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.

moi. L’histoire d’une de mes folies.

Sunday was a sad day—early to bed, school the next morning,

was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home:

I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

And if love is a thing held in common, I suppose we had that in common,

quod erat demonstrandum)

Pyrrhic

I don’t think I can explain the despair my surroundings inspired in me.

Capri, I was then convinced that my unhappiness was indigenous to that place.

(when I was a teenager I made a fatuous show of socialism, mainly to irritate my father),

Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark windowpanes, snow.

raw materials of wisdom.”

a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.

stunned and drunk with beauty.

Trees creaking with apples, fallen apples red on the grass beneath, the heavy sweet smell of apples rotting on the ground and the steady thrumming of wasps around them.

spellbound in the hazy distance.

old and covered with ivy in such a manner as to be almost indistinguishable from its landscape.

It was a small, wise face, as alert and poised as a question;

amiable as a sparrow.

epicene faces as clear, as cheerful and grave, as a couple of Flemish angels.

where pseudo-intellects and teenage decadents abounded,

In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory, or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party.

Segregation. Self. Self-concept.

For a moment, as his arm touched mine, he was a creature of flesh and blood, but the next he was a hallucination again, a figment of the imagination stalking down the hallway as heedless of me as ghosts, in their shadowy rounds, are said to be heedless of the living.

a sweet, unfocused smile, quite impersonal, as if I were a waiter or a clerk in a store.

his stare was so rude I was forced to cut my eyes away.

I had the feeling he would be glad to catch me in a mistake, and that he would be able to do it easily.

She, I thought, was very beautiful, in an unsettling, almost medieval way which would not be apparent to the casual observer.

He furrowed his eyebrows impressively. Dr. Roland’s senile manner was said to be a facade; to me it seemed quite genuine but sometimes, when you were off your guard, he would display an unexpected flash of lucidity, which—though it frequently did not relate to the topic at hand—was evidence that rational processes rumbled somewhere in the muddied depths of his consciousness.

waiting for him to appear like the gatekeeper in a fairy story: ageless, watchful, sly as a child.

ennui.

entranced by these fraudulent recollections.

exegesis,

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless.

I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world:

sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat.

but the thought that he might see me filled me with an inexplicable anxiety. I ducked into a doorway and waited until he had passed.

bailiwick.

the burden of the self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place.

“Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?”

“Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls—which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn’t it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matte...

Remember the E...

Love?

love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods.

Thus he died, and all the life struggled out of him; and as he died he spattered me with the dark red and violent-driven rain of bitter-savored blood to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds.

“Aristotle says in the Poetics,” said Henry, “that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.”

his body being borne away on the litter, with one arm hanging down?”

“Death is the mother of beauty,”