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The European continent, he thought, must be full of such fleeting connections, fierce brief amities to burn in the face of all the enmity.
The boy had an interesting and memorable blemish, if it could be called that, a small twinned mole like a tiny black figure eight on his cheekbone. Grain de beauté was the poetic French phrase.
“All my life I’ve enjoyed perfect privilege,” he said. “American, rich, Protestant, Harvard-educated. I could walk down the street anywhere and feel, God help me, like a master.”
“It’s only the palpitations.” He used the marvelously onomatopoetic German word for it: die Klopfen, like the hoofbeats of a horse.
But that was how we recognized love, he thought: It made the exception. It was the case that broke the paradigm, the burning anomaly. In its light we failed at first to recognize ourselves, then saw ourselves clearly for the first time. It revealed our boundaries to be mutable; it forced us to shout yes when we’d spent our lives saying no.
