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by
Anne Rice
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October 12 - October 29, 2025
“And I’ll know people like you,” I went on, “people who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we’ll sit in cafés and we’ll drink together and we’ll clash with each other violently in words, and we’ll talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement.”
Treachery it was, the theft of immortality. A dark Prometheus stealing a luminescent fire. Laughter in the darkness. Laughter echoing in the catacomb. Echoing as if down the centuries. And the stench of the grave. And the ecstasy, absolutely fathomless, and irresistible, and then drawing to a finish.
What was vanity now? What was anything at all? And such a trivial word was stubborn, so cruel …
Beauty wasn’t the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good. In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden. So why must it wound him
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The thirst wanted her heart. It was no alchemist, the thirst.
We sprang up from a crack between faith and despair, as it were.”
“I need not tell you how the world looked to me with the new vision, how I saw each tint and surface beneath the thin veil of darkness, how these hymns and anthems assaulted my ears.
“Death by fire, death by water, death by the piercing teeth of the hungry god.
What did these things mean to me? What did it mean that I had written this history, that I had lain in this bed?
