Homemade Chutney
“... he was faintly depressed by the way a whole life could be contained by a few hundred pages—bottled, like homemade chutney.” (Ch. 1)
Perowne is contemplating the biography of Charles Darwin his daughter, Daisy, assigned for him to read. This image of "bottling" a person's life into a few hundred pages is depressing to him, but it's also one of literature's greatest appeals: the containment of an entire life or even an entire world in a small package of pages to be visited over and over again. Ironically, this even indirectly references Saturday: instead of containing a whole life into a few hundred pages, McEwan's three hundred pages merely contain a single day, emphasizing the enormous amount of information and thought processes contained in a person's lifetime.
The Abandoned Temple of Psychosis
“In Henry’s view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.” (Ch. 1)
The reasoning spoken about in this quote is Henry's temptation to believe that his coincidental presence at the window at the time of the plane crash means something supernatural. He argues that such reasoning exaggerates one's own importance, denying one's unimportance in the grand scheme of life and departing from a true understanding of one's minuscule existence in the vastness of reality. This is one step, he thinks, on the way to psychosis, which is a complete break with reality.
The Blues of Jane Austen
“Perhaps it’s one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a Spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as Daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel.” (Ch. 1)
Perowne is pondering Theo's obsession with the blues. He doesn't understand how three simple chords can contain the entire universe for Theo, but he tries to understand by comparing it to other such phenomena, such as a Jane Austen novel. Such a novel might appear to contain the entirety of reality, and perhaps it even does - that level of interpretation is beyond Henry's ability and interest.
The Angelic Musician
“Someone has written somewhere that Theo Perowne plays like an angel.” (Ch. 1)
This simile, elevating the music Theo produces to something supernaturally beautiful, emphasizes his talent and success in creating beautiful music. This quote is particularly meaningful in light of Henry's response to hearing his son's music: he says that perfectly executed music is essentially as close to a glimpse of a perfect world like heaven as humanity will ever come.
Curtains of Thought
“Walking up three flights of stairs has revived him, his eyes are wide open in the dark; the exertion, his minimally raised blood pressure, is causing local excitement on his retina, so that ghostly swarms of purple and iridescent green are migrating across his view of a boundless steppe ... drawing back like theatre curtains on new scenes, new thoughts." (Ch. 1)
This skillful simile emphasizes the new, evolving frontiers of the mind that are awoken by exercise and that prevent sleep. Henry, revived by walking up three flights of stairs, is now unable to fall back asleep, as the exercise has caused his mind to reveal new thoughts and scenes in his mental theater that will not allow him to fall back asleep.
