Love and Death on Long Island: A Novel

enervated

But having found myself once more in the mental posture with which I was perversely most at ease – that of being alone in apprehending the mark of beauty where it is least to be expected – I was determined to savour for a moment this unsummoned windfall.

lubricious

synecdoche

By very definition, said Chesterton, our memories are of what we have forgotten.

The ‘bisexual’, so far as I was concerned, was a libeller of the self and of its profoundest instincts; to say the least, a victim of the most unproductive kind of wishful thinking.

Banal, in that, despite an uncustomary gentleness of mien, the morphological type was one very much in the public domain; it exemplified what I take to be a specifically American criterion of ‘cuteness’ – which is to say, beauty untranscended by mystery, tragedy or spirituality, beauty golden and well nourished and so vacuously secure in its own na

Sex is destiny, is written – an injunction, a commandment, a ukase, to which no resistance, with which no compromise, has ever been possible. I had no great fears on that account.

frisson