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For the absence of a single constellation, the night sky might have been empty to the anxious eye of a Greek navigator, seeking the Pleiades, whose fall disappearance signaled the close of the seafaring season. The Pleiades had set while the Purdue Victory was still at sea, but no one sought them now, that galaxy of suns so far away that our own would rise and set unseen at such a distance: a constellation whose setting has inaugurated celebrations for those lying in graves from Aztec America to Japan, encouraging the Druids to their most solemn mystery of the reconstruction of the world,
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He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as “rank presumption.”
It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
Only once, going to the window before it was light, he was stopped in his tracks by the horned hulk of the old moon hung alone in the sky, and this seemed to upset him a good deal, for he shivered and tried to leave it but could not, tried to see the time on the clock but could not, listened, and heard nothing, finally there was nothing for it but to sit bound in this intimacy which refused him, waiting, until the light came at last and obliterated it.
Paris lay by like a promise accomplished: age had not withered her, nor custom staled her infinite vulgarity.
Over this grandstand disposal of promise the waiters stared with a distance of glazed indulgence which all collected under it admired, as they admired the rudeness, which they called self-respect; the contempt, which they called innate dignity; the avarice, which they called self-reliance; the tasteless ill-made clothes on the men, lauded as indifference, and the far-spaced posturings of haute couture across the Seine, called inimitable or shik according to one’s stay. Marvelous to wide eyes, pricked ears, and minds of that erectile quality betraying naive qualms of transatlantic origin (alert
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As lonely, or more lonely (so they say one is in a crowd), the buildings in Munich’s modern town stood away from each other in their differences, made up to extremes like guests at a Venetian masquerade, self-conscious perpetrations of assertive adolescence, well-traveled, almost wealthy, déracinés, they had gathered as transcripts of their seducers who were not known in this land, and stood now stricken in erect silence up and down the aisles of the avenues, surprised that those they had known in conglomerate childhood had also traveled, had also been seduced, and that, in this shocked
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Taxis limped past, bellicose as wounded animals, collapsing further on at Maxim’s, late lunch.
girl lying in a bed said, —We only know about one per cent of what’s happening to us. We don’t know how little heaven is paying for how much hell.
Still, like other women in love, salvation was her original purpose, redemption her eventual privilege; and, like most women, she could not wait to see him thoroughly damned first, before she stepped in, believing, perhaps as they do, that if he were saved now he would never need to be redeemed.
So it may be that his decision to marry simply made one decision the less that he must eventually face; or it is equally possible that his decision to marry was indecision crystallized, insofar as he was not deciding against it.
though much as she wanted to go everywhere she had never been, she as fervently never wanted to revisit any scene in that past, a frantic concatenation whose victim she remained, projecting her future upon it in all the defiant resentment of free will,
His surprise was a look (she would think of it one day, remembering, or trying to remember) indigenous to his face, either that immediate anticipatory surprise, reflecting sudden foretaste of something past (as when she asked him when he’d been in Spain: —I? I’ve never been in Spain); or it was this look he had now, the surprise of one intruded upon. And year after year as their marriage went on, the first came less and the other more often, until one day, remembering him, or trying to remember, it would be this one which would come to her, this face of confusion, of one intruded upon, an
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They seldom discussed painting, for like so many things upon which they might agree, they never managed to agree at the same moment; and as the conversations of the early months of their marriage went on, their ideas and opinions seemed to meet only in passing, each bound in an opposite direction, neither stopping to do more than honor the polite pause of recognition.
The lust of summer gone, the sun made its visits shorter and more uncertain, appearing to the city with that discomfited reserve, that sense of duty of the lover who no longer loves.
Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one’s exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.
—Esther it isn’t the secrecy, the darkness everywhere, so much as the lateness. I mean I get used to myself at night, it takes that long sometimes. The first thing in the morning I feel sort of undefined, but by midnight you’ve done all the things you have to do, I mean all the things like meeting people and, you know, and paying bills, and by night those things are done because by then there’s nothing you can do about them if they aren’t done, so there you are alone and you have the things that matter, after the whole day you can sort of take everything that’s happened and go over it alone. I
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Otto (to whom thought was a series of free-swimming images which dove and surfaced occasionally near to one another)
—In a sense an artist is always born yesterday.
The small town of the port might have had but one place in this world of time, and that to make itself presentable for Otto’s departure, after which it could settle down to a long and uninterrupted decline.
Otto looked after Herschel. —I’d say he was a latent heterosexual, he said, immediately regretted wasting such an inspired line on Hannah, and resolved to repeat it later to someone who would repeat it as his own.
Otto was looking over the room for someone he knew to talk with, or someone he did not know, to talk to.
Chaby tapped a shiny foot, accompanying an evil rhythm which played endlessly within.
Otto contrasted his own attire to the padded, pleated affair swaying across from him,
The sky refused the encounter it threatened. The storm refused to break; but the dark being continued in menacing movement above, content to unnerve its arrogant antagonist, to inspire foreboding, but declining the skirmish which would witness the spilling of its own blood in streaks of lightning.
Then he smiled. Today must be different, and he tried to evade the habit of fear.
That childhood was like a book read, misplaced, forgotten, to be recalled when one sees another copy, the cheap edition in a railway station newsstand, which is bought, thumbed through, and like as not left on the train when the station is called.
A weight seemed to slide back and forth between these two men; and though Basil Valentine will say, sooner or later, —We are, I suppose, basically in agreement . . . , affirming the fact that most argument is no more than agreement reached at different moments, it was these instants of reversal, when the weight was ready to return, that the one who rose to cast it off did so tensely, as though afraid that when it had fallen to him, it had slid for the last time.
I might accuse you of sponsoring this illusion that one comes to grips with reality only through the commission of evil.
—Like everything today is conscious of being looked at, looked at by something else but not by God, and that’s the only way anything can have its own form and its own character, and . . . and shape and smell, being looked at by God.
Most people are clever because they don’t know how to be honest.
Then with the city’s suddenness someone was walking beside him.
each one contemplating over words in a book (which had sold four million copies: How to Speak Effectively; Conquer Fear; Increase Your Income; Develop Self-Confidence; “Sell” Yourself and Your Ideas; Improve Your Memory; Increase Your Ability to Handle People; Win More Friends; Improve Your Personality; Prepare for Leadership) the Self which had ceased to exist the day they stopped seeking it alone.
Nothing escaped Mr. Pivner’s eye, nor penetrated to his mind; nothing evaded his attention, as nothing reached his heart.
he knew that he must have read everything else closely and avidly, that nothing had evaded his eye, nor penetrated to his heart round which he had built that wall called objectivity without which he might have gone mad.
It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem.
Affecting to despise loneliness, still he looked at the unholy assortment streaming past him as though hopefully to identify one, rescue some face from the anonymity of the crowd with instantly regretted recognition, and so rescue himself.
—We have to follow Emerson’s advice to treat people as though they were real, because, perhaps they are . . .
The streets were filling with people whose work was not their own. They poured out, like buttons from a host of common ladles, though some were of pressed paper, some ivory, some horn, and synthetic pearl, to be put in place, to break, or fall off lost, rolling into gutters and dark corners where no Omnipotent Hand could reach them, no Omniscient Eye see them; to be replaced, seaming up the habits of this monster they clothed with their lives.
—By the damned, I mean the excluded and . . . keeping the path to hell clean, to fool good people. Fished for? why, fished for . . . Have you read Averroes? What I mean is, do we believe in order to understand? Or understand in order to be . . . be fished for.
On either hand, the visages of the houses watched him pass, self-contained façades indifferent to his presence, but watching still, guarded, as he passed immediately before the panes and fanlights; and when with seven more steps he escaped their line of vision, they did not turn in indecorous curiosity but continued to stare out straight ahead. Unconcealed by walls, or coy behind hedges, sober-mouthed some of them with columns Ionic and Doric (with never the cheer of Corinthian), these miens of narrow clapboard and eighteenth-century brick looked upon the passer-by without deviation or
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Reverend Gwyon was a tall man; but it was his stance made him appear indomitable, that and the sense of a full meter of silence surrounding him which only he could penetrate, or roll back with the invitatory ardor of his own curiosity. His face was heavily lined, but lines in nowise the fortuitous tracings of disgruntled weariness with which one after another generation proclaims abrogation of responsibility for the future, and liability for the past. Venerable age had not, for him, arranged that derelict landscape against which it is privileged to sit and pick its nose, break wind, and damn
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The sky was becoming littered with fragments of cloud. They were being fed across it from a great bank in the north. The cloud bank was gray and motionless, and it did not diminish.
quiet, and the sunlight bearing flecks of silent motion. If there had been a dream, it was gone back where it came from, to refurbish its props, to be recast probably, possibly rewritten, given a new twist to put it across, make it memorable to the audience and acceptable to the censor, all that, but the same old director, same producer, waiting to dissemble the same obscenities before the same captive audience, waiting, again, the first curtain of sleep.
Childhood, the plain-dealer: nothing approached it but upon intimate terms. It’s the shades of experience that afford shadows of fear, but the black-and-white of childhood discovers the intimacy of terror.
The wind had reached a height of delusion. Now, right before her eyes, it was given something to do: particles of snow appeared, conjured by the wind’s own madness.
—Do you know what happens to people in cities? I’ll tell you what happens to people in cities. They lose the seasons, that’s what happens. They lose the extremes, the winter and summer. They lose the means, the spring and the fall. They lose the beginning and end of the day, and nothing grows but their bank accounts. Life in the city is just all middle, nothing is born and nothing dies. Things appear, and things are killed, but nothing begins and nothing ends.
—Do you think the sun will ever shine again? he asked no one.
The cab slipped on the wet pavement, in and out of the slush in the gutters, thrusting itself ahead of everything else in the frenzied motion of the streets, tearing open the half-darkness of side streets with its lights and its noise.
—You had me all filled in before you met me, Otto. There was no room for me at all.
