At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this.
But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not at all the fragile creature one would ever have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof .
Deprendi miserum et.
It was normal, then, that he should be missed, even mourned – for it’s a hard thing when someone dies at a school like Hampden, where we were all so isolated, and thrown so much together. But I was surprised at the wanton display of grief which spewed forth once his death became official. It seemed not only gratuitous, but rather shameful given the circumstances.
Bloodshed is a terrible thing, but the bloodiest parts of Homer and Aeschylus are often the most magnificent – for example, that glorious speech of Klytemnestra’s in the Agamemnon that I love so much.
Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion.
The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.
Priceless. I rolled to face the wall. The recovered Rembrandt had been valued at forty million. But forty million was still a price.
The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it.
The business had upset him, that I knew, but I also knew that there was something about the operatic sweep of the search which could not fail to appeal to him and that he was pleased, however obscurely, with the aesthetics of the thing.
Henry saw it, too. “Like something from Tolstoy, isn’t it?” he remarked. Julian looked over his shoulder, and I was startled to see that there was real delight on his face. “Yes,” he said. “Isn’t it, though?
Because I love Henry.” “Henry’s dead.” “I can’t help it. I still love him.
I followed after her with a sort of dazed sense of lost time, delighted by her preoccupation, how oblivious she seemed of the minutes flying.
If this was a movie, I thought, looking pleasantly into the pleasant beefy face of the policeman – if this was a movie, we’d all be fidgeting and acting really suspicious.
Well, I don’t know who wrote this,” said Francis at last, his tone offhand and perfectly casual, “but whoever they were, they certainly couldn’t spell.
Tormented by what was happening, yet unable to stop it, I hovered around and watched the apartment vanishing piece by piece, like a bee watching its hive being destroyed.
Light climbed and burst through the wild desert clouds- never-ending sky, acid blue, like a computer game or a test pilot’s hallucination.
The world is much stranger than we know or can say.
When I was twelve and thirteen I used to get high at school every day – not because I liked it, it broke me out in cold sweats and panic – but because in the lower grades it was such a fabulous prestige to be thought a pothead, also because I was so expert at hiding the paranoiac flulike symptoms it gave me.
For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time – so too has love.