something, after all, might turn out all right … because in the morning we heard the improbably joyous news that the Chinese had suddenly, without needing to, stopped advancing; having gained control of the Himalayan heights, they were apparently content; CEASEFIRE!