But I could not use these machines. It all remained, for me, grossly muddled up, penitence, remorse, resentment, violence and hate. And it was not a tragedy. I had not even the consolation of that way of picturing the matter. Tragedy belongs in art.
Life has no tragedies.
Note the emphasis on ritual. His is characteristic of Miss Murdoch, who shows a marked predilection for describing the tiny, formal gestures by which her characters achieve clarity and isolation. She discards the religious content but preserves the essential shape of all those benedictions performed by people who extract from our common world a peculiar and private imagined one. Yet it has to be admitted she is among the very few contemporary novelists who go on troubling one's thoughts when the last page is done. Her ear for colloquial speech, her immediately vivid sense of character, her lucid and discriminating prose cannot be called incidental gifts in a novelist.