The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

Sometimes, when there’s been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things—a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf—are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus. And that was what happened then, walking over the meadow to the house. It was like a painting too vivid to be real—every pebble, every blade of grass sharply defined, the sky so blue it hurt me to look at it.

my melancholy began to turn into something like alarm.

from class alone, in a state of bewilderment and turmoil. By now my thoughts were so contradictory and disturbing that I could no longer even speculate, only wonder dumbly at what was taking place around me;

I experienced for a moment both the claustrophobic feeling that the walls had rushed in toward us and the vertiginous one that they receded infinitely, leaving both of us

suspended in some boundless expanse of dark.

But one mustn’t underestimate the primal appeal—to lose one’s self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.

with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat,

With some preternatural craftiness he always knew the right nerve to touch, at exactly the right moment, to wound and outrage most.

I felt torn in some way, grappled with the moral implications of each of the courses available to me.

The abrupt, booming immediacy of his presence

There was a horrible, erratic thumping in my chest, as if a large bird were trapped inside my ribcage and beating itself to death.

her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief.

with the slow, transfixed calm of a subject under hypnosis.

and perhaps this gift was only the converse of that one: the sudden concentration of his wandering molecules rendering his shadowy form solid, all at once, a metamorphosis startling to the viewer.

A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.

with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

The benevolence, the spiritual calm, that radiated from him seemed so clear and true that, for a dizzying moment, I felt the darkness lift almost palpably from my heart. The relief was such that I almost broke down sobbing; but then, looking at him again, I felt the whole poisonous weight come crashing back down, full force.

And then the cloud passed over the sun again, and the life went out of everything.