The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

DOES SUCH a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

A face looked out at me. It was a small, wise face, as alert and poised as a question; and though certain features of it were suggestive of youth—the elfin upsweep of the eyebrows, the deft lines of nose and jaw and mouth—it was by no means a young face, and the hair was snow white.

(“Work?” he said to me once, astonished, when I referred to our classroom activities as such. “Do you really think that what we do is work?” “What else should I call it?” “I should call it the most glorious kind of play.”)

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.” “Well said,” said Julian. “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”

“And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

“Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone—was it van Gogh?—said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.”

and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.

Justice, in a society, is when each level of a hierarchy works within its place and is content with it.

Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?” Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”

It was shocking to hear him speak of her with such intimacy. Pluto and Persephone. I looked at his back, prim as a parson’s, tried to imagine the two of them together. His big white hands with the square nails.

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.