It was like walking into the cockpit of an airplane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk in their seats. And standing outside the Lyceum, I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which in fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at twelve, sitting on a bar stool in our sunny little kitchen in Plano. Who is in control here? I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane?
I suppose I was only a little depressed, now the novelty of it had worn off, at the wildly alien character of the place in which I found myself: a strange land with strange customs and peoples and unpredictable weathers. I thought I was sick, though I don’t believe I really was; I was just cold all the time and unable to sleep, sometimes no more than an hour or two a night.
Thin and pale as a starved poet.
I was fairly sure this death had affected him more than he let show. Then again, I suspect that Julian’s cheery, Socratic indifference to matters of life and death kept him from feeling too sad about anything for very long.
These things are deep – they cannot be honored in words. Human tongue cannot express.
The whole evening had left me with a keen sense of inadequacy and failure which grew keener with every step. I moved relentlessly over the evening, back and forth, straining to remember exact words, telling inflections, any subtle insults or kindnesses I might’ve missed, and my mind – quite willingly – supplied various distortions.
I didn’t have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance I do not now know.
Sunday was a sad day – early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong – but as I watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom.
Booze made people sloppy and unfocused:.
My haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could forsee. In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
If love is a thing held in common, I suppose we had that in common, too.
Initially, I had thought with hard work I could overcome a fundamental squeamishness and distaste for my subject, that perhaps with even harder work I could simulate something like a talent for it. But this was not the case. As the months went by I remained uninterested, if not downright sickened, by my study of biology; my grades were poor.
It was so dark I could hardly see her. The weight of her arm was wonderfully comfortable, and her gin-sweet breath was warm on my cheek.
Though I now suspect, given the circumstances and my disposition, I would’ve been unhappy anywhere, in Biarritz or Caracas or the Isle of Capri, I was then convinced that my unhappiness was indigenous to that place. Perhaps a part of it was. While to a certain extent Milton is right – the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so forth.
Yes,” said Julian, in a tone of voice which managed to convey at once both sympathy with and distaste for the Corcorans.
I cannot remember this particular fight, only that we always fought, about money and school.
It was suffused with a weak, academic light – different from Plano, different from anything I had ever known – a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.
He was talking in a voice which didn’t sound at all like James Bond, but which Harriet recognized as his James Bond voice.
I think romantics are frequently the best classicists. He laughed. “The great romantics are often failed classicists. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it?
And the sweetness of the thought struck her: how lovely to vanish off the face of the earth, what a sweet dream to vanish now, out of her body: poof, like a spirit. Chains clattering empty to the floor.