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You reclined in the low armchair, impassive and silent. Turning your head sidewise and lifting your angular elbow, you would glance at me from under your lashes as you adjusted the hairpins in back.
Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar.…
During the leisure hours when the crystal-bright waves of the drug beat at him, penetrating his thoughts with their radiance and transforming the least trifle into an ethereal miracle, he painstakingly noted on a sheet of paper all the various steps he intended to take in order to trace his wife. As he scribbled, with all those sensations still blissfully taut, his jottings seemed exceedingly important and correct to him. In the morning, however, when his head ached and his shirt felt clammy and sticky, he looked with bored disgust at the jerky, blurry lines.
The barber filled his palm with lather. A delicious chill ran through the crown of his head as the barber’s fingers firmly rubbed in the thick foam. Then an icy gush made his heart jump, and a fluffy towel went to work on his face and his wet hair.
There was something touchingly homespun about her that made you think of violet soap
I realized that the joy I had sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated.
For one instant something flew open in his soul, momentarily froze still in surprise, and slammed shut.
In this silence I fell asleep, exhausted by the happiness of my day, a happiness I cannot describe in writing, and my dream was full of you.
The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
He had just fallen asleep and, as sometimes happens, the very act of falling asleep was what woke him.
And Simpson, with a profound sigh, moved toward her and effortlessly entered the painting. A marvelous freshness immediately made his head spin. There was a scent of myrtle and of wax, with a very faint whiff of lemon. He was standing in a bare black room of some kind, by a window that opened on evening, and at his very side stood a real, Venetian, Maureen—tall, gorgeous, all aglow from within.
McGore, to whom the Colonel’s ire mattered little, nevertheless inadvertently looked where his hand was pointing and saw something truly incredible. On the Luciani canvas, next to the Venetian girl, an additional figure had appeared. It was an excellent, if hastily executed, portrait of Simpson. Gaunt, his black jacket strongly highlighted by the lighter background, his feet turned oddly outward, he extended his hands as if in supplication, and his pallid face was distorted by a pitiful, frantic expression.
and there was a secretly mocking smile at the corner of her lips. “I’m proud of my son,” calmly said the Colonel.
The individuals he had devoured, it so happened, were totally impregnated with wine, and had popped succulently between his jaws.
It was quiet as it can only be on a bright, frosty day.
but good God! how I loved her unassuming prettiness, gaiety, friendliness, the birdlike flutterings of her soul.
It was exactly that gentle simplicity of hers that protected me: to her, everything in the world had a kind of everyday clarity, and it would even seem to me that she knew what awaited us after death, so that there was no reason for us to discuss that topic.
