Todos los grandes cuadros son en realidad autorretratos.
See?” said Boris, interrupting Vitya right in.
Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this.
It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless. Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust. Boris – budding alcoholic, fluent curser in four languages – who snatched food from my plate when he felt like it and nodded off drunk on the floor, face red like he’d been slapped.
The stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.
The months subsequent were an endless dreary battle of paperwork, full of stalemates, fought in trenches.
A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing.
What if the pattern is pre-set? No no – hang on.
No siempre se saca el bien de las buenas obras ni el mal de las malas obras. Ni siquiera los sabios y los buenos pueden ver la finalidad de todas sus acciones.
I’ve never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary –.
It was an obscure specialization, but the candlelit and treacherous universe in which they moved – of sin unpunished, of innocence destroyed – was one I found appealing. Even the titles of their plays were strangely seductive, trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickled beneath the surface of mortality: The Malcontent. The White Devil. The Broken Heart.
I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath. It lasted forever, like some weepy and endless made-for-TV movie – all the clinging, all the complaints, all the parking-lot confessions of “inadequacy” and “poor self-image,” all those banal sorrows.
Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable.
For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days.
It’s funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn’t see this crucial moment then for what is was; I suppose we never do.
Death is the mother of Beauty. And what is Beauty? Terror.
Um – ” I turned to the shop window to compose myself, and my transparent ghost turned to meet me, crowds passing behind me in the glass.
Well – very Russian, you know, to complain how bad things are all the time! Even if life is great – keep it to yourself. You don’t want to tempt the devil.
I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head.
Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think? Remember.