It came to me…that I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been thr… - John Fowles

If there was some central theme beneath the (more Irish than Greek) stew of intuitions about the nature of human existence – and of fiction – it is perhaps in the alternative title, whose rejection I still sometimes regret: The Godgame. I did intend Conchis to exhibit a series of masks representing human notions of God, from the supernatural to the jargon-ridden scientific, that is, a series of human illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and absolute power. The destruction of such illusions seems to me still an eminently humanist aim; and I wish there were some super-Conchis who could put the Arabs and the Israelis, or the Ulster Catholics and Protestants, through the same heuristic mill as Nicholas.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

His statement to himself should have been 'I possess this now,therefore I am happy' , instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, therefore I am sad.