The Celestial Omnibus, and Other Stories
1911
A boy discovers a celestial omnibus that climbs into the sky, carrying him to a realm where the ghosts of poets and philosophers debate beauty in a meadow of asphodel. This is E.M. Forster at his most beguiling: a collection of stories where the respectable surfaces of Edwardian English life crack open to reveal something numinous, terrifying, or deeply strange. The title story follows young Tom, who escapes his buttoned-up family for an omnibus pulled by white horses that travels to a heavenly mountain where Wordsworth and Shelley hold court. Other tales venture into the Italian countryside, where a picnic is interrupted by an inexplicable panic, or into the English home counties, where the supernatural intrudes upon stultifying propriety. Forster, that keen anatomist of English manners, here reveals another gift: the capacity to make wonder feel not sentimental but genuinely unsettling. These are stories about imagination as a force that humbles the sensible, about children who see what their elders have trained themselves to miss. They work their magic on the reader the way the omnibus works on Tom: silently, irrationally, impossible to forget.
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“But they did not chatter much, for the boy, when he liked a person, would as soon sit silent in his company as speak.””
— E. M. Forster
“At the present moment, here he was in Greece, and one of the dreams of his life was realized. Forty years ago he had caught the fever of Hellenism, and all his life he had felt that could he but visit that land, he would not have lived in vain. But Athens had been dusty, Delphi wet, Thermopylae flat, and he had listened with amazement and cynicism to the rapturous exclamations of his companions. Greece was like England: it was a man who was growing old, and it made no difference whether that man looked at the Thames or the Eurotas. It was his last hope of contradicting that logic of experience, and it was failing.””
— E. M. Forster
“He had this in common with Oedipus, that he was growing old. Even to himself it had become obvious. He had lost interest in other people’s affairs, and seldom attended when they spoke to him. He was fond of talking himself but often forgot what he was going to say, and even when he succeeded, it seldom seemed worth the effort. His phrases and gestures had become stiff and set, his anecdotes, once so successful, fell flat, his silence was as meaningless as his speech. Yet he had led a healthy, active life, had worked steadily, made money, educated his children. There was nothing and no one to blame: he was simply growing old.””
— E. M. Forster
“I am the means and not the end. I am the food and not the life. Stand by yourself, as that boy has stood. I cannot save you. For poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.””
— E. M. Forster
“Oh, fence me out if you like! Fence me out as much as you like! But never in. Oh Harcourt, never in.””
— E. M. Forster
