I can’t believe you two,” Henry said crossly. “I reminded you of this last night.” “But we forgot,” said the twins, in simultaneous despair. “How could you?” “Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o’clock, you hardly think what you’re going to feed the corpse for dinner.” “Asparagus is in season,” said Francis helpfully.
God’ as reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher.
Demands?” said Andy. “She makes it sound as if you’re asking for ten million in unmarked notes.
What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?
Although, I do have to say, it was difficult to imagine him.
And yet it was remarkable too how his world limped on without him. Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything – or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.
And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate.
I do not now nor did I ever have anything in common with any of them, nothing except a knowledge of Greek and the year of my life I spent in their company. And if love is a thing held in common, I suppose we had that in common, too, though I realize that might sound odd in light of the story I am about to tell.
The description of shock and grief hot so close to home: “but sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illuminated in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.
Forgive me for for all the things that i did, but mostly for all the things i didn’t do.
In Paradise Lost he pushes English to its very limits but I think no language without noun cases could possibly support the structural order he attempts to impose.
They really knew how to work this edge, the Dutch painters – ripeness sliding into rot. The fruit’s perfect but it won’t last, it’s about to go. And see here especially,” she said, reaching over my shoulder to trace the air with her finger, “this passage – the butterfly.” The underwing was so powdery an delicate it looked as if the color would smear if she touched it. “How beautiful he plays it. Stillness with a tremble of movement.
I thought of all the places I’d been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found.
I wanted to say something profound, that Julian was only human, that he was old, that flesh and blood are frail and weak and that there comes a time when we have to transcend our teachers.
I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how.
I don’t know where Henry was. Probably looking at the moon and reciting some poem from the T’ang Dynasty.
I knew it deeply and irrationally like knowledge in a dream.
Mrs. Corcoran ignored him. “I guess you can go ahead and bring in those ferns,” she said to the delivery boy, eyeing the foil-wrapped pots with loathing.
He’s always up in the clouds with Plato or something.