Hiram_161
Legacy Name: Hiram_161

"It's frightening," Julia once said, "to think how completely you haveforgotten Sebastian."

"He was the forerunner."

"That's what you said in the storm. I've thought since: perhaps I amonly a forerunner, too."

Perhaps, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between uslike a wisp of tobacco smoke -- a thought to fade and vanish like smokewithout a trace -- perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; ahill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal onlya further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are typesand this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs fromdisappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other,snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner alwaysa pace or two ahead of us.

I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or ratherit was Julia I had known in him, in those distant, Arcadian days.

"That's cold comfort for a girl," she said when I tried to explain."How do I know I shan't suddenly turn out to be somebody else? It's an easyway to chuck."

I had not forgotten Sebastian; every stone of the house had a memory ofhim, and when I heard him spoken of by Cordelia as someone she had seen amonth ago, my lost friend filled my thoughts. When we left the nursery, Isaid, "I want to hear all about Sebastian."

"To-morrow. It's a long story."

--Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisted

The precise nature of Charles and Sebastian's relationship remains a topic of debate; whether they are simply close friends or if Waugh hints at a sexual relationship between the two is not definitely established. Given that much of the first half of the novel focuses on the initial encounter, blossoming friendship and eventual estrangement of these central characters, this issue continues to pique the curiosity of readers.

Readers who interpret the relationship as overtly homosexual quote such lines as the fact that Charles had been "in search of love in those days" when he first met Sebastian, and his finding "that low door in the wall ... which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden" -- an image that some interpret as a Freudian metaphor for homosexual sex, though it recurs when Charles is expelled from Brideshead by Lady Marchmain, suggesting it refers more generally to the glamorous world Sebastian represents: "a door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford." (A reference to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll).

On the other hand, the line "our naughtiness [was] high on the catalogue of grave sins" may also be a suggestion that their relationship could have a homosexual element towards it, which, if acted upon, would be a mortal sin in Roman Catholic dogma. Reference is made at one point to Charles impatiently awaiting Sebastian's letters. It is also suggested in the book that one of the reasons Charles is later in love with Julia is the similarity between her and Sebastian. -- x