Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?
I became expert at making myself invisible.
Because – the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn’t matter if it’s been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.
Her death was my fault. Other people have always been a little too quick to assure me that it wasn’t; and yes, only a kid, who could have known, terrible accident, rotten luck, could have happened to anyone, it’s all perfectly true and I don’t believe a word of it.
I was floating around up there like a feather, a trick from early childhood that was fading as I got older.
He seemed to be talking partly to himself. “That’s what he would have wanted. The parting gilmore, the death haikus – he wouldn’t have liked to leave without stopping to speak someone along the way. ‘A tea house amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death.
Cinnamon-colored walls, rain on the windowpanes, vast quiet and a sense of depth and distance, like the varnish over the background of a nineteenth-century painting.
And now,” said Julian, when everything was quiet, “I hope we are all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime?
The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue.
I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew – the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in – an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness.
Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.
But it was also a bit like a failed artist working as a security officer at an art gallery, or a failed author working in a bookshop. There’s a constant reminder of how close you are to the thing you want, and how far away from it you are.
In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn’t know the language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.
Look, here comes Twinkletoes,” said Bunny, busying himself with the menu.
At the silence, my heart went cold. Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe... It was a stillness I knew; this was a house closed in on itself when someone had died.
Go see him again why don’t you, said Bunny, take him some flowers and tell him you love Plato and he’ll be eating out of your hand.
You’re a Homeric scholar?′ I might have said yes, but I had the feeling he’d be glad to catch me in a mistake and he would be able to do it easily. ‘I like Homer’ I said weakly. He regarded me chill distaste. ‘I love Homer’ He said.
I hadn’t slept with anybody in Vermont except a little red-haired girl I met at a party on the first weekend.
7522, the last four digits of Boris’s home phone in Vegas.
These people understood- as I did- the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self, all the hidden consolations that lifted life above the ordinary and made it worth living.