Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.

The languor of Youth—how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth—all save this—come and go with us through life. These things are a part of life itself; but languor—the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding—that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

We went there to dress and, while we dressed, drank a bottle of champagne, going in and out of one another’s rooms

With Brideshead, who came home to luncheon and talked to me on the subject—for the subject was everywhere in the house like a fire deep in the hold of a ship, below the water-line, black and red in the darkness, coming to light in acrid wisps of smoke that oozed under hatches and billowed suddenly from the scuttles and air pipes—with Brideshead, I was in a strange world, a dead world to me, in a moon-landscape of barren lava, a high place of toiling lungs.

When the water-holes were dry people sought to drink at the mirage.