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?

a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so forth—it

“There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death—those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement—been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.” This, I think, is pretty rough stuff.

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

hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?”

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.” “Well said,” said Julian. “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.

“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.

“It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?

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.

Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this.

Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.

The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that’s the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star …