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hangover from early anarchy:
He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.’
it was a moment of ecstasy and terror.
terrifying glamour,
I was abroad at last, far from my familiar habitat and separated by the sea from the tangles of the past; and all this, combined with the wild and growing exhilaration of the journey, shed a golden radiance.
skeleton fists
nobody was out of doors and, in the little towns, nothing stirred. Everyone was inside.
This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day’s doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, struggling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots.
Then she laughed in confusion at her boldness,
We drew the curtains to block out the deluge and put on the lights—it was best to treat the dismal scene outside as if it were night—and lolled in dishabille all the morning talking by the fire.
napkins that were half mitres and half Rajput turbans,
men armed with cigars like truncheons and brandy rotating in glasses like transparent footballs, the party began to lose coherence.
“Ah! And where shall I tell him to drop you, junger Mann?” “At the Graf Zeppelin, please.”
features dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre’s banquet.
steaming rustics
All this breathed homesickness for a past now doubly removed and thickly overlaid by recent history.
vanished from the scene; but deep in the bloodstream nevertheless.
unloosed by my voices-in-the-next-room relationship to India, fostered by long gazing at faded photographs, and almost wholly unrelated to reality, unavowable dreams intoxicatingly and fleetingly took shape.
began only a few fields away,
The last sunrise of January was sliding across a lawn, catching the statues of Vertumnus and Pales and finally Pomona at the far end and stretching their thin and powdery shadows on the untouched snow. Rooky woods feathered the skyline and there was a feeling in the air that the Danube was not far.
Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in the tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came?
Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures...a widowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.
purulent
Fenstergucker,
they belonged to a small half-native and half-expatriate Bohemian set which seemed perfect from the first moment I became involved in it. With the end of the political troubles, the last days of Carnival were given over to music and dancing and dressing up. Wildish nights and late mornings set in, and after a last climactic fancy dress party, I woke in an armchair with an exploding head still decked with a pirate’s eyepatch and a cut-out skull and crossbones.
There were quivers and arrows and quarrels and bow-cases and tartar bows; scimitars, khanjars, yatagans, lances, bucklers, drums; helmets damascened and spiked and fitted with arrowy nasal-pieces; the turbans of janissaries, a pasha’s tent, cannon and flags and horsetail banners with their bright brass crescents.
There, too, was the mace of Suleiman the Magnificent, and the skull of Kara Mustafa, the Grand Vizir strangled and decapitated at Belgrade by Suleiman’s descendant for his failure to take Vienna; and beside it, the executioner’s silken bowstring.
But the rolls which the Viennese dipped in the new drink were modelled on the half-moons of the Sultan’s flag. The shape caught on all over the world. They mark the end of the age-old struggle between the hot-cross-bun and the croissant.
I realized I was at last in a country where the indigenous sounds meant nothing at all;
the juxtaposition of tongues made me feel I had crossed more than a political frontier. A different cast had streamed on stage and the whole plot had changed.
Meanwhile, further afield, the shift of mountains and plains and rivers and the evidence of enormous movements of races gave me the feeling of travelling across a relief map where the initiative lay wholly with the mineral world. It evicted with drought and ice, beckoned with water and grazing, decoyed with mirages and tilted and shifted populations, like the hundreds-and-thousands in a glass-topped balancing game; steering languages, breaking them up into tribes and dialects, assembling and confronting kingdoms, grouping civilizations, channelling beliefs, guiding armies and blocking the way
...more
the tremendous Carpathian barrier, forested hiding-place of boars and wolves and bears, climbs and sweeps for hundreds of miles beyond the reach of even memory’s eye. It towers above southern Poland and the Ukraine and the whole length of Rumania in a thousand-mile-long boomerang-shaped curve until it retreats west again, subsides and finally drops into the lower Danube at the Iron Gates for its underwater meeting with the Great Balkan Range.
Prague seemed—it still seems, after many rival cities—not only one of the most beautiful places in the world, but one of the strangest. Fear, piety, zeal, strife and pride, tempered in the end by the milder impulses of munificence and learning and douceur de vivre, had flung up an unusual array of grand and unenigmatic monuments. The city, however, was scattered with darker, more reticent, less easily decipherable clues.
History pressed heavily upon it.
a world the Romans never knew. (Is there a difference between regions separated by this ancient test? I think there is.)
vagabond full of random learning
Moody and unbalanced, he lived in an atmosphere of neo-platonic magic, astrology and alchemy.
As this vehicle was a giant dung-beetle from Mount Etna which the protagonist refuelled with his own droppings on the long ascent, the exhibition may well have caused a stir. I would like to have seen it.
The trouble was that I had imagined—as one always does with lost property—that the contents were better than they were.
The sun was setting in a soft pink sky with a few strands of lighted cloud. The gold bar of heaven!
Soon, as the sky began to fade into twilight, I reached a little place called Nagy-Magyar,[2] a collection of white-washed houses thatched with long reeds, unkempt and desolate, with roads of rutted mud and no pavements or garden fences. The whole village teemed with swarthy black-haired children in coloured blankets. There were dark-skinned hags with strands of greasy hair hanging out of their headcloths and tall, dark, loose-limbed and shifty-eyed young men. Zigeunervolk! Hungarian Gipsies, like the ones I saw in Pozony.
In the past, I had always arrived on any new scene trailing a long history of misdeeds and disasters. Now, the continuity was broken. Somewhere between the Dogger Bank and the Hook of Holland the scent had gone cold; and, for a quarter of a year there had been no rules to break except ones I had chosen. Things were on the mend! No wonder I looked on life with a cheerful glance.
all prospects glowed.
irredeemable bumpkins,
Fast and ugly deeds
I might have been in the royal box opposite the milling dramatis personae as the curtain was going up.
