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Orange groves, failed movie stars, lamplit cocktail hours by the swimming pool, cigarettes, ennui.
“I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?”
“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
“We don’t like to admit it,” said Julian, “but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.
All truly civilized people—the ancients no less than us—have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self.
“Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.
But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!
If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
